About the Book
From exam scores to retirement age; from weather forecasts to election results: numbers permeate our lives. But measurements are done by people and so numbers are not always as objective as they may seem.
In her book, Sanne Blauw aims to return numbers to their rightful place: not on a pedestal; not in the bin – but alongside words where they belong.
The book will be available on 30 October. More about the book…
Sanne Blauw at NIAS
Blauw worked on her book at NIAS during her Journalist-in-Residence Fellowship in the autumn of 2017. “Being away from the newsroom brought my brain in a different mode. NIAS is a place for ‘deep work’ as writer Cal Newport likes to call it. But I also learnt from other fellows. Though trained as an econometrician, the material of my book demanded more than what I learned during my PhD. I required knowledge of history to show how numbers have become so dominant; psychology to understand why we are seduced by misleading numbers; philosophy to grasp what truth is about.”
Read more about her stay here (in Dutch). The Journalist-in-Residence Fellowship is co-sponsored by the Fonds Bijzondere Journalistieke Projecten.