Well, it's Leon Wieseltier and TNR. My expectations are set correspondingly low. However, he actually stumbles not far from an important point -- Silver is feti

Well, it's Leon Wieseltier and TNR. My expectations are set correspondingly low. However, he actually stumbles not far from an important point -- Silver is fetishizing "the side of no side," and using the cult of pretended objectivity as a blunt instrument to bash his critics with. Silver isn't doing LHC observations here: he's doing political journalism, and data in politics and economics are neither neutral nor objective. The data we select, the models we use, create toy realities that we can use to justify certain policies and philosophies. What makes Silver particularly pernicious -- and I count myself a fan of his approach to weighting election polls -- is that he pretends that data and modeling means 538's articles are endowed with an Olympian objectivity. Yet his hires suggest that his articles are going to be animated more by ideology than rigor. For example, he chose for his science writer Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist whose climate-change denialism (usually published as popular books, op-eds, and blog posts, not peer-reviewed papers) has been thoroughly debunked by practicing scientists. Not a promising beginning to his site; if I wanted to read worthless contrarianism written by unqualified hacks, I'd just renew my New Republic subscription.