The #MeToo movement has often criticized powerful men for being hypocrites. Aziz Ansari, Harvey Weinstein, Al Franken, and many others put on feminist fronts that did not match their private behavior. But such hypocrisy is more widespread: We are all capable of it.
People have been telling love stories for thousands of years. But in 2004, a new romantic subgenre was born—in the form of the New York Times’ wildly popular “Modern Love” column.
Steph Curry recently set a basketball record for most consecutive games (128) with at least one 3-pointer. “I have a hard time seeing how that streak is ever going to end,” one coach said, because Curry’s playing at a level no one’s ever seen before; LeBron James called him “ridiculous.” We are Bay Area basketball fans, so we love Steph Curry; it would warm our hearts to believe we could always go to sleep knowing he’d hit at least one three. But we’re also math nerds, so we had to see whether the numbers supported our happy fantasy.
A few months ago I became single for the first time in several years. As a statistician who studies online dating, I was intrigued to suddenly find myself a datapoint. I began to think more urgently about questions I once considered abstractly, like the connection between testing statistical hypotheses and testing romantic attraction.
Summer is often a time for drinking with your friends. I lack friends, so I found another way to participate in this summer ritual: over the summer and fall of 2014, I collected more than two million tweets mentioning alcohol. Using the tweets, which had location tags, I mapped out people’s preferences. In the map below, red areas show where people tweet more about #wine; blue areas show where they tweet more about #beer; yellow areas are balanced. (I focused on tweets containing hashtags because I found these often more reliably came from people who were actually drinking.)
Summer is often a time for drinking with your friends. I lack friends, so I found another way to participate in this summer ritual: over the summer and fall of 2014, I collected more than two million tweets mentioning alcohol. Using the tweets, which had location tags, I mapped out people’s preferences. In the map below, red areas show where people tweet more about #wine; blue areas show where they tweet more about #beer; yellow areas are balanced. (I focused on tweets containing hashtags because I found these often more reliably came from people who were actually drinking.)
When I go to a bar with male and female friends, the server often places the pink drinks in front of the girls and the beers in front of the guys, regardless of who ordered what. As a feminist, I should probably get very annoyed at this patriarchal repression of my alcoholic freedom.
Twitter advocates like to talk about how Twitter gives everyone a voice. But we should have no illusions that all voices are equal. A Twitter user at the 99th percentile for followers will have 50 times as many as the median Twitter user. This is far more unequal than even the notoriously skewed income distribution in the US, where someone at the 99th income percentile makes about eight times (pdf) what the median person does. The inequality raises a question: to what extent do a few powerful voices control the way we perceive events? To answer this, I looked at reactions to more than a dozen news events over the past year and analyzed the extent to which powerful Twitter accounts dominated discussion.
Walking out of Fifty Shades of Grey, I confronted a mystery: the critics hated the movie, but I had enjoyed it, and everyone around me seemed to have liked it as well. There are several obvious explanations: critics are paid to have better, or at least snobbier, taste than the rest of us—enjoying a movie is not the same as thinking it is good. But then another possibility occurred to me: 68% of the film’s viewers were women, but film critics are predominantly male (pdf). Would Fifty Shades of Grey have been a critical success in a world with more female reviewers?
In a time of increasing political polarization, it often feels like we live in echo chambers. This was apparent when, as I wrote for Quartz, people discussing Ferguson on Twitter fell into a “red group,” whose members were more likely to be conservative and support the Ferguson police, and a “blue group,” whose members were more likely to be liberal and African-American and support Michael Brown. The two groups rarely spoke to each other and were often hostile when they did. Many people told me they found this depressing but unsurprising; it sometimes seems like internet incivility has become so prevalent, social schisms so profound, that if two groups disagree on a controversial issue like race, they are better off not communicating online at all.
After prosecutor Robert McCulloch announced the Ferguson grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown, a night of clashes between police and protesters produced burning police cars, blocked highways, and automatic gunfire. Amid all the unrest, is it possible to get a clear look at some of the racial and political tensions that underlie the Ferguson conflict?
Harvard Business School caused controversy recently when it coached female students on how to raise their hands and speak up more in the classroom. Women had been participating less, and were earning lower grades; after Harvard intervened, women’s grades climbed.
