How Did the Worst Team in NBA History Become a Title Contender?
…the best team in the history of the Clippers. For the first time in franchise history (which began in Buffalo in 1970-71), the Clippers won 60% of their games. In…
Fareed Zakaria says yes. But it’s not just political revolution — it’s economic, technological, even emotional. He doesn’t offer easy solutions but he does offer some hope….
Fareed Zakaria says yes. But it’s not just political revolution — it’s economic, technological, even emotional. He doesn’t offer easy solutions but he does offer some hope….
…the best team in the history of the Clippers. For the first time in franchise history (which began in Buffalo in 1970-71), the Clippers won 60% of their games. In…
…an entire way of life. Both parties at different times in American history have been guilty of mind-boggling attempts to influence elections. In the 1880s, one of the worst decades…
…provide free advertising time to local candidates to reduce the overall cost of the campaigns. I remember hearing a history professor argue that historically, the party out of power clung…
…The Secret History of the War on Cancer, she describes her relationship with cancer in a less formal way: “I know what cancer looks like, feels like and smells like….
…current woes are simply another step in the long and tumultuous history of paper currency in the U.S. Stephen Mihm, a professor of history at the University of Georgia and…
…Marshall McLuhan or the way Peter Griffin did with Jesus Christ, to settle arguments? Well, here’s your chance. Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton…
…you can read more here and here. One of the fun things about this field is getting to talk to sociologists, demographers, gender studies folks, lawyers, and historians. The history…
…women rarely make history” attributed to pretty much every “empowered woman” historical figure you can think of. Do you know who actually said it? Yes I do. It was Laurel…
If you’re still fuming over taxes this year, take a look at Mike Duncan and Jason Novak‘s (slightly biased) cartoon explanation of the history of taxes. The income tax really…
Every day, something significant to human history must happen … right? Photo: iStockphoto Wrong. Last year, the computer program True Knowledge concluded that the most boring day in human history…
…her too by picking up a copy of her just-released book, “Fresh: A Perishable History.” Photo: Stephen Ausmus A White Leghorn hen. Last week’s post talked about early-20th-century “egg gamblers”…
…existed in human history. Who would like to argue against him? And if you attack on the “nutritious” dimension (I suspect you will), be very specific. FWIW, here, from the…
Video Today’s installment of FREAK-TV traces the history of male abs in culture and media, from the unveiling of Michelangelo’s “David” to James Dean‘s shirtless pose in Rebel Without a…
The documentary filmmaker, known for The Civil War, Jazz, and Baseball, turns his attention to the Holocaust, and asks what we can learn from the evils of the past….
Photo: iStockphoto An Atlanta Post article by R. Asmerom traces the cultural and historical origins of “bling” in the African-American community — all the way back to Africa. “Certain areas…
In this special episode of People I (Mostly) Admire, Steve Levitt talks to the best-selling author of Sapiens and Homo Deus about finding the profound in the obvious….
A leading expert on the Reformation era, Brad, a University of Notre Dame professor, tells Steve about how the “blood gets sucked out of history,” and why historians and economists…
The author of Sapiens has a knack for finding the profound in the obvious. He tells Steve why money is fiction, traffic can be mind-blowing, and politicians have a right…
Stephen Dubner’s conversation with David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group, one of the most storied private-equity firms in history. We spoke with Rubenstein for the Freakonomics Radio series “The…
Also: Does knowing your family history affect your identity?…
On April 12, 2005, Freakonomics was published. We had high hopes and low expectations. From what I recall, nothing magical happened on that day. But at 12:01 a.m. on the…
Do you regularly read the Marginal Revolution blog? If you care much about actual economics, and especially if you are a student of the same (either literally or figuratively), you…
Hans Rosling, a guru of data animation, is at it again. Here is a very cool video showing 200 years of mortality/wealth progress in just four minutes: (HT: Peter Siegelman)…
Steven Levy of Wired provides the “inside story” of Facebook’s new search engine, Graph Search: For years now, Facebook watchers have wondered when the company would unleash the potential of…
(Photo: davidd) We’ve blogged before about the obesity epidemic, and whether or not it is a recent phenomenon; John Komlos and Marek Brabec have argued that obesity rates actually began…
The biggest sports league in history had a problem: While most of its players were Black, almost none of its head coaches were. So the N.F.L. launched a hiring policy…
Neil Shubin hunts for fossils in the Arctic and experiments with D.N.A. in the lab, hoping to find out how fish evolved to walk on land. He explains why unlocking…
We tend to think of medicine as a science, but for most of human history it has been scientific-ish at best. In the first episode of a three-part series, we…
