Charles Wheelan

What makes some evidence strong, some evidence weak, and some evidence total nonsense? Truth Addict is your guide to answers. Individuals, policymakers, and businesses across the globe want to make decisions based on evidence. But not all evidence is created equal. Truth Addict is the layperson's guide to data, truth, and the gap between them. Whether it's collected through laboratory experiments or public surveys, market research or archival records, data has a story to tell us—but only if we can read it. Drawing on engaging examples, John V. Kane details the logic of gathering and analyzing data as a means of getting us closer to the truth, even if the truth hurts. Developing research questions. Defining variables. Choosing metrics. Testing hypotheses. Quantifying relationships. Ruling out chance. Considering alternative explanations. Knowing not just that "correlation does not equal causation," but also how to tell the difference. These are key steps along Kane's "Road to Evidence," a journey that begins with curiosity and ends at objective knowledge. You don’t have to be a math whiz to study our social world—Truth Addict provides every reader tools to uncover the reality within the numbers.

What makes some evidence strong, some evidence weak, and some evidence total nonsense? Truth Addict is your guide to answers. Individuals, policymakers, and businesses across the globe want to make decisions based on evidence. But not all evidence is created equal. Truth Addict is the layperson's guide to data, truth, and the gap between them. Whether it's collected through laboratory experiments or public surveys, market research or archival records, data has a story to tell us—but only if we can read it. Drawing on engaging examples, John V. Kane details the logic of gathering and analyzing data as a means of getting us closer to the truth, even if the truth hurts. Developing research questions. Defining variables. Choosing metrics. Testing hypotheses. Quantifying relationships. Ruling out chance. Considering alternative explanations. Knowing not just that "correlation does not equal causation," but also how to tell the difference. These are key steps along Kane's "Road to Evidence," a journey that begins with curiosity and ends at objective knowledge. You don’t have to be a math whiz to study our social world—Truth Addict provides every reader tools to uncover the reality within the numbers.

How would you create a winning pitch for your latest investment idea? Or persuasively argue for a major policy change? Or successfully ask your boss for a raise? The answer: clear and effective communication, whether in writing or through a presentation. Best-selling author Charles Wheelan has spent decades mastering effective communication skills in his work as a writer, college professor, journalist, speechwriter, political candidate, and public speaker. In Write for Your Life, he shares his best tips. Taking readers through all the steps required to arrive at a coherent first draft, he then explains the best ways to improve and fine-tune your writing. He covers how to organize and present information, why it's necessary to adapt your tone to different audiences, and when to use summaries, sidebars, bullet points, and other tools for making information more digestible. He explores the truth behind popular clich s like "Show, don't tell" and "Kill your darlings," and discusses the proper use and attribution of quotations from secondary sources. And he goes on to cover how to speak effectively, providing helpful advice for preparing a winning presentation or delivering a speech. Writing with his signature wit and humor, Wheelan illustrates his points with entertaining examples from his own life, as well as memorable anecdotes from leading magazine and newspaper writers, political figures from Winston Churchill to Barack Obama and Elena Kagan, and a diverse array of the best communicators from the worlds of culture, sports, and politics. Write for Your Life is an essential guide for anyone needing to get their ideas across whether in an email, memo, report, presentation, fund-raising letter, or speech.

What would happen if you quit your life for a year? In a pre-COVID-19 world, the Wheelan family decided to find out; leaving behind work, school, and even the family dogs to travel the world on a modest budget. Equal parts how-to and how-not-to--and with an eye toward a world emerging from a pandemic--We Came, We Saw, We Left is the insightful and often hilarious account of one family's gap-year experiment. Wheelan paints a picture of adventure and connectivity, juggling themes of local politics, global economics, and family dynamics while exploring answers to questions like: How do you sneak out of a Peruvian town that has been barricaded by the local army? And where can you get treatment for a flesh-eating bacteria your daughter picked up two continents ago? From Colombia to Cambodia, We Came, We Saw, We Left chronicles nine months across six continents with three teenagers. What could go wrong?

How would you create a winning pitch for your latest investment idea? Or persuasively argue for a major policy change? Or successfully ask your boss for a raise? The answer: clear and effective communication, whether in writing or through a presentation. Best-selling author Charles Wheelan has spent decades mastering effective communication skills in his work as a writer, college professor, journalist, speechwriter, political candidate, and public speaker. In Write for Your Life, he shares his best tips. Taking readers through all the steps required to arrive at a coherent first draft, he then explains the best ways to improve and fine-tune your writing. He covers how to organize and present information, why it's necessary to adapt your tone to different audiences, and when to use summaries, sidebars, bullet points, and other tools for making information more digestible. He explores the truth behind popular clich s like "Show, don't tell" and "Kill your darlings," and discusses the proper use and attribution of quotations from secondary sources. And he goes on to cover how to speak effectively, providing helpful advice for preparing a winning presentation or delivering a speech. Writing with his signature wit and humor, Wheelan illustrates his points with entertaining examples from his own life, as well as memorable anecdotes from leading magazine and newspaper writers, political figures from Winston Churchill to Barack Obama and Elena Kagan, and a diverse array of the best communicators from the worlds of culture, sports, and politics. Write for Your Life is an essential guide for anyone needing to get their ideas across whether in an email, memo, report, presentation, fund-raising letter, or speech.

America is in trouble--at the mercy of a puzzling pathogen. That ordinarily wouldn't lead to catastrophe, thanks to modern medicine, but there's just one problem: the government supply of Dormigen, the silver bullet of pharmaceuticals, has been depleted just as demand begins to spike. Originally published before the COVID-19 pandemic, The Rationing is set in the near future, and centers around a White House struggling to quell the crisis--and control the narrative. Working together, just barely, are a savvy but preoccupied president; a Speaker more interested in jockeying for position--and a potential presidential bid--than attending to the minutiae of disease control; a patriotic majority leader unable to differentiate a virus from a bacterium; a strategist with brilliant analytical abilities but abominable people skills; and, improbably, our narrator, a low-level scientist with the National Institutes of Health who happens to be the world's leading expert in lurking viruses. Little goes according to plan during the three weeks necessary to replenish the stocks of Dormigen. Some Americans will get the life-saving drug and others will not, and nations with their own supply soon offer aid--but for a price. China senses blood and a geopolitical victory, presenting a laundry list of demands that ranges from complete domination of the South China Sea to additional parking spaces at the UN, while India claims it can save the day for the U. S. Political backstabbing, rank hypocrisy, and dastardly deception reign in this delightfully entertaining debut that presciently anticipated the COVID-19 crisis.

A Family Gap Year

What would happen if you quit your life for a year? In a pre-COVID-19 world, the Wheelan family decided to find out; leaving behind work, school, and even the family dogs to travel the world on a modest budget. Equal parts "how-to" and "how-not-to"--and with an eye toward a world emerging from a pandemic--We Came, We Saw, We Left is the insightful and often hilarious account of one family's gap-year experiment. Wheelan paints a picture of adventure and connectivity, juggling themes of local politics, global economics, and family dynamics while exploring answers to questions like: How do you sneak out of a Peruvian town that has been barricaded by the local army? And where can you get treatment for a flesh-eating bacteria your daughter picked up two continents ago? From Colombia to Cambodia, We Came, We Saw, We Left chronicles nine months across six continents with three teenagers. What could go wrong?

America is in trouble--at the mercy of a puzzling pathogen. That ordinarily wouldn't lead to catastrophe, thanks to modern medicine, but there's just one problem: the government supply of Dormigen, the silver bullet of pharmaceuticals, has been depleted just as demand begins to spike. Set in the near future, The Rationing centers around a White House struggling to quell the crisis--and control the narrative. Working together, just barely, are a savvy but preoccupied president; a Speaker more interested in jockeying for position--and a potential presidential bid--than attending to the minutiae of disease control; a patriotic majority leader unable to differentiate a virus from a bacterium; a strategist with brilliant analytical abilities but abominable people skills; and, improbably, our narrator, a low-level scientist with the National Institutes of Health who happens to be the world's leading expert in lurking viruses. Little goes according to plan during the three weeks necessary to replenish the stocks of Dormigen. Some Americans will get the life-saving drug and others will not, and nations with their own supply soon offer aid--but for a price. China senses blood and a geopolitical victory, presenting a laundry list of demands that ranges from complete domination of the South China Sea to additional parking spaces at the UN, while India claims it can save the day for the U. S.

This is a new edition of the best-selling economics book that won’t put you to sleep. In our challenging economic climate, this perennial favourite of students and general readers includes commentary on hot topics such as automation, trade and income inequality. Ten years after the financial crisis, Naked Economics examines how policymakers managed the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

We use money every day. Yet the practice of exchanging paper or bytes for goods and services seems absurd if you think about it. Naked Money explores why money exists and why it so often gets entire nations in trouble. Charles Wheelan explains with his trademark wit and refreshing clarity how our banks and monetary systems should work in ideal situations, and he reveals the havoc and suffering caused in real situations by inflation, deflation, illiquidity and other monetary effects. With illuminating stories from Argentina, Zimbabwe, North Korea, America, China and elsewhere around the world, Naked Money demystifies the curious world behind the paper in our wallets and the digits in our bank accounts.

Once considered tedious, the field of statistics is rapidly evolving into a discipline Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, has actually called "sexy." From batting averages and political polls to game shows and medical research, the real-world application of statistics continues to grow by leaps and bounds. How can we catch schools that cheat on standardized tests? How does Netflix know which movies you’ll like? What is causing the rising incidence of autism? As best-selling author Charles Wheelan shows us in Naked Statistics, the right data and a few well-chosen statistical tools can help us answer these questions and more. For those who slept through Stats 101, this book is a lifesaver. Wheelan strips away the arcane and technical details and focuses on the underlying intuition that drives statistical analysis. He clarifies key concepts such as inference, correlation, and regression analysis, reveals how biased or careless parties can manipulate or misrepresent data, and shows us how brilliant and creative researchers are exploiting the valuable data from natural experiments to tackle thorny questions. And in Wheelan’s trademark style, there’s not a dull page in sight. You’ll encounter clever Schlitz Beer marketers leveraging basic probability, an International Sausage Festival illuminating the tenets of the central limit theorem, and a head-scratching choice from the famous game show Let’s Make a Deal—and you’ll come away with insights each time. With the wit, accessibility, and sheer fun that turned Naked Economics into a bestseller, Wheelan defies the odds yet again by bringing another essential, formerly unglamorous discipline to life.

Naked Economics makes up for all of those Econ 101 lectures you slept through (or avoided) in college, demystifying key concepts, laying bare the truths behind the numbers, and answering those questions you have always been too embarrassed to ask. For all the discussion of Alan Greenspan in the media, does anyone know what the Fed actually does? And what about those blackouts in California? Were they a conspiracy on the part of the power companies? Economics is life. There's no way to understand the important issues without it. Now, with Charles Wheelan's breezy tour, there's no reason to fear this highly relevant subject. With the commonsensical examples and brilliantly acerbic commentary we've come to associate with The Economist, Wheelan brings economics to life. Amazingly, he does so with nary a chart, graph, or mathematical equation in sight—certainly a feat to be witnessed firsthand. Economics is a crucial subject. There's no way to understand the important issues without it. Now, with Charles Wheelan's breezy tour, there's also no reason to fear it. "Explains our global economy in a way that is—gasp!—actually entertaining."—Book "Translates the arcane and often inscrutable jargon of the professional economist into language accessible to the inquiring but frustrated layman.... Clear, concise, informative, [and] witty."—Chicago Tribune "Wheelan has an anti-Midas touch. If he touched gold he would turn it to life."—Burton G. Malkiel, from the foreword