Edouard Mathieu

Throughout history, social and economic inequalities have been fueled and justified by different ideologies. French economist Thomas Piketty’s latest book, Capital and Ideology, looks at the advent and fall of these ideologies, and how they could evolve in the future. He recommends five great books to better understand these complex and always-evolving ideas, and their consequences for the world.

French philosopher and sociologist Geoffroy de Lagasnerie argues for a more realist political theory, one that fully acknowledges that state violence is the one thing in your life that you can never escape. His selection includes works by Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin, as well as a history of the Black Panther Party.

What do we mean when we talk about ‘big data’, and how can be become better critical consumers of it? Data scientist Vicki Boykis recommends the best books for learning Python—a language, she says, as versatile as a Swiss Army knife—and shows that it’s possible to teach yourself coding and data science.

Should you feel responsible for helping the world become better? And if so, how should you use your time, money, and career to have the biggest possible impact? These are the questions addressed by the effective altruism movement. One of its leading figures, Will MacAskill, recommends the best books to answer them.

From complex techniques only used by academic statisticians, data science has risen to extreme popularity in only a few years. Roger D. Peng, Professor of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University and founder of one of the largest data science online courses, helps us understand this discipline and recommends the five best books to delve into it.

In the rapidly-emerging field of existential risks, researchers study the mitigation of threats that could lead to human extinction or civilisational collapse. We met with four researchers from The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, to discuss their recommendations of the best books to get a grasp of this dense subject.

To the western eye, Japan often appears as a surprising combination of very advanced development, and extreme cultural peculiarity. Linda Flores, Associate Professor of modern Japanese literature at the University of Oxford, guides us through this discovery with five great works of modern Japanese literature.

Data science is often said to be built on three pillars: domain expertise, statistics, and programming. Hadley Wickham, Chief Scientist at RStudio and creator of many packages for the R programming language, chooses the best books to help aspiring data scientists build solid computer science fundamentals.

Sometimes vilified, often misunderstood, rarely taught in universities, anarchism is a political philosophy and social movement that’s far removed from today’s mainstream politics. But it was and remains a powerful motivator. Political theorist Ruth Kinna talks us through the best books to read to get a better understanding of anarchism.

How do computers work? What is well-crafted code? How do you write an algorithm? Ana Bell, lecturer in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, chooses the best books to learn computer science and programming.