Jody Avirgan, FiveThirtyEight

Jody Avirgan

FiveThirtyEight

New York, NY, United States

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Recent:
  • Unknown
Past:
  • FiveThirtyEight
  • WNYC

Past articles by Jody:

Politics Podcast: Should Democrats Play Dirty?

Last week New Jersey Democrats backed off from a plan that would essentially gerrymander their state in Democrats’ favor, while Wisconsin Republicans went ahead… → Read More

Politics Podcast: Kavanaugh’s Confirmation Could Be In Trouble

Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s prospects of confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court changed significantly over the weekend after Christine Blasey Ford told The Washingt… → Read More

Politics Podcast: Inside The Trump Administration

Over the past week, the inner workings of the Trump administration were laid bare both in Bob Woodward’s new book, “Fear: Trump in the White House,” and in an a… → Read More

Politics Podcast: The Democrats And The Trump Impeachment Question

Michael Cohen’s suggestion last week that President Trump directed him to break the law has renewed questions about whether Democrats should aim to impeach the … → Read More

Politics Podcast: What Kinds Of Candidates Are Democrats Nominating?

What kinds of candidates are Democrats nominating to compete this fall? Meredith Conroy joins the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast crew to discuss an analysis o… → Read More

We Asked You To Visualize Your Podcast Listening And, Wow, Did You Deliver

Early this year, as part of our podcast What’s The Point, we asked listeners to track their podcast-listening habits for a week, visualize the data, and send us a postcard. This was inspired by des… → Read More

Count One More Gold For The U.S. — In Math

To train the best young math minds in America, Po-Shen Loh cares less about his students’ raw computing power and more about priming them for “leaps of insight.” Loh is the coach of the U.S. team t… → Read More

Why The Dean Scream Sounded So Different On TV

Howard Dean has a long résumé. He was the longest-serving governor in Vermont’s history. As a presidential candidate in 2004, he pioneered the online fundraisin… → Read More

Doug Rushkoff Says Companies Should Stop Growing

“The world that you see is being configured to a probable reality that you haven’t yet chosen.” When Twitter went public, its initial stocked soared and Wall Street valued it at close to $25 … → Read More

Dear Data And FiveThirtyEight Want You To Visualize Your Podcast Habits

When you have it all visualized, it really jumps at you. — Giorgia Lupi For 52 weeks, Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec built their friendship one postcard at a time. Lupi and Posavec are bot… → Read More

DNA Evidence Has A Dark Side

“There’s too much secrecy, too little transparency and not enough accountability when it comes to these incredibly important statistics.” Imagine you’re sitting on a jury. The prosecutor stands in … → Read More

What Polls Can’t Tell Us About Faith In America

“Polling has become the only polite language for talking about religious experience in public life.” — Emma Green Perhaps it’s no surprise that polling about America’s religious life is tricky. Re… → Read More

The Canadian Census Matters (Really)

“Those communities are invisible, as far as the census is concerned.” When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party swept into power last month, it faced a number of pressing issues: … → Read More

Doctors Without Borders Fights Outbreaks With New Tech And Old-Fashioned Paper

“The outcome of a study is usually reduced to one number. But behind that number is a lot of people.” Niger, one of the world’s poorest countries, is also one of the most vulnerable to disease. And… → Read More

Rating Subjective Experiences Is Hard, But Fandango Is Really Bad At It

“It’s difficult for us to break down exactly how good an experience was. It’s not, a lot of the time, as mathy as people expect it to be.” Fandango is the Lake Wobegon of movie websites: All the ac… → Read More

Big Data Is Saving This Little Bird

The marbled murrelet is an enigma. It wasn’t until the 1970s that biologists discovered where the chunky brown-and-white bird made its home, and even then it was by accident: A tree-climber found a… → Read More

Podcast: Wall Street’s Just One Big Bloomberg Chat

“Bloomberg just wants you to be locked into the ecosystem and never, ever leave. It’s like the Hotel California of financial data.” — Robin Wigglesworth The secret sauce that powers Wall Street is… → Read More

Podcast: Your Cloud Self vs. You

“Your data is like your pet. You may own it, but it also has a life of its own.” On this week’s What’s The Point, a conversation with longtime radio and print journalist Farai Chideya, who has join… → Read More

FiveThirtyEight Podcasts

Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight uses statistical analysis — hard numbers — to tell compelling stories about elections, politics, sports, science, economics and lifestyle. → Read More

Podcast: Everyone Is Your Cousin

“Because of big data, genealogy is the most fascinating topic right now. It affects everything in life. It affects family and sex and history and the meaning of relatives and inheritance …” You m… → Read More