Nate Silver's blog, FiveThirtyEight, has been linked to your right since several days after its inception during the 2008 presidential primaries (during which two of my three best friends to whom I'm not married did some incredible gymnastics to convince you that their eventual corporatist tool was substantively better than the other corporatist tool, while I took a more realistic, balanced, Trumanesque, and ultimately correct view--and yes, I'm done, at least until the next time I'm not done).
FiveThirtyEight has published some outstanding statistical analysis, and Nate Silver certainly deserves to make a buck. I'm not at all pleased that he's moved the blog to the newspaper that started the war in Iraq, enamoured though fellow travellers are of it as an institution. Ordinarily, I'd dump him--not that he'd care, or that he should. I think the Times is up its own ass (as is our local journalistic institution). But FiveThirtyEight's work is too good, too reality-based, and too useful to dump on principle. Some middle-dwelling skeptics (you know who you are), or just plain smartasses, might suggest that I should consider the possibility that the blog is a sign of the Grey Lady lifting itself from the ashes of the destruction it has wrought. And I think we all know what I have to say to that.
So enjoy the money, Nate, and fuck you. Not that you should care.
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Part of me agrees with you (except for that part in the first graph, of course). Part of me sees the fact that Her Greyness hired him as an indicator that they recognize the notion of scholarship as laudable, or at least mildly popular. In any case I don't mind him taking money that otherwise might go to another Ross Douchehat.
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