Farewell (Dec 1, 2015 17:30)
I’m shutting down the blog. Well, I won’t be publishing new posts, anyway; ...

Measuring Trends in Human Rights Practices (Nov 25, 2015 13:19)
I wrote a thing for Foreign Policy‘s Democracy Lab on evidence that widely-used d...

Kill the Spider (Nov 16, 2015 16:43)
When I was 15, I got my first paying job, doing yard work and odd tasks on summer weekd...

Halloween, Quantified (Nov 1, 2015 10:38)
Some parents dress up for Halloween. Some throw parties. In our house, we—well, I, real...

Measurement Is Hard, Especially of Politics, and Everything Is Political (Oct 23, 2015 12:07)
If occasional readers of this blog remember only one thing from their time here, I̵...

The State of War in Syria (Oct 13, 2015 12:03)
I’m just now seeing Bridget Conley’s recent post on the state of war in Syr...

Which NFL Teams Are the Biggest Surprises of 2015 So Far? (Oct 9, 2015 15:34)
We’re now 4.0625 weeks into the NFL’s 2015 regular season. (If you don̵...

A Fictitional But Telling Take on Policy Relevance (Sep 29, 2015 19:55)
I finally read and really enjoyed Todd Moss’s first novel, The Golden Hour. It...

Military Coup in Burkina Faso (Sep 17, 2015 10:08)
Yesterday, Burkina Faso suffered its second military coup in less than a year. Just a f...

A First-Person Reminder of How Not to Do Statistics and Science (Sep 5, 2015 11:15)
I recently re-learned a lesson in statistical and scientific thinking by getting—...