and went looking for numbers that would tell the story. He wrote up the results as an OpEd for the Chicago Sun-Times. It featured the sort of plangent counterintuition for which he has become famous: "If you both own a gun and have a swimming pool in the backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is." -THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, AUGUST 3, 2003                 WhatMakesaPerfectParent?                               Hasthereeverbeenanotherartsodevoutlyconvertedintoascience as the art of parenting? Over the recent decades, a vast and diverse flock of parenting ex- perts has arisen. Anyone who tries even casually to follow their advice may be stymied, for the conventional wisdom on parenting seems to shift by the hour. Sometimes it is a case of one expert differing from another. At other times the most vocal experts suddenly agree en masse that the old wisdom was wrong and that the new wisdom is, for