The Playbook

Science is so powerful that the powerful want to control it. From the author of Is Shame Necessary?, comes a biting satire of the techniques used by the corporate world to obfuscate and deny scientific truths. Taking the form of a corporate meeting agenda, The Playbook highlights the tactics used by the business elite to contradict climate change, ignore health risks, and undermine worker safety.

The Playbook is a caustic handbook for tobacco, oil, and pharmaceutical company executives--epistolary non-fiction--advising whom to hire, how to recruit experts, how to obfuscate, and how to relentlessly and effectively challenge the threat of science, policy, reporters, and activists. Jacquet likens the machinery of deception and delays to a casino, with its deliberative architecture and design--the dimmed chandeliers, the comfortable furniture, the dealers, the drinks--to keep the customers inside comfortable and gambling as long as possible. The Playbook will help any business buy time if it is threatened by science, the most reliable form of knowledge the world has ever known. Part strategy, part social history, part resistance, part lampoonery, The Playbook illuminates the methods and motives of many successful scientific denial campaigns, and the social forces that may outwit them.