Nature didn't design human beings to be statisticians, and in fact our
minds are more naturally attuned to spotting the saber-toothed tiger
than seeing the jungle he springs from. Yet scienti?c discovery in
practice is often more jungle than tiger. Those of us who devote our
scienti?c lives to the deep and satisfying subject of statistical
inference usually do so in the face of a certain under-appreciation from
the public, and also (though less so these days) from the wider
scienti?c world. With this in mind, it feels very nice to be
over-appreciated for a while, even at the expense of weathering a 70th
birthday. (Are we certain that some terrible chronological error hasn't
been made?) Carl Morris and Rob Tibshirani, the two colleagues I've
worked most closely with, both 't my ideal pro?le of the statistician as
a mathematical scientist working seamlessly across wide areas of theory
and application. They seem to have chosen the papers here in the same
catholic spirit, and then cajoled an all-star cast of statistical
savants to comment on them.