In the course of my daily rummaging through Twitter I saw a strange take: GameStop didn’t matter because it wasn’t still everything. Because the stock wasn’t still in infinite bubble mode the story was over and because the story moved to a new phase that means it “didn’t matter” in the first place. This seems like an absolutely goofy take to me as I have talked with dozens of people personally involved in the story through their efforts to lift the stock to the moon.

Then it hit me — for some people now the only story that mattered was…

He is running a special purpose acquisition company (also known as a SPAC) worth 300m, that’s what. But what is that? A company with no product except synergy — that sounds like some nonsense from 30 Rock…

Unfortunately this is the same answer for the question — what is happening at Buzzfeed, why did Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias exited Vox and why it will merge with Vice. Because all media companies with starting with V must merge to be some sort of Voltron?

The truth in the boutique media world is that a SPAC has come to save the…

If you have read my posts over the years, you can find plenty of evidence that Facebook has never had a particularly strong understanding of the public sphere. Mark Zuckerberg in particular does not understand communication, from the vitamix theory of the public sphere, inability to understand affect in decision making, intends to stop trying to get people to like the company (is that what they were doing?). At least in the last weeks they seem to be understanding that if their platform is extremely unpleasant you won’t like it.

Facebook is the hero in all this, according to them…

A few weeks back, I published an article for this lovely publication on the statistical asymmetry in the conferences in the NFL — especially the hard truth that the wealth of “great” teams in the AFC was simply a mirage. Unfortunately for the AFC, this has been borne out by the games played. With Miami missing the playoffs at least we were spared the weakest playoff team (by SOS) since at least 2009.

Here is the cleanest graphic:

For review here are the key statistical axioms:

A. Strength-of-schedule at Christmas can tell you a lot about how good or not…

The swashbuckling Buccaneers of Tampa Bay won the Super Bowl last night, behind their dreamy quarterback Tom Brady, who continues to lead a charmed life. General Motors also took the opportunity to alert the viewing public to their excellence in electric cars and CBS to their rebrand as Paramount+. The Weeknd was excellent.

But you may find yourself asking the question: why is the Super Bowl such a big deal? Didn’t the NFL peak in 2012 and enter a slow collapse due to an inability to manage social change and traumatic brain injuries? Why does anyone make commercials anymore? …

On January 20, President Biden was sworn in, as per the normal flow of Constitutional governance. Presidents mark this occasion with a speech — generally of particular persuasive power. In their canonical approach to Inauguration discourse, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamison argue that Inaugurals are often penned by their very conditions, these addresses reconstitute the “people,” argue for the possibilities and limits of the Presidency, and are timeless in inviting contemplation. The best inaugural addresses then make a few profound arguments, they are not like a Wilsonian State of the Union, which may read as a list of…

Dateline January 2021: despite the expansion to seven teams per conference in the NFL playoffs, a 10-win team didn’t make it. On the NFC side, a team with a losing record secured a home-playoff game. Chris Collinsworth has been complaining about this since the end of the Green Bay game.

Acquaintances have argued that this is healthy, an expression of consistent AFC dominance. I am skeptical. The exception that proves the rule are the hapless Jets edging out a win over the Browns, who for reasons of pandemic, did not bring their receiving corps. What does consistency mean when it…

Annually, I build a social network of college football results. You might enjoy hiking or watching football, I enjoy translating sports results into edge-lists and matrices. Over the years, it has become clear that a network based model is optimal as it encodes the teams records and their transitive records (who they beat). The key innovation was that football is not associative, it isn’t that the teams merely met but that one lost, it is a directed graph. This model is tabula rosa, meaning that the slate is blank, it requires no other meta-data about games, teams, or plays. …