If Then

New Yorker writer Jill Lepore – Harvard professor of American history and host of the podcast The Last Archive – offers a surprisingly gripping story of a tiny company almost nobody remembers: The Simulmatics Corporation, which sold its clients predictions of human behavior deduced from computer simulations.

Its short, often shaky run, Simulmatics played a role in some of the most epochal events of the 1960s, including the election of John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. Lepore – who can make any subject compelling – details how this long-forgotten firm’s theories and practices reappeared in the predictive analytics of Facebook, Amazon, Cambridge Analytica and Google, among others.