Courtney M. Cahill (FSU): Abortion and Disgust. No Exception: Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock aren’t outliers — banning abortion for rape victims is the new Republican mainstream. Ethicist Peter Singer critiques Roe v. Wade, Obamacare, Romney. Nate Silver, artist of uncertainty: In the campaign’s last days, a leading political scientist says all hail to the polling guru’s sobering new book about predicting outcomes. Nate Silver and Intrade are vastly different touchstones in our new predictive era — one is democratic, the other technocratic — and yet their success springs from the same well: a human desire to forecast the unknown, and a modern desire to do it with data. Gerardo Serra reviews Cognitive Capitalism by Yann Moulier Boutang. Republicans to cities: Drop Dead. Those who laugh are defenseless: A look at how humor breaks resistance to influence. Imagine yourself decades from now: Cass R. Sunstein on how philosophers and social scientists have been keenly interested in learning exactly why some people fail to give a lot of weight to their own futures, even when that failure produces real hardship.
