Smadar Lavie (Minnesota): Writing Against Identity Politics: An Essay on Gender, Race, and Bureaucratic Pain. The first chapter from Game Theory: An Introduction by Steven Tadelis. What Nate Silver gets wrong: The Signal and the Noise is a terrific book, with much to admire — but it will take a lot more than Bayes’s theorem to solve the many challenges in the world of applied statistics. New polling data about the UN may surprise you. With billions of mouths to feed, we can't go on producing food in the traditional way; scientists are coming up with novel ways to cater for future generations — in-vitro burger, anyone? Many organizations including churches could use faithful, submissive, and humble number twos — don’t be a Larry and miss an opportunity because of pride or damaged ego. Is there any way to determine the fraction of notable people on the planet? Samuel Arbesman considers various ways to calculate how many of the world's humans are famous. Are their intellectuals better than our intellectuals, asks modern Greek literature specialist Gregory Jusdanis; “our”, in this case, means American, and “their” means — well, pretty much anywhere else.
