The reason for the relationship doesn’t matter. But the relationship itself does.

One somewhat random topic I recently explored: how does pregnancy play out in different countries around the world? I examined Google searches by pregnant women. The first thing I found was a striking similarity in the physical symptoms about which women complain.

Men’s second-most-common sex question is how to make their sexual encounters longer. Once again, the insecurities of men do not appear to match the concerns of women.

Firms believe they know how effective their ads are. Economists are skeptical they really do.

At its core, data science is about spotting patterns and predicting how one variable will affect another. People do this all the time.

The second lesson is that, when trying to make predictions, you needn’t worry too much about why your models work.

we weight our data, and we give far too much weight to one particular data point: ourselves.

You might think that anxiety is highest in overeducated big cities. The urban neurotic is a famous stereotype.

A major reason that Google searches are so valuable is not that there are so many of them; it is that people are so honest in them. People lie to friends, lovers, doctors, surveys, and themselves. But on Google they might share embarrassing information, about, among other things, their sexless marriages, their mental health issues, their insecuriti