My Uncle Bobby, borrowing a page from George Burns and only half-jokingly, would often give me this sage piece of advice:  “Once you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.”  It was another way of saying, “Fake it till you make it.”  To me, the underlying drift of Uncle Bobby’s and George Burns’ advice was an acknowledgment that pretending we feel some way that we don’t or that we know more than we do is universal. 

I was thinking of Uncle Bobby and his advice recently as I watched my 11-month-old daughter throw her...

Last week, the New Yorker published a story looking back at the cheating scandal that plagued the Atlanta Public Schools and first came to light in a 2009 investigation by the Atlanta Journal Constitution.  In the story, reporter Rachel Aviv spoke to John Ewing, former executive director of the American Mathematical Society and current president of...

It used to be that protests were actual events that happened predominantly in the physical world.  Today, protests are often confined to the virtual world – with real people represented by their avatars and the contested terrain more likely to be the comments section of a Facebook post than the National Mall.  This new normal seems to me a mixed blessing.  On the one hand, people in power today are just as likely as the rest of us to have social media profiles – Facebook pages and Twitter accounts abound – which means that they are generally more accessible and more likely...

With another election cycle fast approaching, the punditry is surely charging themselves up for an endless stream of speculation.  As we look ahead to 2014’s best bloviating, it may be worth considering one of the memorable takeaways from 2012:  I am thinking of the eager embrace of rigorous and complex statistical analyses by non-statisticians like my family and friends.  These are people who would cringe or whose eyes would glaze over when I talked about regression, parameter estimates, and confidence intervals, but in 2012 a surprising number of them flocked toward poll-...