“There are three kinds of lies,” Mark Twain famously wrote. “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” But in the lively and engaging Everything is Predictable, science writer Tom Chivers seeks to lift the sagging reputation of statistics using the story and work of Thomas Bayes, an intriguing and underexplored 18th-century English preacher and mathematician whose ideas have gradually come to suffuse the field. Nowadays, Bayesian ideas inform DNA analysis, criminal justice, public health, insurance underwriting, artificial intelligence, scientific studies, and many other areas.