And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking - our daily decisions, our laws, our governance - on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality

Purity is a good mask for corruption because it discourages inquiry.

Data, I think, is one of the most powerful mechanisms for telling stories. I take a huge pile of data and I try to get it to tell stories.

The gulf between the information we proclaim & the information we know to be true is vast. In other words: we say one thing & do another.

The data don't lie: a Chicago street prostitute is more likely to have sex with a cop than to be arrested by one.

After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it's fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you buy the right to fantasize how you'd spend the winnings - much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy.

Levitt admits to having the reading interests of a tweener girl, the Twilight series and Harry Potter in particular.