2025 Stephen A. Levin Family Dean's Forum featuring Nate Silver
3260 South Street Philadelphia, PA
The Stephen A. Levin Family Dean's Forum welcomes bestselling author Nate Silver!
Join bestselling author Nate Silver in conversation with Al Filreis on risk, data, and the psychology of leadership.
This event is free and open to the public.
Nate Silver
Leading political forecaster Nate Silver’s statistics-driven approach is unparalleled in its accuracy to predict election outcomes. He first gained national attention during the 2008 presidential election when he correctly predicted the results of the primaries and the presidential winner in 49 states. In 2012, he called 50 of 50 states.
A pioneer in the field of data journalism, Silver publishes his insights and statistical assessments of cultural phenomena on his highly popular Silver Bulletin Substack, boasting nearly a quarter million subscribers. Silver founded the award-winning FiveThirtyEight website and served as its editor-in-chief until 2023.
Silver is the author of two New York Times bestsellers. His newest book, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, was named one of the most-anticipated books of 2024 by Financial Times, The Guardian, and The Sunday Times. Inspired by his experiences as a professional poker player, the book takes us behind the scenes of casinos, venture capital firms, crypto networks, and into the minds of professional risk-takers to help us better understand navigating uncertainty in the 21st century. In a starred review, Kirkus praises it as "an enlightening study of the people who play the game of risk and win." To accompany the book, Silver launched the Risky Business podcast, applying his renowned analytical framework to everything from politics and poker to better decision-making in one’s personal life.
His first bestseller, The Signal and The Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don't, shows how to make reliable distinctions between both meaningful signals and noisy data, and confident predictions and accurate ones. Forbes deems it “essential reading in the era of Big Data that touches every business, every sports event, and every policymaker.” The Wall Street Journal lauds the book as “accessible” and “painstakingly researched.”
Silver has written for ESPN, Sports Illustrated, Slate, the New York Sun, and the New York Times. His work has been featured in such publications as the New York Times, Newsweek, Huffington Post, and Vanity Fair. He has been named one of Fast Company‘s 100 Most Creative People in Business, TIME's 100 Most Influential People, and Rolling Stone's 100 Agents of Change.
Al Filreis
Alan Filreis has published books on the literary politics of modern poetry, a new edition of the radical 1943 novel Tucker's People by Ira Wolfert, an edition of Wallace Stevens's correspondence with Jose Rodriguez Feo (Secretaries of the Moon, 1986), and many articles on modern poetry and painting, and the literary and cultural politics of the 1950s. Stevens and the Actual World, a literary biography of Wallace Stevens, was published by Princeton University Press. Another book, Modernism from Right to Left, was published by Cambridge University Press. His most recent book is Counter-revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960.
Filreis has won nearly every teaching award Penn gives, including the Lindback Award and the Ira Abrams Award. He was also named Pennsylvania Professor of the Year in 2000 by the Carnegie Foundation. Aside from teaching modern American poetry, he has offered a series of courses on twentieth-century American decades, and another on the literature of the Holocaust.
He is Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, which in 2003 brought together all of Penn's writing programs. He is founder and Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House. With Charles Bernstein, he co-founded and co-directs PennSound, the world's largest archive of recordings of poets performing their work. He is the Publisher of Jacket2 magazine. He is a member of several boards, including that of the Wallace Stevens Journal and the Writers Center at SUNY Purchase, and is Vice President of the Board of Trustees of Frost Valley. He served for many years as the Chairman of the Board of WXPN (88.5 FM; xpn.org) and as Chair of the Residential Faculty Council at Penn.
The Stephen A. Levin Family Dean's Forum is a celebration of the arts and sciences. Initiated in 1984, the Forum presents leading intellectual figures who exemplify the richness of the liberal arts. The Levin Family Dean’s Forum is made possible by a generous gift from Stephen A. Levin, C’67, in honor of his sons Eric T. Levin, C'92, and Andrew Levin, C'14.