andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1381 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: I liked it; the reviews were well-deserved. It indeed is a cross between The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop. What struck me most, though, was the contrast with Indecision, the novel by Harbach’s associate, Benjamin Kunkel. As I noted a few years ago , Indecision was notable in that all the characters had agency. That is, each character had his or her own ideas and seemed to act on his or her own ideas, rather than merely carrying the plot along or providing scenery. In contrast, the most gripping drama in The Art of Fielding seem to be characters’ struggling with their plot-determined roles (hence the connection with Coover’s God-soaked baseball classic). Also notable to me was that the college-aged characters not being particularly obsessed with sex—I guess this is that easy-going hook-up culture I keep reading about—while at the same time, just about all the characters seem to be involved in serious drug addiction. I’ve re
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1 It indeed is a cross between The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and The Universal Baseball Association, J. [sent-2, score-0.091]
2 What struck me most, though, was the contrast with Indecision, the novel by Harbach’s associate, Benjamin Kunkel. [sent-4, score-0.363]
3 As I noted a few years ago , Indecision was notable in that all the characters had agency. [sent-5, score-0.622]
4 That is, each character had his or her own ideas and seemed to act on his or her own ideas, rather than merely carrying the plot along or providing scenery. [sent-6, score-0.577]
5 In contrast, the most gripping drama in The Art of Fielding seem to be characters’ struggling with their plot-determined roles (hence the connection with Coover’s God-soaked baseball classic). [sent-7, score-0.719]
6 Also notable to me was that the college-aged characters not being particularly obsessed with sex—I guess this is that easy-going hook-up culture I keep reading about—while at the same time, just about all the characters seem to be involved in serious drug addiction. [sent-8, score-1.31]
7 I’ve read books where one character or another is an alcoholic or a chain-smoker or whatever, but it’s not so usual to see a book where alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana are so central to just about everyone’s life. [sent-9, score-0.483]
8 That said, I’m not claiming that Indecision is a better novel than The Art of Fielding. [sent-10, score-0.239]
9 I read Indecision a few years ago and now I can remember vary little about it. [sent-11, score-0.216]
10 The Art of Fielding is much more focused, and I’m guessing it will remain clear in my mind even in 2017. [sent-12, score-0.139]
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Introduction: I liked it; the reviews were well-deserved. It indeed is a cross between The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop. What struck me most, though, was the contrast with Indecision, the novel by Harbach’s associate, Benjamin Kunkel. As I noted a few years ago , Indecision was notable in that all the characters had agency. That is, each character had his or her own ideas and seemed to act on his or her own ideas, rather than merely carrying the plot along or providing scenery. In contrast, the most gripping drama in The Art of Fielding seem to be characters’ struggling with their plot-determined roles (hence the connection with Coover’s God-soaked baseball classic). Also notable to me was that the college-aged characters not being particularly obsessed with sex—I guess this is that easy-going hook-up culture I keep reading about—while at the same time, just about all the characters seem to be involved in serious drug addiction. I’ve re
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Introduction: I saw this excellent art show the other day, and it reminded me how much artistic talent is out there. I really have no idea whassup with those all-black canvases and the other stuff you see at modern art museums, given that there’s so much interesting new stuff being created every year. I see a big difference between art made by people who feel they have something they want to say, compared to art being made by people who feel they are supposed to make art because they’re artists. And there’s also the internal logic of art responding to other art, as Tom Wolfe discussed in The Painted Word.
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Introduction: At first glance, that’s what I thought Tyler Cowen was asking . I assumed he was asking about the characters, not the audience, as watching a play seems like a pretty safe activity (A. Lincoln excepted). Characters in plays die all the time. I wonder what the chance is? Something between 5% and 10%, I’d guess. I’d guess your chance of dying (as a character) in a movie would be higher. On the other hand, movies have lots of extras who just show up and leave; if you count them maybe the risk isn’t so high. Perhaps the right way to do this is to weight people by screen time? P.S. The Mezzanine aside, works of art and literature tend to focus on the dramatic moments of lives, so it makes sense that death will be overrepresented.
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Introduction: You know that expression, “Not from the Onion”? How did we say that, all those years before the Onion existed? I was thinking about this after encountering (amidst a Google search for something else) this article on a website called “College News”: DANVILLE, KY., March 8, 2007–Two Centre College professors spent the past six years reading and analyzing 200 children’s books to discover a disturbing trend: gender bias still exists in much of modern children’s literature. Dr. David Anderson, professor of economics, and Dr. Mykol Hamilton, professor of psychology, have documented that gender bias is common today in many children’s books in their research published recently in Sex Roles: A Journal of Research titled “Gender Stereotyping and Under-Representation of Female Characters in 200 Popular Children’s Picture Books: A 21st Century Update.” . . . “Centre College,” huh? That’s where Area Man is studying, right? According to the materials on its website, Centre College is
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Introduction: I was asked by Sophie Roell, an editor at The Browser , where every day they ask an expert in a field to recommend the top five books, not by them, in their subject. I was asked to recommend five books on how Americans vote. The trouble is that I’m really pretty unfamiliar with the academic literature of political science, but it seemed sort of inappropriate for a political scientist such as myself to recommend non-scholarly books that I like (for example, “Style vs. Substance” by George V. Higgins, “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” by James Loewen, “The Rascal King” by Jack Beatty, “Republican Party Reptile” by P. J. O’Rourke, and, of course, “All the King’s Men,” by Robert Penn Warren). I mean, what’s the point of that? Nobody needs me to recommend books like that. Instead, I moved sideways and asked if I could discuss five books on statistics instead. Roell said that would be fine, so I sent her a quick description, which appears below. The actual interview turned out much bett
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Introduction: From two years ago : Awhile ago I was cleaning out the closet and found some old unread magazines. Good stuff. As we’ve discussed before , lots of things are better read a few years late. Today I was reading the 18 Nov 2004 issue of the London Review of Books, which contained (among other things) the following: - A review by Jenny Diski of a biography of Stanley Milgram. Diski appears to want to debunk: Milgram was a whiz at devising sexy experiments, but barely interested in any theoretical basis for them. They all have the same instant attractiveness of style, and then an underlying emptiness. Huh? Michael Jordan couldn’t hit the curveball and he was reportedly an easy mark for golf hustlers but that doesn’t diminish his greatness on the basketball court. She also criticizes Milgram for being “no help at all” for solving international disputes. OK, fine. I haven’t solved any international disputes either. Milgram, though, . . . he conducted an imaginative exp
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Introduction: Awhile ago I was cleaning out the closet and found some old unread magazines. Good stuff. As we’ve discussed before , lots of things are better read a few years late. Today I was reading the 18 Nov 2004 issue of the London Review of Books, which contained (among other things) the following: - A review by Jenny Diski of a biography of Stanley Milgram. Diski appears to want to debunk: Milgram was a whiz at devising sexy experiments, but barely interested in any theoretical basis for them. They all have the same instant attractiveness of style, and then an underlying emptiness. Huh? Michael Jordan couldn’t hit the curveball and he was reportedly an easy mark for golf hustlers but that doesn’t diminish his greatness on the basketball court. She also criticizes Milgram for being “no help at all” for solving international disputes. OK, fine. I haven’t solved any international disputes either. Milgram, though, . . . he conducted an imaginative experiment whose results stu
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen posts the following note from a taxi driver: I learned very early on to never drive someone to their destination if it was a route they drove themselves, say to their home from the airport . . . Everyone prides themselves on driving the shortest route but they rarely do. . . . When I first started driving a cab, I drove the shortest route—always, I’m ethical—but people would accuse me of taking the long way because it wasn’t the way they drove . . . In the end, experts they consider themselves to be, people are a tangle of unexamined emotional impulses and illogical responses. I take a lot of rides to and from the airport, and I can assure you that a lot of taxi drivers don’t know the good routes. Once I had to start screaming from the back seat to stop the guy from getting on the BQE. I don’t “pride myself” on knowing a good route home from the airport, but I prefer the good route. I’m guessing that the taxi driver quoted above is subject to the same illusions
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Introduction: When I was a kid they shifted a bunch of holidays to Monday. (Not all the holidays: they kept New Year’s, Christmas, and July 4th on fixed dates, they kept Thanksgiving on a Thursday, and for some reason the shifted Veterans Day didn’t stick. But they successfully moved Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, and Columbus Day. It makes sense to give people a 3-day weekend. I have no idea why they picked Monday rather than Friday, but either one would do, I suppose. My question is: if this Monday holiday thing was such a good idea, why did it take them so long to do it?
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Introduction: Siobhan Mattison pointed me to this . I’m just disappointed they didn’t use my Fenimore Cooper line. Although I guess that reference wouldn’t resonate much outside the U.S. P.S. My guess was correct See comments below. Actually, the reference probably wouldn’t resonate so well among under-50-year-olds in the U.S. either. Sort of like the Jaycees story.
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Introduction: In her essay on Margaret Mitchell and Gone With the Wind, Claudia Roth Pierpoint writes: The much remarked “readability” of the book must have played a part in this smooth passage from the page to the screen, since “readability” has to do not only with freedom from obscurity but, paradoxically, with freedom from the actual sensation of reading [emphasis added]—of the tug and traction of words as they move thoughts into place in the mind. Requiring, in fact, the least reading, the most “readable” book allows its characters to slip easily through nets of words and into other forms. Popular art has been well defined by just this effortless movement from medium to medium, which is carried out, as Leslie Fiedler observed in relation to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “without loss of intensity or alteration of meaning.” Isabel Archer rises from the page only in the hanging garments of Henry James’s prose, but Scarlett O’Hara is a free woman. Well put. I wish Pierpoint would come out with ano
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