no amount of money can do much about it. (Messrs. Dean, Forbes, Huffington, and Golisano already know this, of course.) And what about the other half of the election truism-that the amount of money spent on campaign finance is obscenely huge? In a typical election period that includes campaigns for the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, about $1 billion is spent per year-which sounds like a lot of money, unless you care to mea- sure it against something seemingly less important than democratic elections. It is the same amount, for instance, that Americans spend every year on chewing gum.       This isnt a book about the cost of chewing gum versus campaign spending per se, or about disingenuous real-estate agents, or the im- pact of legalized abortion on crime. It will certainly address these sce- narios and dozens more, from the art of parenting to the mechanics of cheating, from the inner workings of the Ku Klux Klan to racial dis- crimination on The Weakest Link. What this book is about is stripping a layer or two from the surface of modern life and seeing what is hap- pening underneath. We will ask a lot of questions, some frivolous and some about life-and-death issues. The answers may often seem odd but, after the fact, also rather obvious. We will seek out these answers in the data-whether those data come in the form of schoolchildrens test scores or New York Citys crime statistics or a crack dealers finan- cial records. (Often we will take advantage of patterns in the data that     were incidentally left behind, like an airplanes sharp contrail in a high sky.) It is well and good to opine or theorize about a subject, as hu- mankind is wont to do, but when moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising in- sight.