That personal discovery anchors Risam’s new book, Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate. Data Empire was just named to former President Barack Obama’s 2026 summer reading list. A central theme of Data Empire is that data has always been intertwined with power. How does Dartmouth’s role in the development of modern computing fit into the larger story you tell in Data Empire? But one of the central lessons of Data Empire is that this isn’t true.