Playing It Safe: Nate Silver Will Spend The Next Month Making Easy Predictions About Apples In Order To Get His Confidence Back 
Silver announced his decision this week in his debut blog post for “Nate’s Orchard,” a special FiveThirtyEight vertical where he’ll be breaking down softball predictions like “There will be a bunch of apples at my supermarket” and “In addition to red apples, there are green apples.”
The poor guy definitely can’t afford to get overwhelmed by self-doubt when he’s breaking down battleground states district by district. By focusing entirely on uncontroversial, apple-related forecasting, he’ll hopefully prove to himself that he really does have the goods and isn’t just the “know-nothing dirt-for-brains” he says he is in his post.
Nate’s blog post also outlined some of the other claims he plans to advance, including the following:
Apples make a good snack for the afternoon.
One apple will not be enough to make Nate Silver full.
No new species of apples will naturally arise before October.
Ripe apples are soft, but not as soft as overripe apples.
Apples can be cut into several slices, depending on how many times you slice them.
Apples have seeds unless they’re seedless apples.
Apples can be taken “on the go.”
The rest of the FiveThirtyEight staff has been nothing but supportive of Nate during his rough patch, and ESPN even released a statement backing his decision: “Nate is under a great deal of pressure to knock it out of the park this election, and he really wants to do a good job. We support what he needs to do to get his head back in the game.”
Sounds like Nate is doing just that, whether it’s recording his weekly AppleCast or making Core Tracker graphs like this one charting how many apples he’ll most likely eat every day:
