Ben Cohen
There is more than one Ben Cohen in the GR database. This is Ben^^Cohen. Ben Cohen is a sports reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He writes about the NBA, the Olympics and other topics that don't involve extraordinarily athletic people. He lives in New York with his wife and their cat. The Hot Hand is his first book. (source: Amazon)
2 Books Written
A brilliant and buoyant investigation into the existence (or not) of streaks, from a rising star at the Wall Street Journal.For decades, statisticians, social scientists, psychologists, and economists (among them Nobel Prize winners) have spent massive amounts of precious time thinking about whether streaks actually exist. After all, a substantial number of decisions that we make in our everyday lives are quietly rooted in this one question: If something happened before, will it happen again? Is there such a thing as being in the zone? Can someone have a “hot hand”? Or is it simply a case of seeing patterns in randomness? Or, if streaks are possible, where can they be found?In The Hot Hand, Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Cohen offers an unfailingly entertaining and provocative investigation into these questions. He begins with how a $35,000 fine and a wild night in New York revived a debate about the existence of streaks that was several generations in the making. We learn how the ability to recognize and then bet against streaks turned a business school dropout named David Booth into a billionaire, and how the subconscious nature of streak-related bias can make the difference between life and death for asylum seekers. We see how previously unrecognized streaks hidden amidst archival data helped solve one of the most haunting mysteries of the twentieth century, the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg. Cohen also exposes how streak-related incentives can be manipulated, from the five-syllable word that helped break arcade profit records to an arc of black paint that allowed Stephen Curry to transform from future junior high coach into the greatest three-point shooter in NBA history. Crucially, Cohen also explores why false recognition of nonexistent streaks can have cataclysmic results, particularly if you are a sugar beet farmer or the sort of gambler who likes to switch to black on the ninth spin of the roulette wheel.A brilliant investigation into when streaks exist and how they can be taken advantage of, The Hot Hand is essential reading for anyone who thinks they’ve got a shot.
Duke University coach Mike Krzyzewski has won more games than any Division I basketball coach in history. He is also recognized around the world as the coach of Team USA, and on campus at Duke, the man known as Coach K is such an icon that students bow down to him he walks onto the court named in his honor. But Krzyzewski's prolonged and unprecedented success is complicated. How is he still winning? Why he is coaching basketball? What happens when he decides to move on? Duke graduate Ben Cohen, who writes about sports for The Wall Street Journal, set out to answer those questions by revisiting his own time in North Carolina and interviewing Krzyzewski and those around him in exclusive settings. The result is an intimate portrait of Krzyzewski written from a unique perspective.