The Daily Dish and FiveThirtyEight

The two blogs I will be following are The Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan and FiveThirtyEight by Nate Silver. The primary reason why I chose these blogs is because I was aware of each before this class. I knew who Andrew Sullivan was and occasionally read his opinions. I’ve always respected his intellect and status as an ideological independent, so I feel that reading his blog will be enjoyable. The name Nate Silver didn’t ring a bell with me; however, his website has. I learned about fivethirtyeight.com during the 2008 presidential campaign because of its reputation as being the single most accurate election-prediction website on the internet. While researching Silver, I found out that he’s essentially a mathematics genius who has an economics degree from the University of Chicago and has developed player-performance algorithms for professional sports. Being the avid sports-nerd myself, I was aware of the increasing use of mathematic formulas to evaluate players. Given his background, Silver’s blog is obviously going to focus on quantitative assessment of the political discourse sphere. His blog also involves his opinion on current events and he describes himself as an independent who leans slightly to the left. It will be interesting to read both him and Sullivan concurrently because Sullivan is an independent who considers himself to be a conservative.

I was slightly hesitant to choose Sullivan’s blog because I’m afraid that half the class will. This, however, isn’t necessarily a bad thing considering the quality of his blog (I guess it’s popular for a reason). Knowing Sullivan’s viewpoints for awhile, I think his blog and FiveThirtyEight are good compliments of each other. For example, Sullivan’s blog will provide me with a thoughtful and independent take on a current event, while FiveThirtyEight will provide statistical information about public opinion regarding the same issue.

I originally had considered reading a liberal blog and a conservative blog to hear opposing sides on an issue, but I ultimately decided against it. I stay up on the news well enough to by and large know the various sides to a given issue, and I’ve long had respect for both Sullivan and FiveThirtyEight, so my final decision was relatively easy.