As I"ve been pointing out in intermittent columns, much of the received wisdom about the 1960s doesn"t make much sense. One major reason is that human psychology generally doesn"t behave according to the reigning worldview in which the people who complain most about being victims must ...
The great mystery of my lifetime has been the 1960s. It's worth returning to this vast subject periodically as new perspectives unveil themselves. The closest thing to a successful prophecy of that era was made by science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein in his 1941 Future History chart, in which ...
Nate Silver is most famous for steadily predicting Barack Obama's reelection (which, as you may have heard, happened). Yet his new bestseller The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail"But Some Don"t is a fine all-around introduction to the science and art of forecasting, with ...
Joe Wright first directed Keira Knightley in a decent remake of Pride and Prejudice in 2005. Two years later, Wright and Knightley almost hit the Academy Award jackpot with the glossy Atonement, an adaptation of Ian McEwan's celebrated bestseller. I argued at the time, though, that Wright and ...
With his unimpeachable performance in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln (which opens nationwide on Friday), Daniel Day-Lewis seems ready to become the first man ever to win three Best Actor Oscars. After his awards for My Left Foot in 1989 and There Will Be Blood in 2007, Day-Lewis is tied for the career ...
I"m writing my weekly column the evening before Election Day for you to read starting an hour after the polls close on the West Coast. As you may have noticed, I"ve strenuously avoided making any election predictions, and I"m definitely not going to start now. So, let's reflect instead ...
Who is the real Barack Obama? It's an odd question to ask about an incumbent president less than a week before he's up for reelection. It's an especially strange inquiry to make of a president as self-obsessed and introspectively voluble as Obama. Yet Obama has been the subject of so much ...
No journalist this century has played a more persistent role in forging a new conventional wisdom on education than Paul Tough, long of The New York Times Magazine. Tough has threaded the needle between the inanity of Great Society theorizing and getting himself Watsoned, as happened to DNA pioneer ...
Among literary critics, a controversy has been raging tepidly over what purpose reviewing might hold in this age of crowdsourcing. Why rely upon one fallible pundit’s thumbs up or thumbs down when you can access the wisdom of crowds by averaging dozens of ratings, whether elite or mass? As a ...
We live in an age, we are often informed, of Big Data. Every facet of life is collected, counted, and analyzed carefully: baseball statistics, Twitter trends, and even Google searches regarding which celebrities are gay. On the other hand, there are all sorts of numbers that we"re not ...
