This is a puzzling election to understand, with unconventional candidates, unusual voting patterns, and hundreds of fluctuating polls. One site does the best at tracking the race (as opposed to the candidates and issues): Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com. And one very strange graphic on that site shows exactly what’s happening, what matters, and what’s changing. Here…
The Las Vegas Review-Journal — owned by the politically active casino owner Sheldon Adelson — just became the first major newspaper to endorse Donald Trump. Endorsements are supposed to be biased, but the more over-the-top they are, the less persuasive they are. This endorsement is so full of florid language that it strains credulity. To understand…
In the early 1900s, the physicist Ernest Rutherford discovered the emptiness at the heart of everything. In 2015, so did I. Ernest Rutherford, born in New Zealand, was an early experimenter in the field of radioactivity. Working at the University of Manchester, England, he investigated the mineral uranium and the stream of particles it emitted, which he…
Salesforce and Disney have given up on acquiring Twitter, citing its troll problems. To succeed in tech you need either profits or growth; Twitter has neither. So somebody’s going to buy it that doesn’t care about the users. As a result, if you’re a user, you can expect a very scary future — scarier than any ghosts…
The US Census Bureau released figures yesterday showing that, in 2015, the median annual household income in America increased by 5.2% over a year earlier. That’s an increase of $2,798, to $56,516 per year. Why talk about the “median” and how is that different from an average? I’ll explain. Put simply, when you’re talking about income, the…
Should business writers write like journalists? Some journalist habits — like never burying the lede — make perfect sense. But if you imagine you’re Woodward and Bernstein, you’re deluded. Learn which journalistic conventions will make your writing better, and which will ruin it. Journalist habits that business writers should adopt Journalists and business writers share…
The stock market has already priced in anything you read in The Wall Street Journal about stocks. So they fill space with an elaborate passel of theories that’s obscure enough that you might think the market doesn’t understand it yet. That’s fine, so long as you realize it’s for entertainment purposes only. Markets reporters at a paper…
Tuesday, November 8, 2016, NEW YORK, 11:15 PM EST. Thank you. Thank you all. We showed America something, didn’t we? Didn’t we? Let’s acknowledge the hard work of our volunteers and campaign staff. And of Ivanka, and Eric, and Donald Jr. and Melania. And Mike Pence! Let’s hear it for those guys. Look. I set out in…
Friday’s post about the Donald Trump statues got quite a reaction. Surprisingly, it restored my faith in the Internet as a place for discourse. My objective was simple: get people to think twice about whether we’re ready to accept public, naked, exaggerated depictions of our political candidates as part of the dialogue. And I think…