Tom Vanderbilt

"From the best-selling author of Traffic, a brilliant and entertaining exploration of our personal tastes--why we like the things we like, and what it says about us,"--NoveList. From the tangled underpinnings of our food taste to the complex dynamics of our playlists, our preferences and opinions are constantly being shaped by countless forces. In the digital age, a nonstop procession of "thumbs up" and "likes" is helping dictate our choices. Vanderbilt stalks the elusive beast of taste, probing research in psychology, marketing, and neuroscience to answer complex and fascinating questions, in an intellectual journey that helps us better understand how we perceive, judge, and appreciate the world around us.

Driving is a fact of life. We are all spending more and more time on the road, and traffic is an issue we face everyday. This audiobook will make you think about it in a whole new light. We have always had a passion for cars and driving. Now Traffic offers us an exceptionally rich understanding of that passion. Vanderbilt explains why traffic jams form, outlines the unintended consequences of our attempts to engineer safety and even identifies the most common mistakes drivers make in parking lots. Based on exhaustive research and interviews with driving experts and traffic officials around the globe, Traffic gets under the hood of the quotidian activity of driving to uncover the surprisingly complex web of physical, psychological and technical factors that explain how traffic works. -- Publisher details.