The hots for Nate Silver
A DATE WITH NATE
BY PAUL RUDNICK
NOVEMBER 19, 2012
Dear Nate Silver:
My name is Emma Gertlowitz and I’m 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 can’t stop thinking about how you study polls and create probability models and predict elections and how you’re always right, which I think is so unbelievably cute, and I keep imagining you saying to me, “Emma, I think that there’s a 93.7% chance of me falling in love with you.”
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I wonder if when you get up in the morning you open your kitchen cabinet and go, I’m 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 I’m really feeling 58.3% like having a cupcake for breakfast, but then your mom says, “I don’t care if you’re 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 I’m predicting that you’ll 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; you’re like James Bond in saggy sweatpants whose pockets are filled with wadded-up Kleenex.
I know that you’re too old for me and that if we actually met you’d probably be really nice and say something like “I predict that someday you’ll meet a boy who’s 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 you’re on “Rachel Maddow” you’ll 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
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