Nate Silver called every state correctly in the last presidential race, and was wrong about only one in 2008. In 2012 he predicted Obama’s total of the popular vote within one tenth of a percent of the actual figure. His powers of prediction seemed uncanny. In his early and sustained prediction of an Obama victory, he was ahead of most polling organizations and my fellow political scientists.

But buyers of his book, The Signal and the Noise, now a deserved best seller, may be in for something of a surprise. There’s only a short chapter on predicting elections, briefer than ones on baseball, weather, and chess. In fact, he’s written a serious treatise about the craft of prediction—without academic mathematics—cheerily aimed at lay readers. Silver’s coverage is polymathic, ranging from poker and earthquakes to climate change and terrorism.