Upcoming: Nate Silver and I talk politics, baseball, and more

I have a handful of appearances coming up, including two public talks that are part of MIT’s Communications Forum. The first, which is this Thursday at 5 pm, is a special one indeed: I’ll be holding a Q&A with Nate Silver, the powerhouse behind FiveThirtyEight, the stat-centric political blog that has roiled the punditocracy by forecasting the past two presidential elections with remarkable accuracy.

Nate Silver

Silver, of course, has not always been focused on politics: From 2003 to 2008 he wrote for Baseball Prospectus, and PECOTA, his sabermetric tool for predicting baseball players’ future performance, is one of the most advanced systems developed. In a previous life, I also did some writing about baseball, so that’s a subject we’ll be touching on — as well as the future of the journalism, how to monitor one’s media diet, and more.

The other Communications Forum event is a few months away: On April 11, I’ll be hosting a discussion with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Mark McKinnon. That should be equally lively and interesting; more details closer to the actual date.

There are a few more upcoming events, including a March 8 talk in Chicago as part of the National Foundation on Infectious Disease’s Clinical Vaccinology Course; two panels (on March 14 and 16) as part of the Association of Health Care Journalists’ Health Journalism 2013 conference in Boston; a talk on April 21 as part of the Colorado Academy of Family Physicians’s annual scientific conference; and, on April 23, an open-to-the-public event titled “Vaccine myths, parents, and modern health information” at Seattle’s Town Hall with Wendy Sue “Seattle Mama Doc” Swanson. More details are on my website.