Jean-Baptiste Michel is a French-Mauritian mathematician, engineer and researcher with appointments at Harvard and Google. He uses a quantitative approach to study trends in human disease, language and culture based on linguistic and grammatical patterns in vast libraries of digitized texts.

READING I recently read Latour and Woolgar’s fantastic “Laboratory Life,” where they observe this weird thing that scientists do — how we make up stories using data. How we measure things with instruments to get numbers and write papers. It’s this process the authors observe as outsiders as if they had gone into the jungle and watched how they sacrifice goats or something.

Even though I read mostly science-related books these days, I do love fiction. I have ambitiously loaded a couple of Flaubert books on my iPad, but I haven’t gotten around to reading them. Tomorrow’s the day, for sure.

Image Credit... Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

LISTENING These days, I listen to a lot of Black Keys and Metronomy, as well as Mark Ronson and Feist. And, of course, it’s hard to go for a while without listening to Serge Gainsbourg. He’s basically like the French version of Bob Dylan, only he’s dead, which always helps with celebrity.