Nate Silver
Born	Nathaniel Read Silver (1978-01-13) January 13, 1978 (age 34)[1] East Lansing, Michigan
Residence	Brooklyn, New York
Nationality	American
Education	A.B., Economics (2000)
Alma mater	University of Chicago East Lansing High School
Occupation	Statistician, journalist
Known for	PECOTA, FiveThirtyEight.com
Website
fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com

Nathaniel Read "Nate" Silver (born January 13, 1978) is an American statistician, psephologist, and writer. Silver first gained public recognition for developing PECOTA,^[2] a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to and then managed for Baseball Prospectus from 2003 to 2009.^[3]

In 2007, writing under the pseudonym "Poblano," Silver began to publish analyses and predictions related to the 2008 United States presidential election. At first this work appeared on the political blog Daily Kos, but in March 2008 Silver established his own website, FiveThirtyEight.com. By summer of that year, after he revealed his identity to his readers, he began to appear as an electoral and political analyst in national print, online, and cable news media.

The accuracy of his November 2008 presidential election predictions—he correctly predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states—won Silver further attention and commendation. The only state he missed was Indiana, which went for Barack Obama by 0.9%. He also correctly predicted the winner of all 35 Senate races that year.

In April 2009, he was named one of The World's 100 Most Influential People by Time.^[4]

In 2010, Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog was licensed for publication by The New York Times.^[5][6] The newly renamed blog, FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus,^[7] first appeared in The Times on August 25, 2010. In 2012, FiveThirtyEight won a Webby Award as the "Best Political Blog" from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

Early years[link]

Nate Silver was born in East Lansing, Michigan, the son of Sally Silver, a community activist, and Brian D. Silver, a former chair of the political science department at Michigan State University.^[8] He was an early math wizard.^[9] According to journalist William Hageman, "Silver caught the baseball bug when he was 6.... It was 1984, the year the Detroit Tigers won the World Series. The Tigers became his team and baseball his sport. And if there's anything that goes hand in glove with baseball, it's numbers, another of Silver's childhood interests. ("It's always more interesting to apply it to batting averages than algebra class".^[10])

As a student at East Lansing High School, in 1996 Silver won first place in the State of Michigan in the 49th annual John S. Knight Scholarship Contest for senior high school debaters.^[11]

Silver first evinced his journalism skills as a writer and opinion page editor for The Portrait, East Lansing High School's student newspaper, from 1993–1996.

In 2000, Silver graduated with Honors with an A.B. degree in economics from the University of Chicago. He also wrote for the Chicago Weekly News and the Chicago Maroon. He spent his third year at the London School of Economics.^[12]

Career synopsis[link]

Economic consultant and baseball statistician[link]

After college graduation in 2000, Silver worked for three and a half years as an economic consultant with KPMG in Chicago. When asked in 2009, "What is your biggest regret in life?" Silver responded, "Spending four years of my life at a job I didn’t like".^[13] While employed at KPMG, however, Silver continued to nurture his life-long interest in baseball and statistics, and on the side he began to work on his PECOTA system for projecting player performance and careers. He quit his job at KPMG in April 2004 and for a time earned his living mainly by playing online poker.^[14]

In 2003, Silver became a writer for Baseball Prospectus (BP), after having sold PECOTA to BP in return for a partnership interest. After resigning from KPMG in 2004, he took the position of Executive Vice-President, later renamed Managing Partner of BP. In addition to providing executive functions, Silver maintained and further developed PECOTA as well as wrote a weekly feature column under the heading "Lies, Damned Lies". In this column he applied sabermetric techniques to a broad range of topics in baseball research—including, among others, forecasting the performance of individual players, the economics of baseball, metrics for the valuation of players, and developing an Elo rating system for Major League baseball.^[15]

Between 2003 and 2009, Silver was a co-author of the Baseball Prospectus (ISBN 0-7611-3995-8) annual book of Major League Baseball analysis and forecasts as well as a co-author of other books published by Baseball Prospectus, including Mind Game: How the Boston Red Sox Got Smart, Won a World Series, and Created a New Blueprint for Winning (New York: Workman Publishers, 2005) (ISBN 0-7611-4018-2), Baseball Between the Numbers (New York: Basic Books, 2006) (ISBN 0-465-00596-9), and It Ain't Over 'til It's Over: The Baseball Prospectus Pennant Race Book (New York: Basic Books, 2007) (ISBN 0-465-00284-6).

He was an occasional contributor of articles about baseball to ESPN.com, Sports Illustrated, Slate, the New York Sun and The New York Times.^[16]

Political analyst and blogger[link]

In November 2007, while still working for Baseball Prospectus, Silver began to write about politics, specifically the 2008 U.S. Presidential race. Until the end of May 2008, this writing was under the pseudonym "Poblano" and appeared on Daily Kos or on his blog FiveThirtyEight.com, which he launched in March 2008. In June he began to publish political analysis under his own name, including in his blog, newspapers, and The New Republic. He first appeared on national television on CNN's American Morning on June 13, 2008.^[17]

Shortly after the November 4 election, ESPN writer Jim Caple observed, "Forget Cole Hamels and the Phillies. No one in baseball had a more impressive fall than Nate Silver.... [R]ight now Silver is exhausted. He barely slept the last couple weeks of the campaign – 'By the end, it was full-time plus' – and for that matter, he says he couldn't have kept it up had the campaign lasted two days longer. Plus, he has his Baseball Prospectus duties. 'We write our [Baseball Prospectus 2009] book from now through the first of the year,' [Silver] said. 'I have a week to relax and then it gets just as busy again. In February 2009 I will just have to find an island in the Caribbean and throw my BlackBerry in the ocean'".^[18]

Later in November 2008, Silver signed a contract with Penguin Group USA to write two books, reportedly for a $700,000 advance.^[19] In an intervew, Silver described his first book-in-progress as about "the value and limitations of predictions, looking at such diverse industries as fashion design, hurricane forecasting, and the search for extraterrestrial life".^[20][21][22] Silver's book The Signal and the Noise is scheduled for publication in September 2012.

He was invited to be a speaker at TED 2009 in February 2009,^[23] and keynote speaker at the 2009 South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference (March 2009).^[24]

While maintaining his FiveThirtyEight.com website, in January 2009 Silver began a monthly feature column, "The Data," in Esquire^[25] as well as contributed occasional articles to other media such as The New York Times^[26] and the Wall Street Journal.^[27] He also tried his luck in the 2009 World Series of Poker.^[28]

The success of his FiveThirtyEight.com blog and the accuracy of his detailed forecasts of the 2008 U.S. Presidential race marked the effective end of Silver's career as baseball analyst, though he continued to devote some attention to sports statistics and sports economics in his blog. In March 2009, he stepped down as Managing Partner of Baseball Prospectus and announced that he had handed over responsibility for producing future PECOTA projections to other Baseball Prospectus staff members, but that he intended to continue as a writer for BP, including for BP's partner, ESPN.com.^[3][29] In April 2009, he appeared as an analyst on ESPN's Baseball Tonight. However, after March 2009, he published only two "Lies, Damned Lies" columns on BaseballProspectus.com.

While continuing to write his FiveThirtyEight.com blog, he took on some freelance statistically oriented projects. In November 2009, ESPN introduced a new Soccer Power Index (SPi),^[30] developed by Nate Silver, for predicting the outcome of the 2010 FIFA World Cup.^[31] He published a post-mortem after the tournament, comparing his predictions to those of alternative rating systems.^[32]

In April 2010, Silver took an entirely different assignment for New York Magazine, creating a quantitative index of "The Most Livable Neighborhoods in New York".^[33]

In June 2010, it was announced that Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com blog would be moving to the The New York Times, a platform from which it would begin to be published online in August 2010. In addition, Silver would be contributing content to the print edition of The Times as well as to the Sunday Magazine.^[5] This transition occurred on August 25, 2010, with the online publication of Silver's first FiveThirtyEight column in The Times.^[34]

Baseball analysis: 2003–2008[link]

Silver uses a wide variety of research methods and statistical tools in his writings about baseball. However, he has developed three tools that are identified with his name. The best known and most enduring is his forecasting system, PECOTA, which remains a signature product of Baseball Prospectus.

PECOTA[link]

PECOTA (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm) is a statistical system that projects the future performance of hitters and pitchers. It is designed primarily for two uses: fans interested in fantasy baseball, and professionals in the baseball business interested in predicting the performance and valuation of major league players. Unlike most other such projection systems, PECOTA relies on matching a given current player to a set of "comparable" players whose past performance can serve as a guide to how the given current player is likely to perform in the future. Unlike most other such systems, PECOTA also calculates a range of probable performance levels rather than a single predicted value on a given measure such as earned run average or batting average.

PECOTA projections were first published by Baseball Prospectus in the 2003 edition of its annual book as well as online by BaseballProspectus.com. The formulae have been updated steadily since then. Silver produced the annual PECOTA forecasts for each Major League Baseball season from 2003 through 2009. Beginning in Spring 2009, Baseball Prospectus took responsibility for future editions and products based on the forecasts.^[3]

Other tools[link]

Because of the dependence of earned run average statistics on factors over which a pitcher may have little control, sabermetricians have developed several defense independent pitching statistics, including Defense-Independent ERA. One that Silver has created for quick calculations that do not require detailed adjustments for the park or era in which a pitcher is performing is the "QuikERA" or QERA.^[35] It may be useful for early- or mid-season assessments of a pitcher's performance, since it attempts to reduce the effect of luck in summarizing a pitcher's ERA.^[36] Silver explains,

I call this toy QuikERA (QERA), which estimates what a pitcher's ERA should be based solely on his strikeout rate, walk rate, and GB/FB ratio. These three components — K rate, BB rate, GB/FB — stabilize very quickly, and they have the strongest predictive relationship with a pitcher’s ERA going forward. What’s more, they are not very dependent on park effects, allowing us to make reasonable comparisons of pitchers across different teams.

The formula for QERA is as follows: QERA =(2.69 + K%*(-3.4) + BB%*3.88 + GB%*(-0.66))².

Note that everything ends up expressed in terms of percentages: strikeouts per opponent plate appearance, walks per opponent plate appearance, and groundballs as a percentage of all balls hit into play.^[37]

Silver also developed a formula, which he called the "Secret Sauce," to predict whether Major League teams are likely to be successful in the playoffs if they somehow manage to reach them.^[38] This formula comes out of research that he initially conducted and published with Dayn Perry.^[39] The formula claimed that, although during the regular season having an excellent offense above all else may get a team to the playoffs, once in the playoffs a team's success depends much more on strong defense, including pitching.^[40] In other words, teams that prevent the ball from going into play, catch it when it does and preserve late-inning leads are likely to excel in the playoffs".^[41]

Notable critics of the "secret sauce" formula included Tom Tango and Mitchel Lichtman, co-authors of The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball.^[42] Criticism focused on the formula ignoring logical assumptions and relying too heavily on best-fitting sample data that may not be predictive for out-of-sample data.^[43]

For a few years Baseball Prospectus published Secret Sauce figures for every Major League team on its statistics page.^[44] In the 2010 season, Baseball Prospectus stopped using the Secret Sauce method as an indicator of playoff success because teams that ranked higher in secret sauce than their opponents only won 54% of their playoff series since the formula was put into use.^[45]

Political analysis: 2007–present[link]

Silver describes his own partisan orientation as follows in the FAQ on his website: "My state [Illinois] has non-partisan registration, so I am not registered as anything. I vote for Democratic candidates the majority of the time (though by no means always). This year, I have been a supporter of Barack Obama".^[46] With respect to the impartiality of his electoral projections, Silver states, "Are [my] results biased toward [my] preferred candidates? I hope not, but that is for you to decide. I have tried to disclose as much about my methodology as possible".^[46]

Silver describes his ideological orientation as one of "rational progressivism":

I regard myself as a rational progressive. I believe in intellectual progress – that we, as a species, are gradually becoming smarter. I believe that there are objectively right answers to many political and economic questions.

I believe that economic growth is both a reflection of and a contributor toward societal progress, that economic growth has facilitated a higher standard of living, and that this is empirically indisputable. I also believe, however, that our society is now so exceptionally wealthy – even in the midst of a severe recession – that it has little excuse not to provide for some basic level of dignity for all its citizens.

I believe that answers to questions like these do not always come from the establishment. But I also believe that it is just as important to question one's own assumptions as to question the assumptions of others.^[47]

FiveThirtyEight[link]

2008 U.S. elections[link]

On November 1, 2007, Silver began publishing a diary under the pseudonym "Poblano" on the progressive political blog Daily Kos.^[48] Silver set out to analyze quantitative aspects of the political game in a manner that would enlighten a broader audience. Silver reports that "he was stranded in a New Orleans airport when the idea of FiveThirtyEight.com came to him. 'I was just frustrated with the analysis.... I saw a lot of discussion about strategy that was not all that sophisticated, especially when it came to quantitative things like polls and demographics'”.^[49] His forecasts of the 2008 United States presidential primary elections drew a lot of attention, including being cited by The New York Times Op-Ed columnist William Kristol.^[50]

In March 2008, still using the pseudonym "Poblano," Silver established his own blog FiveThirtyEight.com, in which he developed a system for tracking polls and forecasting the outcome of the 2008 general election. At the same time, he continued making forecasts of the 2008 Democratic primary elections. That several of his forecasts based on demographic analysis proved to be substantially more accurate than those of the professional pollsters gained visibility and professional credibility for "Poblano".^[51]

After the North Carolina and Indiana primaries on May 6 the popularity of FiveThirtyEight.com "really exploded. Silver recalls the scenario: 'I know the polls show it’s really tight in NC, but we think Obama is going to win by thirteen, fourteen points, and he did.... Any time you make a prediction like that people give you probably too much credit for it.... But after that [Silver's and the website's popularity] started to really take off. It’s pretty nonlinear, once you get one mention in the mainstream media, other people [quickly follow suit]'".^[52]

On May 30, 2008, Poblano revealed his identity to FiveThirtyEight.com readers.^[53] On June 1, 2008, Silver published a two-page Op-Ed article in the New York Post outlining the rationale underlying his focus on the statistical aspects of politics.

"My fulltime occupation has been as a writer and analyst for a sports media company called Baseball Prospectus. In baseball, statistics are meaningless without context; hitting 30 home runs in the 1930s is a lot different than hitting 30 today. There is a whole industry in baseball dedicated to the proper understanding and interpretation of statistics. In polling and politics, there is nearly as much data as there is for first basemen. In this year's Democratic primaries, there were statistics for every gender, race, age, occupation and geography – reasons why Clinton won older women, or Obama took college students. But the understanding has lagged behind. Polls are cherry-picked based on their brand name or shock value rather than their track record of accuracy. Demographic variables are misrepresented or misunderstood. (Barack Obama, for instance, is reputed to have problems with white working-class voters, when in fact these issues appear to be more dictated by geography – he has major problems among these voters in Kentucky and West Virginia, but did just fine with them in Wisconsin and Oregon)".^[54]

As a CNET reporter wrote on election eve, "Even though Silver launched the site as recently as March, its straightforward approach, daring predictions, and short but impressive track record has put it on the map of political sites to follow. The Washington Post featured Silver in its 14th annual election prediction contest this year, and he'll be reporting on Tuesday night's results with Dan Rather on HDNet".^[55]

Silver's final 2008 presidential election forecast accurately predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states as well as the District of Columbia (missing only the prediction for Indiana). As his model predicted, the races in Missouri and North Carolina were particularly close. He also correctly predicted the winners of every U.S. Senate race. The accuracy of his predictions won him further acclaim, including abroad,^[56] and added to his reputation as a leading political prognosticator.^[57]

[edit] Transition to The New York Times

On June 3, 2010, Silver announced on FiveThirtyEight.com,

In the near future, the blog will "re-launch" under a NYTimes.com domain. It will retain its own identity (akin to other Times blogs like DealBook), but will be organized under the News:Politics section. Once this occurs, content will no longer be posted at FiveThirtyEight.com on an ongoing basis, and the blog will re-direct to the new URL. In addition, I will be contributing content to the print edition of the New York Times, and to the Sunday Magazine. The partnership agreement, which is structured as a license, has a term of three years.^[5]

The transition to the new blog FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus sponsored by The New York Times took place on August 25, 2010, with the publication online of Silver's first article, "New Forecast Shows Democrats Losing 6 to 7 Senate Seats".^[58] From then until the mid-term elections of 2010 in November, Silver's blog focused almost exclusively on developing forecasts of the outcomes of the 2010 U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives as well as state gubernatorial contests. Silver's Times Sunday Magazine feature first appeared on November 19, 2010, under the heading "Go Figure".^[59] It was later titled "Acts of Mild Subversion".^[60]

2010 U.S. elections[link]

Shortly after 538 relocated to The New York Times, Silver introduced his prediction models for the 2010 elections to the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives, and state Governorships. Each of these models relied initially on a combination of electoral history, demographics, and polling. Silver eventually published detailed forecasts and analyses of the results for all three sets of elections.

2012 U.S. elections[link]

Although throughout 2011 Silver devoted a lot of attention on his blog to the 2012 Republican party primaries, his first effort to handicap the 2012 Presidential general election appeared as the cover story in The New York Times Magazine a year prior to the election: "Is Obama Toast? Handicapping the 2012 Election".^[61] Accompanying the online release of this article, Silver also published "Choose Obama’s Re-Election Adventure," an interactive toy that allowed readers to predict the outcome of the election based on their assumptions about three variables: President Obama's favorability ratings, the rate of GDP growth, and how conservative the Republican opponent would be.^[62] This analysis stimulated a lot of critical discussion.^[63]

While publishing numerous stories on the Republican primary elections, in mid-February 2012 Silver reprised and updated his previous Magazine story with another one, "What Obama Should Do Next".^[64] This story painted a more optimistic picture of President Obama's re-election chances. A companion article on his FiveThirtyEight blog, "The Fundamentals Now Favor Obama," explained how the model and the facts on the ground had changed between November and February.^[65]

Mainstream media[link]

Silver's self-unmasking at the end of May 2008 brought him a lot of publicity, much of it focused on his combined skill as both baseball statistician-forecaster and political statistician-forecaster, including articles about him in the Wall Street Journal,^[66] Newsweek,^[67] Science News,^[68] New York Magazine,^[69] and his hometown Lansing State Journal.^[70]

In early June he began to cross-post his daily "Today's Polls" updates on "The Plank" in The New Republic.^[71] Also, Rasmussen Reports began to use the FiveThirtyEight.com poll averages for its own tracking of the 2008 state-by-state races.^[72]

This added exposure provided him with opportunities to appear on CNN's American Morning and D.L. Hughley Breaks the News,^[73] MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann and Hardball with Chris Matthews, CNBC's Fast Money,^[74] Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show, HDNet's Dan Rather Reports, Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!,^[75] PBS's The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, The Charlie Rose Show,^[76] and The Rachel Maddow Shows on both Air America Radio and MSNBC, as well as to contribute essays and op ed columns to The New Republic,^[77] the New York Post,^[78] the Los Angeles Times,^[79] and Newsweek.^[80]

New York Magazine, on October 12, 2008, referred to Silver as "The Spreadsheet Psychic": "a number-crunching prodigy who went from correctly forecasting baseball games to correctly forecasting presidential primaries".^[81] Other commentators drew a parallel between Silver's baseball prognosticatons and his election forecasting in 2008: "The Tampa Bay Rays and Barack Obama have made 2008 the year of the surprise contender, though one man predicted both successes before nearly anyone else – and he sees a general election landslide for Obama over John McCain on Tuesday".^[82]

The celebrity that this attention brought to Silver sometimes took a curious form, including articles on Wonkette: The D.C. Gossip^[83] and a Facebook group entitled "There's a 97.3 Percent Chance that Nate Silver Is Totally My Boyfriend".^[84]

Throughout 2009 through 2012, Silver appeared several more times as a political analyst on national television, most frequently on MSNBC^[85] but also on CNN^[86] as well as Bloomberg Television,^[87] PBS,^[88] NPR,^[89] "Democracy Now!",^[90] The Charlie Rose Show,^[91] ABC News,^[92] and Current TV.^[93]

Book[link]

• Nate Silver. The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail – But Some Don't. New York: Penguin, 2012. ISBN-13 978-1-59-420411-1. In Press (publication date: September 27, 2012).

Recognition and awards[link]

• In September 2008, FiveThirtyEight became the first blog ever selected as a Notable Narrative by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.^[94]

• On the day after the first McCain-Obama Presidential Debate, Time Magazine's Joe Klein observed on the magazine's "Swampland" blog: "If there's been a rookie of the year in this year's presidential campaign coverage, it's Nate Silver—a baseball stats guy who has turned his talents to politics and produced some of the most creative slicing and dicing of polling numbers at his website fivethirtyeight.com. Today's offering is typical Silver: he takes the snap polling results and weights them according to the issues the voters considered most important—and finds that Obama won, according to the cross tabs, on the more important issues, thereby accounting for his snap poll victories".^[95]

• October 7, 2008: Silver appeared as a guest on "The Colbert Report".^[96]

• November 2008: Crain's Chicago Business profiled Silver as one of Chicago's "40 under 40" notable young entrepreneurs.^[97]

• November 9, 2008: the New York Times called Silver "perhaps the most unlikely media star to emerge" out of "an election season of unlikely outcomes" and described FiveThirtyEight with its almost five million page views on Election Day as "one of the breakout online stars of the year".^[98]

• December 2008: Newsweek.com identified Silver's November 3, 2008 article "What to Watch For – An hour-by-hour guide to election night"^[99] as the 4th most viewed story on Newsweek.com in 2008.^[100]

• December 2008: Silver was named by Huffington Post writer Jason Linkins as the #1 of the "Ten Things that Managed to Not Suck in 2008, Media Edition". "The uncanny, poll-wrangling, stats-freaking Nate Silver took it upon himself to demonstrate that some level of governable, rational reality could be brought to bear on the confusing world of competing tracking polls, and along the way all but cemented the geek-chic trajectory of this election season".^[101]

• December 2008: named by The Daily Beast as one of the "Breakout Stars of 2008": "Breakout Swami: NATE SILVER. In 2007, Nate Silver was mainly known as a world-class seamhead,[1] a Baseball Prospectus geek who could do sexy things with ERAs. Then he started applying his statfreak principles to presidential politics under the pseudonym Poblano. When he finally outed himself in June 2008, it was clear that Silver and his website www.FiveThirtyEight.com had everyone’s number—his primary projections became gospel. In the end, though, Silver only correctly predicted how 49 of the 50 states would vote. Better luck in 2012".^[102]

• February 2009: named by James Wolcott in Vanity Fair as one of the "Winners of 2008": "No shiny arrow shot swifter and loftier from obscurity to quotable authority than Nate Silver, whose FiveThirtyEight.com site became the expert sensation of the election season.... Not only did his disciplined models and microfine data mining command respect, his prognostications hit the Zen mark on Election Day.... Silver also became an instant cable-news savant, his geek-genius glasses and owlish mien worthy of a Starfleet sub-adjutant whose quadratic equations coolly foil an attack from a Romulan vessel while the senior officers are frantically poking at their touch screens".^[103]

• January 2009: Silver was named by Forbes.com to its third annual "Web Celeb 25," which "track[s] the biggest and brightest stars on the Web, the people who have turned their passions into new-media empires. From stay-at-home moms to geek entrepreneurs, these are the people capturing eyes, influencing opinion and creating the new digital world".^[104]

• April 2009: Silver was named as one of the "Rolling Stone 100: Agents of Change".^[105]

• April 27, 2009: named "Blogger of the Year" by The Week in its 6th annual Opinion Awards. The commendation stated: "Nate Silver of Fivethirtyeight.com was arguably the most important blogger of the 2008 presidential election, translating a flood of poll numbers into a narrative that was both compelling and trustworthy. By Election Night — when Fivethirtyeight.com declared the race for Obama at 8:46 p.m., an hour and 14 minutes before the mainstream media did — Silver had already established himself as the most reliable caller of the political horse race".^[106]

• April 30, 2009: Silver was named one of "The World's 100 Most Influential People" by TIME Magazine.^[4]

• December 2009: Silver was recognized by The New York Times Magazine in its "Ninth Annual Year in Ideas" article for his "Forensic Polling Analysis" of the possible falsification of data by a polling firm.^[107]

• 2009: named "Speaker of the Year" by the intercollegiate Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA).^[108]

• November 2010: John F. Harris, Editor-in-Chief of Politico writing in Forbes Magazine listed Nate Silver as one of seven bloggers among "The Most Powerful People on Earth": "The New York Times recently began hosting Nate Silver's delightfully granular blog about the numbers that underlie politics".^[109]

• May 2011: Presented the Henry Pringle Lecture at the Columbia Journalism School.^{[110][111][112]}

• March 2012: Crain's New York Business featured Silver as one of New York City's "Forty Under Forty" notable young entrepreneurs.^[113]

• May 2012: FiveThirtyEight won a Webby Award for "Best Political Blog" from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences in the 16th annual Webby Awards.^[114]

Personal life[link]

Nate Silver is a grandnephew of Leon Silver, geologist.

After residing in Chicago, Illinois for twelve years, Silver moved to New York City in 2009.^[115]

Silver has long been interested in fantasy baseball, especially Scoresheet Baseball. While in college he served as an expert on Scoresheet Baseball for BaseballHQ.^[116] When he took up political writing, Silver abandoned his blog, The Burrito Bracket,^[117] in which he ran a one-and-done competition among the taquerias in his Wicker Park neighborhood in Chicago.^[118]

In 2010, Out magazine included Silver among their top 100 LGBT people of the year.^[119]

In his spare time, Silver uses his analytical approach at the poker table where he plays semi-professionally.^[120]

Notes[link]

External links[link]

	Baseball portal
	Journalism portal
	Biography portal

Blogs[link]

• Nate Silver's Baseball Prospectus article archive (2003–2009)
• Nate Silver's The Burrito Bracket (2007)
• Nate Silver's diaries as "Poblano" on Daily Kos (2007–2009)
• FiveThirtyEight.com archive from pre-NYT period (2008–2010)
• FiveThirtyEight/NYT (2010– )

Other[link]

• Nate Silver/FiveThirtyEight on Twitter
• Leigh Bureau speaker profile
• Video of Silver discussing his methodology for polling aggregation on Bloggingheads.tv (August 21, 2008)
• TED 2009 video of talk about race and the 2008 U.S. presidential election

Fareed Zakaria
Zakaria at Charles Schwab Institutional Impact 2007
Born	Fareed Rafiq Zakaria (1964-01-20) January 20, 1964 (age 48) Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Alma mater	Yale University (AB) Harvard University (PhD)
Occupation	Journalist, commentator, author
Notable credit(s)	Time magazine, contributing editor (2010) Fareed Zakaria GPS, host (2008–present) Newsweek International, editor (2000–2010) Foreign Exchange, host (2005–2007) Foreign Affairs, former managing editor
Spouse	Paula Throckmorton Zakaria
Children	Omar, Lila, Sofia
Website
www.fareedzakaria.com

Fareed Rafiq Zakaria ( /fəˈriːd zəˈkɑriə/; Konkani/Hindi: फ़रीद राफ़िक़ ज़कारिया, Urdu: فرید رفیق زکریا; born January 20, 1964) is an Indian-American journalist and author. From 2000 to 2010, he was a columnist for Newsweek and editor of Newsweek International. In 2010 he became editor-at-large of Time magazine. He is also the host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS, and a frequent commentator and author about issues related to international relations, trade and American foreign policy.^[1]

In 2010, the government of India honored him with the Padma Bhushan for his contribution towards journalism.^[2]

Early life[link]

Zakaria was born in Mumbai (then Bombay), Maharashtra, India, to a Konkani Muslim family.^[3] His father, Rafiq Zakaria, was a politician associated with the Indian National Congress and an Islamic scholar. His mother, Fatima Zakaria, was for a time the editor of the Sunday Times of India.

Zakaria attended the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University,^[1] where he was president of the Yale Political Union, editor-in-chief of the Yale Political Monthly, a member of the Scroll and Key society, and a member of the Party of the Right. He later earned a Doctor of Philosophy in political science from Harvard University in 1993,^[1] where he studied under Samuel P. Huntington and Stanley Hoffmann, as well as international relations theorist Robert Keohane.^[4]

Career[link]

After directing a research project on American foreign policy at Harvard, Zakaria became managing editor of Foreign Affairs magazine in 1992. In October 2000, he was named editor of Newsweek International,^[1] and wrote a weekly foreign affairs column. In August 2010 it was announced that he was moving from Newsweek to Time magazine, to serve as a contributing editor and columnist.^[5]

He has written on a variety of subjects for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and as a wine columnist for the web magazine Slate.^[6][7]

Zakaria is the author of From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role (Princeton, 1998), The Future of Freedom (Norton, 2003), and The Post-American World (2008); he has also co-edited The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World (Basic Books).

In 2007, Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines named him one of the 100 leading public intellectuals in the world.^[8]

Zakaria was a news analyst with ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos (2002–2007); he hosted the weekly TV news show, Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria on PBS (2005–2008); his weekly show, Fareed Zakaria GPS (Global Public Square) premiered on CNN in June 2008.^[1] As of November 2011, It airs on Sundays at 10:00am and 1:00pm Eastern Daylight Time.^[9]

Political views[link]

Zakaria self-identifies as a "centrist",^[10] though he has been described variously as a political liberal,^[11][12] a conservative,^[13] or a moderate.^[14] George Stephanopoulos said of him in 2003, "He’s so well versed in politics, and he can’t be pigeonholed. I can’t be sure whenever I turn to him where he’s going to be coming from or what he’s going to say."^[15] Zakaria wrote in February 2008 that "Conservatism grew powerful in the 1970s and 1980s because it proposed solutions appropriate to the problems of the age", adding that "a new world requires new thinking".^[16] He supported Barack Obama during the 2008 Democratic primary campaign and also for president. In January 2009 Forbes referred to Zakaria as one of the 25 most influential liberals in the American media.^[11] Zakaria has stated that he tries not to be devoted to any type of ideology, saying "I feel that's part of my job... which is not to pick sides but to explain what I think is happening on the ground. I can't say, 'This is my team and I'm going to root for them no matter what they do.'"^[10]

Fareed Zakaria at World Economic Forum 2006, Davos, Switzerland (second from the right)

Zakaria's books include The Future of Freedom and The Post-American World. The Future of Freedom argues that what is defined as democracy in the Western world is actually "liberal democracy," a combination of liberal constitutionalism and participatory politics. Zakaria points out that protection of liberty and the rule of law actually preceded popular elections by centuries in Western Europe, and that when countries only adopt elections without the protection of liberty, they create "illiberal democracy." The Post-American World, published in 2008 before the financial crisis, argued that the most important trend of modern times is the "rise of the rest," the economic emergence of China, India, Brazil and other countries.^[17]

After the 9/11 attacks, in a Newsweek cover essay, "Why They Hate Us," Zakaria argued that Islamic extremism was not fundamentally rooted in Islam, nor could it be claimed a reaction to American foreign policy. He portrayed Osama bin Laden as one in a long line of extremists who used religion to justify mass murder. Zakaria argued for an inter-generational effort to create more open and dynamic societies in Arab countries, and thereby helping Islam enter the modern world.^[18]

Zakaria initially supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq.^[13] He said at the time, “The place is so dysfunctional... any stirring of the pot is good. America’s involvement in the region is for the good."^[13] He argued for a United Nations-sanctioned operation with a much larger force—approximately 400,000 troops—than was actually employed by the administration of President George W. Bush. After the invasion, he frequently criticized the way the Bush administration was running the occupation of Iraq.^[19] He continued to argue that a functioning democracy in Iraq would be a powerful new model for Arab politics but believes that at this point, an honest accounting would have to say that the costs of the invasion and occupation have been much higher than the benefits. He opposed the Iraq surge in March 2007, writing that it would work militarily but not politically, still leaving Iraq divided among its three communities. Instead he advocated that Washington push hard for a political settlement between the Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, and Kurds, and begin a reduction in forces to only 60,000 troops.^[19] In January 2009, he stated flatly that the surge "succeeded," militarily and did better politically than he would have predicted.^[20][21]

From 2006, Zakaria has also criticized what he views as "fear-based" American policies employed not only in combating terrorism, but also in enforcing immigration and drug smuggling laws, and has argued in favor of decriminalization of drugs and citizenship for presently illegal immigrants to the United States of all backgrounds.^[22][23][24]

Before the 2008 US Presidential election, Zakaria endorsed Barack Obama on his CNN program.^[25] In May 2011 The New York Times reported that President Obama has "sounded out prominent journalists like Fareed Zakaria ... and Thomas L. Friedman" concerning Middle East issues.^[26]

Wolfowitz meeting[link]

In his 2006 book State of Denial, Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward described a November 29, 2001, meeting of Middle East analysts, including Zakaria, that was convened at the request of the then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. According to a New York Times story on Woodward's book, the Wolfowitz meeting ultimately produced a report for President George W. Bush that supported the subsequent invasion of Iraq. Zakaria, however, later told The New York Times that he had briefly attended what he thought was "a brainstorming session".^[27] He was not told that a report would be prepared for the President, and the report did not have his name on it.^[28]

Personal[link]

Zakaria is a naturalized American citizen.^[29] He currently resides in New York City^[1] with his wife, Paula Throckmorton Zakaria, son Omar, and daughters Lila and Sofia.

Awards[link]

Zakaria was conferred India Abroad Person of the Year 2008 award on March 20, 2009, in New York.^[30] Filmmaker Mira Nair, who won the award for year 2007, honored her successor. He has received honorary degrees at the University of Miami, Oberlin College, Bates College, Brown University, Harvard University,^[31] and Johns Hopkins University.

In January 2010, Zakaria was given the Padma Bhushan award by the Indian government for his contribution to the field of journalism.^[32]

In 2005, Zakaria was awarded the Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize from the Anti-Defamation League ("ADL"). In July 2010 the ADL expressed its opposition to the Park51 Islamic cultural center and mosque, planned for a site that is two blocks from the World Trade Center site. Zakaria returned the award in protest, saying that he could not "in good conscience keep it anymore". In support of his decision, he stated that the larger issue in the controversy is freedom of religion in America, even while acknowledging that he is not a religious person. He also wrote that a "moderate, mainstream version of Islam" is essential to winning the war on terror.^[33][34][35] On the August 8, 2010, edition of Fareed Zakaria GPS, Zakaria addressed the issue, stating that in returning his award, he had hoped that the ADL would reconsider their stance.^[35]

Zakaria has accepted invitations to give commencement addresses to the 2012 graduating classes at Harvard University ^[36] and Duke University.^[37]

Bibliography[link]

• The Post-American World, Release 2.0, Fareed Zakaria, (W.W. Norton & Company; 2011) ISBN 0-393-08180-X
• The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria, (W.W. Norton & Company; 2008) ISBN 0-393-06235-X
• The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, Fareed Zakaria, (W.W. Norton & Company; 2003) ISBN 0-393-04764-4
• From Wealth to Power, Fareed Zakaria, (Princeton University Press; 1998) ISBN 0-691-04496-1
• The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World Essays from 75 Years of Foreign Affairs, edited by James F. Hoge and Fareed Zakaria, (Basic Books; 1997) ISBN 0-465-00170-X

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Fareed Zakaria

• FareedZakaria.com Official site
• Fareed Zakaria on Facebook
• Fareed Zakaria on Twitter
• Global Public Square at CNN
• Column archive at The Daily Star
• Column archive (through 2010) at Newsweek
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Fareed Zakaria on Charlie Rose
• Fareed Zakaria at the Internet Movie Database
• Works by or about Fareed Zakaria in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Fareed Zakaria collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• Fareed Zakaria at the Notable Names Database

Interviews and articles

• Marion Maneker. "Man of the World". New York magazine profile.
• Coverage of his many appearances on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart". Sajaforum.org
• Review roundup of "The Post-American World" at SAJA Forum
• One-on-One with Thomas L. Friedman. Omnivoracious. September 7, 2008
• "Sweet Justice". Zakaria says that German wines get a bad rap. Slate (magazine).
• Audio: Fareed Zakaria in conversation on the BBC World Service discussion show The Forum
• Q&A with Fareed Zakaria on five-year anniversary of 9/11 attacks. South Asian Journalists Association blog. September 10, 2006.
• "The Interpreter". Village Voice profile. August 9, 2005.

Charlie Rose
Rose in May 2010
Born	Charles Peete Rose, Jr. (1942-01-05) January 5, 1942 (age 70) Henderson, North Carolina, U.S.
Education	Duke University B.A. (1964) Duke University J.D. (1968)
Occupation	Talk show host Journalist
Years active	1972–present
Notable credit(s)	Charlie Rose, 60 Minutes II, 60 Minutes, CBS News Nightwatch, CBS This Morning
Website
http://www.charlierose.com/

Charles Peete "Charlie" Rose, Jr. (born January 5, 1942)^[1] is an American television talk show host and journalist. Since 1991 he has hosted Charlie Rose, an interview show distributed nationally by PBS since 1993. He has also co-anchored CBS This Morning since January 2012. Rose, along with Lara Logan, has hosted the revived CBS classic Person to Person, a news program during which celebrities are interviewed in their homes, originally hosted from 1953 to 1961 by Edward R. Murrow.^[2]

Early life[link]

Rose was born in Henderson, North Carolina, the only child^[3] of Margaret Frazier and Charles Peete Rose, Sr., tobacco farmers who owned a country store.^[4][5] As a child, Rose lived above his parents' store in Henderson and helped out with the family business from age seven.^[6] Rose admitted in a Fresh Dialogues interview that as a child his insatiable curiosity was constantly getting him in trouble.^[7] A high school basketball star, Rose entered Duke University intending to pursue a degree with a pre-med track, but an internship in the office of Democratic North Carolina Senator B. Everett Jordan got him interested in politics.^[8] Rose graduated in 1964 with a bachelor's degree in history. At Duke, he was a member of the Kappa Alpha Order fraternity. He earned a Juris Doctor from the Duke University School of Law in 1968.^[6] He met his wife, Mary (née King), while attending Duke.^[3][4]

Career[link]

After his wife was hired by the BBC (in New York), Rose handled some assignments for the BBC on a freelance basis. In 1972, while continuing to work at Bankers Trust, he landed a job as a weekend reporter for WPIX-TV. His break came in 1974, after Bill Moyers hired Rose as managing editor for the PBS series Bill Moyers' International Report. In 1975, Moyers named Rose executive producer of Bill Moyers Journal. Rose soon began appearing on camera. "A Conversation with Jimmy Carter," one installment of Moyers's series U.S.A.: People and Politics, won a 1976 Peabody Award. Rose worked at several networks honing his interview skills until KXAS-TV in Dallas-Fort Worth hired him as program manager and gave him the late-night time slot that would become the Charlie Rose show.

Rose worked for CBS News (1984–1990) as the anchor of CBS News Nightwatch, the network's first late-night news broadcast. The Nightwatch broadcast of Rose's interview with Charles Manson won an Emmy Award in 1987.^[4] In 1990, Rose left CBS to serve as anchor of Personalities, a syndicated program produced by Fox Broadcasting Company, but he got out of his contract after six weeks because of the tabloid-style content of the show. Charlie Rose premiered on PBS station Thirteen/WNET on September 30, 1991, and has been nationally syndicated since January 1993. In 1994, Rose moved the show to a studio owned by Bloomberg Television, which allowed for improved satellite interviewing.^[9]

Rose was a correspondent for 60 Minutes II^[10] from its inception in January 1999 until its cancellation in September 2005, and was later named a correspondent on 60 Minutes.^[11]

Rose was a member of the board of directors of Citadel Broadcasting Corporation from 2003 to 2009.^[3] In May 2010, Charlie Rose delivered the commencement address at North Carolina State University.

On November 15, 2011, it was announced that Rose would return to CBS to help anchor CBS This Morning, replacing The Early Show, commencing January 9, 2012, along with co-anchors Erica Hill and Gayle King.

Cameo appearances[link]

Rose has appeared as himself in the 1998 film Primary Colors,^[12] in a 2000 episode of The Simpsons^[13] and in the 2008 movie Elegy.^[14] He and his show were also used in the Wes Anderson film The Royal Tenenbaums. He also appears as himself in the 2011 George Clooney directed film, The Ides of March.

[edit] Accusations of conflict of interest

While hosting the 2002 Coca-Cola Company shareholders' meeting, Rose said "few companies are able to connect as completely with consumers in the way that Coca-Cola is. It is a privilege to be associated with [The Coca-Cola family] ... This is the business of Coca-Cola: being part of a family, being worldwide, doing well and doing good at the same time."^[15] Afterward, Coca-Cola agreed to become what Rose called "a leading underwriter" of The Charlie Rose Show, paying "six or possibly seven figures."^[16] Even the Charlie Rose mugs used on his PBS show feature a Coca-Cola logo on one side.^[17][18] Although CBS News policy bars correspondents from doing commercials and product endorsements, the Washington Post reported CBS was "comfortable" with Rose's actions. Rose insists he "would never do a story on 60 Minutes II about anybody who underwrites my PBS show."^[16]

[edit] Quiet influence

The New York Times reported that Rose encouraged a discussion between the leaders of NBC and Fox, that led eventually to a mutual reduction in ad hominem attacks between Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly on their respective news programs.^[19]

Rose has attended several Bilderberg Group conference meetings, including meetings held in the United States in 2008;^[20] Spain in 2010;^[21] and Switzerland in 2011.^[22] These unofficial conferences hold guests from North America and Western Europe, most of whom are political leaders and businessmen. Details of meetings are closed off to the public and strictly invitation-only, and critics^[who?] speculate the controversial nature of these meetings of highly influential people. Accusations from conspiracy theorists against The Charlie Rose show claim that it has become the US media outlet for Bilderberg.^{[23][unreliable source?]}

Personal life[link]

Rose's twelve-year marriage to Mary Rose (née King) ended in divorce in 1980. Mary is the sister-in-law of Morgan Stanley Chairman John J. Mack. Since 1993, his companion has been socialite and chairman of the New York City Planning Commission and director of the city department of planning Amanda Burden, a stepdaughter of CBS founder William S. Paley.^[24]

On March 29, 2006, after experiencing shortness of breath in Syria, Rose was flown to Paris and underwent surgery for mitral valve repair in the Georges-Pompidou European Hospital. His surgery was performed under the supervision of Alain F. Carpentier, a pioneer of the procedure.^[25] Rose returned to the air on June 12, 2006, with Bill Moyers and Yvette Vega (the show's executive producer), to discuss his surgery and recuperation.

In a 2009 Fresh Dialogues interview, Rose described his life as "great and glorious."^[7] He added, '"I get up every morning with a new adventure. The adventure is fueled by interesting people. I get a chance to control my own destiny. I do something that is immediately either appreciated or not. I get feedback."

Rose owns a 575-acre (2.33 km²) farm in Oxford, North Carolina, an apartment overlooking Central Park in New York City, a beach house in Bellport, New York, an apartment in Washington D.C.^[3] and an apartment in Paris, France.

References[link]

External links[link]

This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (March 2012)

• Charlie Rose Official website of his eponymous show
• Charlie Rose official channel on YouTube
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Charlie Rose at the Internet Movie Database
• Charlie Rose collected news and commentary at the Los Angeles Times
• Charlie Rose collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• Charlie Rose at the Notable Names Database
• Charlie Rose shows on Hulu
• celebritynetworth.com, Celebrity Net Worth, Charlie Rose
• Why Business Loves Charlie Rose David A. Kaplan, Fortune, September 28, 2009