Bad Choices to John Murray

John Murray has acquired Bad Choices from Ali Almossawi, author of Bad Arguments.

Georgina Laycock acquired British and Commonwealth rights from Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein on behalf of Seth Fishman at The Gernert Company.

Almossawi’s first book Bad Arguments pinpointed the mistakes in logic that make arguments fail. It started as a free website and, after 2.4m visitors, its users helped to crowdfund the physical book which has sold over 200,000 copies worldwide, according to the publisher. It has now been translated into 16 languages, 10 of which were done so by volunteers.

In Bad Choices, Almossawi takes on algorithms - "those perennially misunderstood principles that underlie so many of our everyday activities". It will take the reader through 12 funny, highly illustrated situations, from how we listen to music to finding every item on a shopping list as quickly as possible. Examples include: How to sort your socks in record time, manage an overflowing inbox and how to find “the next big thing” before it hits the charts.

Laycock said: "Ali Almossawi is on a one-man mission to explain the world to us and it’s an honour being part of that journey. I think we could all do with picking up some of the methods that computers use to crunch data. This book makes complex maths fun. I love it."

Almossawi works on the Firefox team at Mozilla and is an alumnus of MIT’s Engineering Systems Division and Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. He said: "Bad Choices is a better book because of John Murray. It's been such a pleasure to have worked so closely with them over the past year and we are hatching all kinds of exciting plans for the future."

John Murray will publish in hardback and e-book in April 2017.