In “Moneyball,” the book and movie, Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane and statistician Bill James stop thinking about recruiting baseball players based on time-honored gut instinct and instead begin looking at numbers. Simon Kuper, a Financial Times columnist, and Stefan Szymanski, a University of Michigan kinesiology professor, have taken a similar statistical microscope to [...]

Ready or not, business world, here comes Big Data. That’s the message this month in both Foreign Affairs and McKinsey Quarterly, publications whose writers generally seem to know a lot about a lot of things (even if you don’t always agree with their conclusions). And these articles comes with pretty hefty warnings. If you don’t [...]

Several lifetimes ago, when I was attempting to impress upon attention-deficit high school students the wonders of American literature, we would start with the Puritans. And I always opened with Jonathan Edwards. Edwards is best known for a podium-pounding sermon that’s come to be called “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” the original [...]

As we were coming out of a showing of the Baz Luhrmann-directed movie “The Great Gatsby” — the latest in a line of movie versions of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel — we passed a clutch of older-than-middle-aged women, and one of them sighed to her friend, “I was hoping for a happy ending.” Really? [...]

Before you read too far into today’s column, you should go to YouTube to watch Daniel Simons’s video. You’ll find it by searching for “selective attention test.” The narrator will instruct you to count how many times players wearing white pass a basketball. Easy peasy. But the trick — and you knew there was one [...]

It’s not such a surprise that Margaret Thatcher turns up in the chapter on success, likability and women leaders in Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, “Lean In,” is it? During her tenure as Great Britain’s so-far only female prime minister, Thatcher, who died April 8, was reviled by detractors — and she had an abundance of [...]

The photo is a surprise. The black-and-white print itself, part of a collection of photos my mother has begun sorting, is still in pristine condition despite its age, and it shows my maternal grandmother standing up behind the wheel of an industrial-strength tractor. She’s smiling broadly, for all the world like Gene Autry astride his [...]

Even if you don’t love it when art and life conspire to mirror each other — sometimes in a rather scary, mocking way they have when they get together, like a pair of old college drinking buddies — you’ve at least got to give them their due, and nod. That was the case in April [...]

It isn’t simple happenstance that the theme music for “Mr. Selfridge,” the eight-part drama running on Iowa Public Television’s “Masterpiece Classic,” sounds for all the world like a big, bold Broadway musical. The music, as with the man upon whom the more-or-less true-to-life tale is based, is intentionally showy and brash. Every day is opening [...]

Warren Buffett, the business oracle of the 20th century and, so far, of the 21st, more than once has professed a love of newspapers. And, as his company, Berkshire Hathaway, continues to pocket a clutch of publications here and there around the country, he has remarked that newspapers should stick to what they — theoretically [...]