Bob Garfield

The Frederick, Maryland warehouse of Wonder Book is where unwanted used books go to find a second life--as decorative objects sold by the foot to fill empty bookshelves.

If political prognostication is usually so wrong, why do we keep listening? And what makes a good forecaster, anyway?

What if the will of the electorate could be divined without polling and pundit guesswork? There may be a way.

Why are pundits like Bill Kristol still paid for their botch prognostications?

What if the problem with polling isn't bad polls but polls in general? The New Yorker's Jill Lepore on the history of polling and why skepticism is, and has always been, necessary.

You can't spoil something that wasn't good to begin with, says Ralph Nader.

A Canadian initiative urging citizens to vote strategically got results in 2015. Can America learn from it? 

After a year of misguided media speculation about whether Trump’s latest outburst has gone “too far,” we ask: is that the wrong question?

Nader's role as spoiler in the 2000 election has been used as a cautionary tale for the American Left ever since. Sixteen years later, a reevaluation of the facts.

Bob presses an editor from the Daily Caller on the demeaning right-wing media coverage of Khizr Khan.

What does it really mean to vote your conscience?

One year after its initial release, the Pentagon's Law of War manual is finally revised, with new language aimed at protecting journalists.

While putschists led his coworkers out of the Hürriyet newspaper building at gunpoint, one Turkish journalist hid and captured the raid on Facebook Live. 

To hear the RNC speakers tell it, America is on the brink of ruin and only Trump can save us. We put the warnings in perspective.

When it comes to media coverage -- foreign and domestic -- Rio de Janeiro’s favelas tend to get a raw deal.

Bob takes on the thorny tangle of Brazil's media world. 

Bob takes a trip to Brazil, the "country of the future" -- but the future is looking turbulent. 

Our relationship with lying in our own lives has a lot to do with how we judge the lies of politicians. 

If fact-checking is meant to chasten politicians who lie, why isn't it more chaste out there? A talk with Politifact about educating the public and the definition of a "half-truth."

The art of the political lie has reached a new zenith this election season. So just how did we get here?