XL Files
Contributing Editor Xiao-Li Meng writes:
Giving a banquet speech after a whole conference day is never easy—few people long for yet another speech. My recent speech also faced an extra challenge. The speech was scheduled after as many karaoke performances as the number of Chinese dishes, except that the former…
Contributing Editor Xiao-Li Meng writes:
“How do you like your new job?” I keep getting asked. Like most jobs, mine has seen days I wished to forget before sunset and evenings I wanted to remember after sunrise. One of these evenings was a talk at our graduate student center, given…
Contributing Editor Xiao-Li Meng writes:
“Upstairs on the Square” is reputed in some circles to be the restaurant for dining and wining around Harvard Square. The probability therefore was not surprisingly small to find Ben Affleck and two statisticians there sitting only a few tables apart. It was September 15,…
Contributing Editor Xiao-Li Meng writes:
My new year’s reading started with a holiday gift: On the Money, a collection of over 400 cartoons in The New Yorker from 1925–2009. No, after months of learning about fundraising, money was least alluring on a day when my alarm clock took a…
Our new Contributing Editor, Xiao-Li Meng, used to be Chair of Harvard’s Department of Statistics, and has recently been appointed Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. In this, his first XL-Files column, he writes:
When Editors Dimitris Politis and Tati Howell invited me to…