Nate Silver Meets Chuck Woolery

by Graeme Wood

The eroto-quants at OKCupid.com have produced a data-intensive argument that men should date older women.  Specifically, they should target women who have moved into what Sanjay Gupta has called (on 30 Rock, anyway) their "dirty thirties":

There are two operative stereotypes of older single women: the sad-sack (à la Bridget Jones) and the "cougar" (à la Samantha from Sex In The City) and both, like all stereotypes, are reductionist and stupid and I've tried to avoid them. I hesitated beginning my case for older women with something about their sexuality, like I did in Exhibit A, because that territory borders right on cougar country. But the evidence there was too compelling to ignore.