Nate Silver is a number-crunching prodigy who went from correctly forecasting baseball games to correctly forecasting presidential primaries—and perhaps the election itself. Here’s how he built a better crystal ball.

Nate Silver: More understanding. Less kicking and throwing things.

Silver doesn’t know all that much about high finance; these days, he’s spending most of his energy on his political Website, FiveThirtyEight (the total number of Electoral College votes), where he uses data analysis to track and interpret political polls and project the outcome of November’s election.

I am really enjoying FiveThirtyEight (and not just because it comforts me about the direction of the voting).

And as more and more people started wondering who he was, in May, Silver decided to unmask himself. To most people, the fact that Poblano turned out to be a guy named Nate Silver meant nothing. But to anyone who follows baseball seriously, this was like finding out that a guy anonymously running a high-fashion Website turned out to be Howard Cosell.