The Best of FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup. At some point last year — maybe around when my child woke up wailing at 4 a.m. for the thousandth time — I …

It has been 1,090 days since the last World Chess Championship. In the meantime, the ancient game has seen a modern resurgence, a swell in popularity driven by …

The chess machines never stop playing.

Alarm bells seemed to sound in teachers’ lounges across America late last year with the debut of ChatGPT — an AI chatbot that was both easy to use and capable o…

When she was hired as a professor by Harvard University in 2013, Lorgia García Peña was the only Black Latina on a tenure track in the university’s Faculty of A…

The alarm was deafening. My coffin-shaped acrylics crawled from underneath the covers, searched for the stop button and quickly found my Apple Watch. I slapped …

Inflation is top of mind for Americans. We asked them why they're so worried about it.

Imagine the federal government could lift millions of American children out of poverty with a single program. That program would help parents put nutritious mea…

«The expanded tax credit ended in December 2021, and chances are low it will be renewed. That tells you all you need to know about which is more powerful in Washington — politicians’ biases or actual evidence.»

The second half of Iran and Morocco’s tightly contested group match contained nothing too out of the ordinary by World Cup standards. Each side used all three s…

During the 2018 World Cup, Zito Madu pointed out the racially coded language commentators used to describe a match between Poland and Senegal, which didn’t line…

«The physical advantages that supposedly defined the African team’s style of play disappeared as soon as their skin color did.»

The Olympics are an international celebration of sport, but not all sports are invited to the cool kids’ table. The first modern Olympics in 1896 had only a han…

«In 2004, the last time the requirement was enforced, men’s sports had to have been active in at least 75 countries and four continents for inclusion in the Summer Olympics, while women’s sports needed to be active in 40 countries and three continents; for inclusion in the Winter Olympics, both men’s and women’s sports had to be active in at least 25 countries and three continents»

In his concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that he views not only abortion precedent as wrong but …

Before we get started, do me a favor and grab a pen or a pencil. Now hold it between your teeth, as if you were about to try to write with it. Don’t let your li…

«A failed attempt to replicate a particular experiment doesn’t really tell you anything about the underlying theory, he said; all it tells you is that one particular design works or doesn’t work.»

Latest forecast of the 2020 presidential election between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden by Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight

Americans have spent over 150 years arguing about what kind of history we should teach to our children. In “Schoolbook Nation,” a book that examines the history…

The Big Five is the way most psychologists test personality. See your score on different traits like extraversion and agreeableness and then find how your personality compares with that of the average American.

Here we are, in the middle of a pandemic, staring out our living room windows like aquarium fish. The question on everybody’s minds: How bad will this really ge…