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The 2012 election is officially over, and it was glorious. Barack Obama and the Democrats have delivered what one of our elder statesmen once referred to as “a thumping” to […]
I will do my level best not to turn this site into a constant stream of book promos and the like in my transparent attempt to sell copies – I’ll […]
            If you look east from most places in Seattle, you can see majestic Mt. Rainier looming tall and snow covered 80 miles to the west. Mt. Rainier is not […]
Today Foreign Policy published the first excerpt from The Last Refuge. The piece is largely drawn from Chapter 13 of the book, entitled Policy Shift: Here is the opening as […]
This was indeed a choice election, if you consider the choice between consuming entertainment journalism or data-based journalism. Entertainment is fun, and math is hard. Math won. 
Susannah Cahalan was just another ambitious New York kind of girl–a fast-rising cub reporter at the New York Post and fabulous gal about town–when something surprising happened.  She lost her […]
Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale has created an expertly delivered whistlestop tour of psychology for the Big Think. The talk outlines the differences between […]
New York City recently became radicalized out of necessity in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Simply put, when systems broke down, New Yorkers improvised, and took matters into their own hands. 
Update (Jan, 2014): Amir’s patent application (search for no. 12/743357) has been rejected due to prior art by Mathews and MacLeod.  Update (Feb, 2013): Following this blog post Amir corrected two […]
Tomorrow is Election Day for all us Americans. And while I normally try to base my arguments on solid evidence, far be it from me to deny everyone the chance […]
In a new co-authored study with John Besley and Sang Wa Oh at the journal Public Understanding of Science,we expand on our recent work examining how scientists as a group perceive and understand public opinion, […]