Playground →
The top 10 neighbors for Tom Nichols span a tight band — from George Conway at 0.99 down to Daniel Goldman at 0.98 — with no single neighbor pulling sharply ahead of the rest. That flat distribution is the defining structural fact here.
Tallying the subcategories across the top 10: Politicians lead with four entries — George Conway (0.99), Rick Wilson (0.98), Bill Kristol (0.98), and Michael McFaul (0.97) — followed by two Academics (Neal Katyal at 0.98 and Laurence Tribe at 0.98), two Journalists (Jennifer Rubin at 0.98 and Charlie Sykes at 0.97), one Government Official (John O. Brennan at 0.98), and one Political Group (The Lincoln Project at 0.98). Tom Nichols himself is classified as a Professional, and Steve Schmidt (0.98) is the only other Professional in the top 10.
The cluster is almost entirely composed of political commentators, legal academics, and anti-establishment political figures — a cross-kind pattern where the center entity's own subcategory (Professionals) is nearly absent from its nearest neighbors. The audience that follows Tom Nichols looks, in composition, like the audience for dissident-Republican politicians, constitutional law academics, and political journalists rather than for other professionals.
The narrow score range across all ten neighbors — less than 0.01 separating first from tenth — signals a cohesive, well-defined audience with consistent overlap across this entire political commentary cluster.
