My best friend regularly refers to Toby Ord‘s The Precipice as “the most persuasive and impactful book I’ve ever read.” This attitude evoked a lot of eye-rolling and protestation on my part, but I eventually gave in when he was kind enough to buy me a copy. Now that I’ve read it, I’m happy to admit that [...]
Charles Wheelan’s Naked Statistics provides a serviceable summary of a field most people don’t properly understand and often misinterpret. “The paradox of statistics,” Wheelan writes, “is that they are everywhere––from batting averages to presidential polls––but the discipline itself has a reputation for being uninteresting and inaccessible” (xii). He makes a spirited though imperfect effort to resolve this paradox [...]
Greetings, dear friends of the present and curious citizens of the future. “Getting sick is different now.” In a conversation with my wife Jessie, these words tumbled out of my mouth before I could give much thought to what they meant. This is a fairly common experience for me, which means I spend a [...]