One silver lining in the madness of the US Presidential election counting is that there are some interesting analyses floating around regarding polling and surveying and probabilities and visualisatio

Nov 7th 2020 The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. By Joseph Henrich. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 704 pages; $35. Allen Lane; £30 I

Listen to this story AFTER HER morning prayer and before she had eaten breakfast, the sun barely up, Hawa Abdi liked to walk around the village. First she would go to the communal farm to start the generators and check the crops: sorghum, maize, bananas, beans. Then she would go past the villagers’…

My students look depressed and it worries me. At SciencesPo’s journalism school in Paris, cohorts are rather small, which allows instructors and the school management to remain in touch with students,

Oct 31st 2020 The Perfect Nine. By Ngugi wa Thiong’o. New Press; 240 pages; $23.99. Harvill Secker; £12. A MONG THE most exciting new writing of the past few decades has been the reimagining of founda

Oct 29th 2020 E VERY TUESDAY for most of 1979-80, the Blitz wine bar in Covent Garden was host to an influential club-night. London was then a run-down city. The Blitz was a seedy spot. What made it r

In September, Kieren D’Souza, 27, bumped into a few mountaineers during a recce climb on Deo Tibba, a 6,001m peak in the Pir Panjal range in Himachal Pradesh. They had spent over a week on the mountai

That’s a criticism, of course. A report, study or testimony that’s all anecdote with no data carries little in the way of actionable information. On the other hand, if you want to change people’s mind

At the end of May, TIAA, the financial services and investing giant, rolled out new gender-identity awareness guidelines for its client-facing consultants. The guidance included: “Never assume someone

Oct 22nd 2020 The International Brigades. By Giles Tremlett. Bloomsbury; 720 pages; £30. To be published in America in July 2021; $30. H ISTORY MAY often be written by the victors, but that has never

Oct 24th 2020 E ARTH’S LONGEST artificial structure is usually said to be the Great Wall of China. Just how long that is is hard to say, for northern China actually has many walls, built at different

H ow Manchester United must wish they could play Paris Saint-Germain every week. Of course, given the current mood within the game, one imagines the Glazers are probably sitting down with the relevant

Oct 15th 2020 T HE COMIC strip appeared for just nine years, between 1964 and 1973, in Argentina. Yet Mafalda occupies a unique and lasting place in Latin American popular culture. That showed in the

Oct 15th 2020 W HEN HE BECAME famous—when, as he sang the opening words of his best-loved song, Morgh-e Sahar, “Dawn Bird”, the crowds would start clapping and leaping to their feet—Mohammad Reza Shaj

Oct 12th 2020 P ennsylvania is one of a clutch of states that can decide an American presidential election. Its largest city, Philadelphia, leans solidly Democrat but voters in smaller towns and rural

Oct 8th 2020 The Light Ages. By Seb Falk. W.W. Norton; 320 pages; $30. Allen Lane; £20. I N THE 11TH century, nearly 500 years before Leonardo da Vinci drew a similar flying machine, a young monk call

No one ever bought anything on an elevator. The elevator pitch isn’t about selling your idea, because a metaphorical elevator is a lousy place to make a pitch. When you feel like you’re being judged a

Oct 8th 2020 L AST YEAR Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the most Olympian of India’s public intellectuals, infuriated many of his compatriots. Instead of lauding the audacity of a government that had just imposed

Rating an iPhone app takes just a second, maybe two. “Enjoying Skype?” a prompt will ask, and you click on a star rating from 1 to 5. Millions of people respond to these requests, giving little though

Aug 6th 2020 O N THE FIRST day of rehearsals for “Captain Blood”, in 1935, Olivia de Havilland and Errol Flynn returned their lunch trays together to the canteen. Already she had thought “Oh!” at the

Sep 23rd 2020 O N THE EVENING of July 11th 2015, Ruth Bader Ginsburg went to the opera. There was nothing odd in that. Opera, after the law, was her great love, the only place where she could leave th

Sep 26th 2020 “H E WAS HARDLY more than five feet, four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg…His moustache was very stiff and military.” With this d

Oct 3rd 2020 AVIEMORE T HE PURPLE of the Highlands in early autumn can drive the dourest of Scots to poetry, but Renwick Drysdale, who with his brothers will inherit an estate in Fife, can’t see the l

Oct 3rd 2020 I N THE WEEKS following the stockmarket crash in October 1987, the investment committee of Yale University’s endowment fund convened two extraordinary meetings. Just after the crash its n

Oct 3rd 2020 G EORGE BERNARD SHAW , a playwright and activist, thought that the best way to bring about social equality was “to keep the entire community intermarriageable”. He was primarily concerned

Oct 3rd 2020 VILLAHERMOSA O N A SCORCHING Saturday in Jonuta, a poor region of the tropical Mexican state of Tabasco, a woman sits in the shade by a river cradling her granddaughter. The child’s name

Illustrations by Dalbert Vilarino No Code? No Problem — Writing Tests in Plain English How we use Behavior Driven Development to better collaborate Published inNYT Open · 4 min read· Feb 1, 2019 -- Be

Emma Nilsson’s husband is harvesting hay in the hot summer sun and she has popped into the village shop to get him a bottle of water. But there’s no friendly face at the checkout, or opportunity to sw

Aug 25th 2020 BERLIN AND GÖTTINGEN A SKED WHAT he makes of his new home, Safwan Daher, a Syrian refugee, chuckles: Duderstadt, a town near Göttingen that few Germans could find on a map, is “boring”.

Sep 5th 2020 A S HE SLIPPED into each role, studiously, scene by scene, Chadwick Boseman kept one thought in mind. His character was a strong black man in a world that conflicted with his strength. It

Sep 12th 2020 NEW YORK T HE END of the summer often brings about a dose of realism. Children bemoan the end of their leisurely holidays and trudge back to the classroom. Summer-lovers return from the

On a typical day, a long-time user of Goodreads, the world's largest community for reviewing and recommending books, will feel like they're losing their mind. After numerous frustrated attempts to fin

INCIDENTAL COMICS Words and Pictures by Grant Snider Wednesday, July 1, 2020 Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Pinterest Newer Post Older Post Home Subscribe to: Post Co

Audrey Tang says tech can build trust, tame misinformation, and strengthen democracy. Her plan might even work in the US. In early February, Taiwan had a mask supply problem. Howard Wu, a 35-year-old