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A DATE WITH NATE
BY PAUL RUDNICK
NOVEMBER 19, 2012
Dear Nate Silver:
My name is Emma Gertlowitz and Im eleven years old and for a million years I liked Justin Bieber because he was so cute but now I like you. I watched you on MSNBC and HBO and on Charlie Rose and I cant stop thinking about how you study polls and create probability models and predict elections and how youre always right, which I think is so unbelievably cute, and I keep imagining you saying to me, Emma, I think that theres a 93.7% chance of me falling in love with you.
..............................
I wonder if when you get up in the morning you open your kitchen cabinet and go, Im feeling 18.5% Rice Chex and 27.9% Frosted Mini-Wheats and 32% one of those whole-grain Kashi cereals which have photos of smiling multicultural people on the boxes, as if smiling multicultural people were a new form of fibre. And then I wonder if you think, But Im really feeling 58.3% like having a cupcake for breakfast, but then your mom says, I dont care if youre a fancy statistician with a Times blog and Seattle green-architect eyeglass frames, you still need something heart-healthy to start your day, but then you tell her, Mom, if you keep nagging me I will never let you meet my new boyfriend, Matt Bomer.
See, I think that because you predicted the election with near-100% accuracy Matt Bomer is way more likely to go out with you than with Dick Morris, who predicted a Romney landslide, or with Karl Rove, who kept predicting that Ohio was still in play a week after the election was over. In fact, right now I bet that you could get anyone to go out with you just by saying something like I predicted Florida, North Carolina, and Illinois, and now Im predicting that youll have dinner with me. I know that you can also predict the careers of baseball players and that you made a ton of money playing online poker, all of which makes you really cool because you can gamble and do sports without leaving your room; youre like James Bond in saggy sweatpants whose pockets are filled with wadded-up Kleenex.
I know that youre too old for me and that if we actually met youd probably be really nice and say something like I predict that someday youll meet a boy whos 100% right for you, and then I would tell you my secret, that I was totally crushing on this geeky anorexic goth boy but he turned out to be Ann Coulter. So maybe I should just keep fantasizing about you, because statisticians are the new sexy vampires, only even more pasty. I just hope that tonight I can dream that the next time youre on Rachel Maddow youll look right into the camera and say, I can predict that Hillary will win Nevada in 2016, and that Emma Gertlowitz will at least get wait-listed for Brown.
Your No. 1 fan,
Emma ♦
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2012/11/19/121119sh_shouts_rudnick#ixzz2CIibtcJa