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Matt Yglesias says, eh, Nate Silver’s not all that great; Ta-Nehisi Coates says Silver should call Matt a washed-up punk on YouTube (since Silver is clearly Souljah Boy to Yggy’s Ice-T).

I say 538 wasn’t great in this election season (just) because Silver’s formula worked; it was great because it so consistently tempered the insanity of polling fluctuations (including at Pollster.com) by identifying erratic data, bad sampling, house effects, and other quantitative noise. In other words, Silver’s formula (and his explanatory rationale for it), instead of just being an aggregate output, actually helped its readers to make sense of the broader universe of polling, from process to results.

As a result, the blog wound up being one of the best political reporting sites on the web. It helped take political junkies from obsessing about “the polls” as an undifferentiated black box out of which numbers spewed into something they could understand and criticize. I also can’t say enough about its calming effects — every time a friend would call me freaking out about some new polling “shift” (usually as a result of one poll’s numbers following another’s, or Drudge beating a cherry-picked drum), I was able to talk them down, using Silver and 538 as my authority.

When virtually every political blog is devoted to channeling outrage, it’s salutary to have one that, even when challenging the CW, reassures.

A terrific post by Blair Sanderson sleuthing the real-life identity of the fictional Vinteuil’s Sonata from Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way.

Since it’s at All Music Guide, there are also streaming samples of some of the contenders, including Gabriel Faur

Since 2003, I’ve made discs and MP3 playlists of my favorite music of the year to swap with friends. But this year, I just haven’t been feeling it.

I really like In Ear Park and The Walkmen’s new album, and I’ve listened to Dodos’ “Fools” a couple dozen times (my tastes are skewing folky in my dotage). And it may be too early to say, but “Single Ladies” is percussive and weird and anthemic enough to be this year’s “1 Thing.”

But mostly I’ve been tuned out. So, I ask the Snarkmatrix: What have I missed? What do I need to hear?

I just discovered this site, a collection of expositions of the fugues in Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Some of Tim Smith’s writings are pretty opaque to those of us who aren’t trained in music, but many of his comments are accessible enough. (“If you think of the subject as a dancer, then the fugal process is one of finding a suitable partner. But what if the dancer has the ability to be its own partner? Well that is stretto. And stretto is what the C Major fugue is all about.”)

And the visualizations help, although I wish they were done in Flash instead of Shockwave. But hey, it was made in 2002.

Card Catalogues, photo-word-art by Erica Baum. Downloadable at UbuWeb, via Al Filreis.

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… is easily Ben Vershbow, formerly of if:book.

The only post-IFB news I can find of him is a Book Expo Canada from June. I hope he is doing something appropriately awesome.

The Two-Disc Special Edition and Blu-Ray Edition of The Dark Knight ships with a digital AVI copy of the movie; if you buy it on Amazon, you can stream it right away as an Unbox video-on-demand.

Explain to me again why Amazon couldn’t make the same model work for books?

I’ll definitely back up Robin; check out NYTMag’s Screens issue. (Is there no way to permalink whole issues? Blerg.)

My favorite story, though, is Ross Simonini’s “The Sitcom Digresses,” which traces the genealogy of the digression/flashback in TV comedies from The Simpsons to 30 Rock and ultimately to the postmodern novel. So:

Tristram Shandy ->

Gravity’s Rainbow ->

The Simpsons ->

Family Guy ->

Scrubs ->

Arrested Development ->

30 Rock

This reminded me that while we generally have a pretty good sense of developments in technique and changes in style in movies and literature, TV history is driven almost entirely by content. The sense of form is much looser — I know that Malcolm in the Middle or Bernie Mac are single-camera shows, and look different from Seinfeld or I Love Lucy — but what was the first single-camera sitcom? Who first added a phony laugh track? When did that get discredited?

Who are the great television directors? If we really are becoming people of the screen, we ought to know.

Nate Silver reflects on his crrrraaazy interview with John Ziegler and comes to the conclusion that the medium is the message:

[A]lmost uniquely to radio, most of the audience is not even paying attention to you, because most people listen to radio when they’re in the process of doing something else. (If they weren’t doing something else, they’d be watching TV). They are driving, mowing the lawn, washing the dishes — and you have to work really hard to sustain their attention. Hence what Wallace refers to as the importance of “stimulating” the listener, an art that Ziegler has mastered. Invariably, the times when Ziegler became really, really angry with me during the interview was when I was not permitting him to be stimulating, but instead asking him specific, banal questions that required specific, banal answers. Those questions would have made for terrible radio! And Ziegler had no idea how to answer them.

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James Fallows on Terry Gross:

[Gross] avoids the common pitfall of highbrow public broadcasting-style interviewers: giving in to the temptation to show off how much she knows and how smart she is in the set-up to the questions.

What she does instead, and what she shows brilliantly in this interview [with William Ayers], is: she listens, and she thinks. In my experience, 99% of the difference between a good interviewer (or a good panel moderator) and a bad one lies in what that person is doing while the interviewee talks. If the interviewer is mainly using that time to move down to the next item on the question list, the result will be terrible. But if the interviewer is listening, then he or she is in position to pick up leads (“Now, that’s an intriguing idea, tell us more about…”), to look for interesting tensions (“You used to say X, but now it sounds like…”), to sum up and give shape to what the subject has said (“It sounds as if you’re suggesting…”). And, having paid the interviewee the respect of actually listening to the comments, the interviewer is also positioned to ask truly tough questions without having to bluster or insult.

If you have this standard in mind — is the interviewer really listening? and thinking? — you will be shocked to see how rarely broadcast and on-stage figures do very much of either. But listen to this session by Gross to see how the thing should be done.

Gross’s Fresh Air interview with Ayers is here.