Giving more column inches to Nate Silver after he’s been showered with such a charitable amount of attention this week isn’t ideal, I know. After issuing a rash of half-baked tweets to the back-slapping applause of red-pill dinguses, Silver has given the internet’s Right-wingers a reason to welcome him to the club. That reason was his recent proclamation that some mysterious version of evolutionary science has anointed capitalism a triumph of natural selection. Fitting as it may be to watch one of Twitter’s earliest celebs follow the site’s latter-day arc into public odor and seeming disarray, any air you give this guy is still going to stink. So light a match.
The problem of sorting out the recent Nate fuss is that there’s already plenty of reason to survey the winding pipeline of his career. And there’s room for a sober assessment of his unique role in the landscape of digital journalism — from his days as the data-darling of baseball blogging, to his Twitter-hyped rise to fame on a lucky election prediction.
