Reality and the pundits

One of the benefits of being a modern pundit is that there is no price to be paid whatsoever for being totally wrong. Let me be clear that there is nothing bad about being wrong. After all, when you are predicting any outcome that is not certain, there is always the possibility, however carefully you do your analysis, of the actual outcome being one that is not the most likely, one that lies in the tail of the probability distribution. [Read more…]

The strange appeal of soap operas

I was once getting my hair cut and listened to the conversation my barber was having with a friend seated nearby. They were recounting a terribly complicated story of something that seemingly happened to a common friend of theirs. Towards the end I said that I was sorry to hear about their friend’s terrible plight when they laughed and said that they had been discussing their favorite TV soap opera. But they were really invested in it and the way they talked about it was as if those characters were part of their lives. [Read more…]

Why single people voted differently from married

In an earlier post, I discussed the serious problem that the GOP has with single women who voted by a whopping 67-31% for Obama. Mitt Romney’s suggestion that this was because of president Obama’s ‘gift’ of ‘free’ contraceptives was widely ridiculed but this idea that all single women care about is contraception and abortion is quite widespread. [Read more…]