Thanks for all the questions. I'm under no illusion about the amount of work it's going to take over the next few months to build out the "new" 538. But I have a ton of support from ESPN, who has made clear that we can take the time to identify the right contributors, design the site to a high standard, and generally…

It's kind of remarkable that voting is so burdensome — that you might physically have to stand in line for several hours to do it, after having registered several weeks beforehand — when you can now board an airplane or transfer $10,000 to your checking account from your mobile phone.

If you look at Grantland's coverage, it's pretty analytics-friendly. In addition to Barnwell, I'm especially a fan of Zach Lowe, who combines a strong knowledge of analytics, scouting and shoe-leather reporting in a very smart way. (Keith Law also does a lot of that for ESPN.com). Kirk Goldsberry is also pretty…

It's pretty amazing to see all the success that Hollinger has had, and he's wholly deserving of it.

I'd say we're definitely going to hire people (whether as full-timers or freelancers) devoted to politics/elections, sports (preferably people who can cover several different sports as opposed to just one), and economics. The verticals that are optional — they make sense in theory, but we'd need to find the right…

Oh, sure. I'm pretty good at poker, but the game isn't played against the house. Otherwise I'm a recreational gambler, albeit one who isn't likely to blow through more than a few hundred dollars at a time. I'm too lazy to count cards at blackjack.

We are NOT presently accepting applications for a Burrito Correspondent, if that's where you're going with this.

To clarify, I'm not leaving political analysis. My guess is that it might still occupy 40-50% of my time personally, and that politics/elections might represent something like 30-40% of the content at the "new" 538. We'll probably also hire at least one full-time politics writer/editor, along with some talented…

I haven't thought too much about how this would be executed — but just wanted to weigh in to endorse the concept of Bleacher Report as representing replacement level. The concept of replacement level should be carried much farther into other walks of life, in my view. For example, US Airways is a replacement-level…

I don't really have any regrets about the climate change chapter. It's not really disputing the consensus science. It does point out the consensus is narrower in scope than is sometimes portrayed — almost everyone agrees about the big, important stuff (global warming is real and manmade), but not so much about the…

This is an esoteric point, but I'm not all that concerned about how well my models would have called past elections. Essentially any type of statistical model is "fit" to past data to some degree. However, it is very possible to make the fit too rigid, i.e. to overfit the model, in which case the model will describe…

Basically the only way that I excelled at sports as a youth was to exploit others' ineptitude, at the risk of being called a pussy. For instance, I had something like a .633 on-base percentage the last year I played baseball (8th, I think) because I knew that I couldn't hit, but I also knew that the pitchers couldn't…

There's a saying in poker — don't tap the glass (meaning, don't berate the fish/bad players.) After all, you make all your money from them. Likewise, the thing to keep in mind about the poor quality of discourse and analysis among political pundits is that allows me to look really good by comparison, just by being…

If I felt like ESPN was hiring me into a position where my main role was to go on TV anytime they needed a stathead/nerd prototype, then I would have been very reluctant to sign with them. Letting yourself get typecast early in your career is a really good way to limit your prospects for personal and professional…

I'm fairly strongly convinced that shot creation is a big deal. It also seems to me like there have to be better ways to model this than we have publicly now, given the widespread availability of possession-by-possession data. Definitely an area where we may put some work in.

I think the goal is perhaps to have a site where we're publishing 3-4 articles per weekday, plus perhaps some blogs and other quick-hit type stuff. What I'm not quite sure about is exactly how many people we'll need to hire to make that happen, and what the mix of freelancers versus full-time staffers will be.

I'd guess that the median Deadspin commenter is a 34-year-old white male with middle-to-high income but also above-average alcohol consumption. So we're taking about a remaining live expectancy of 47 years, give or take. My best guess is that you'll die in 2060, perhaps just a few days before Sasha Obama wins her…

I imagine Mitt Romney having a lot of food hang-ups, and while there are exceptions (e.g. vegetarians or people who really do have celiac disease), in general someone's annoyingness about food is pretty strongly correlated with their annoyingness overall.

It's a real conflict in an intellectual sense. But I don't think it had that much to do with the NYT in particular, or the decision to leave.

The NWS/Hurricane Weather Research Model is pretty fucking sexy.