The Math Of Politics

Last time I ran the New York Times Spelling Bee through the machinery of cooperative game theory, treating each day’s word list as a weighted voting game: words are voters, points are votes, Genius is the quota, and a word has power when it’s the one that…

The best way to kill a joke is to explain it.

The talk I’d come to Montreal for happened in a windowless hotel ballroom, and it opened with a small technical glitch.

We came to Montreal for a talk — Maggie‘s, at a conference I’ll get to next time — and I did what I always do in a city that predates the automobile, which is walk until my feet complain and then walk a little more.

Thursday’s post ended on a one-dimensional dial and a promise.

Wednesday’s post answered what selects: a stationary distribution, the wheel turning by no hand in particular.

Last week I asked you to take your hand off the lever.

TOKYO — Earlier this week I wrote that there was a man I meant to come back to before I left Japan.

TOKYO — For most of this week I have been the one standing at the board.

TOKYO — No guidebook leads with this, but Tokyo spent much of the twentieth century as one of the world’s quiet capitals of a strange and beautiful science: the mathematics of collective choice, the study of what a group of people actually do when they try