Remember the story about the cheating schoolteachers in Chicago? The theory was that high-stakes testing, by putting more pressure on students to pass, creates a stronger incentive for teachers to not leave those students behind – and that a fraction of those teachers, generally the worse ones, went so far as to cheat on behalf of their students.
Looks like it may have been happening in Springfield, Mass., too.
On the list of illegally downloaded e-books, that is.
Here’s the Washington Post with the story, and here’s the N.Y. Times.
The underlying study claims that more than 9 millions copies of books were illegally downloaded last year.
I recently attended my third Renaissance Weekend in Charleston, where among the normal cornucopia of ideas and fellowship, Sam Horn was incredibly generous in helping me sharpen my elevator pitch for a new project.
I sang this past weekend at the Whiffenpoof Centennial Reunion Concert (you can hear examples of recent groups singing, here). And I had a chance to sing with probably the best selling Whiff, Joseph Finder. Joe is the author of 9 corporate thrillers. (My favorite is “Company Man”). It will not surprise you that, like Levitt and Dubner, his webpage offers free book plates. But you might be surprise when you see his “Bad Apple” bookplate:
Dubner and I both made a huge mistake: we got married before Freakonomics came out.
The library on board the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz is well-stocked with Freakonomics as part of its Navy Reading Program. According to Flickr user Roxanne Darling, it’s the most-read book on the ship.
Just in case you weren’t sitting inside on this beautiful late-summer morning watching television over your breakfast bagel, you can see today’s Good Morning America segment on the Freakonomics paperback, here.
We wanted to let you know that Dubner is scheduled to appear on Good Morning America this Thursday, Aug. 27.
The paperback edition of Freakonomics goes on sale today. As with the Revised and Expanded hardcover (which, we are told, will stay in print), it includes several of our New York Times Magazine columns; it doesn’t, however, include a chapter of blog excerpts.
Next week, after more than four years in, Freakonomics is being published in the U.S. in paperback. We’ve been asked to go on TV to talk about the effects (if any) the book has had, whether in the realm of crime-fighting or baby-naming or book-writing. We need your help in gathering good examples to talk about. Nothing is too large or too small, in your life or the lives of others. Thanks in advance.
My sister Linda is the one who came up with the title Freakonomics for our first book. Probably because of that, ever since she has been obsessed with trying to, in marketing lingo, “extend the Freakonomics brand.” Her first idea was the Freakonomics t-shirt. “Everybody will want one of these,” she said. Somehow, even though millions of people were willing . . .
What he hadn’t written yet, however, was a Freakonomics theme song. That’s the request Mann decided to fulfill. It came from a reader named Spencer, who’ll get his choice of Freakonomics schwag for winning the contest.
So here it is, the theme song we never knew we needed but now wouldn’t want to live without. Thanks to all for participating, and especially to Jonathan Mann for lending his talents to our cause:
Well, probably not. But at least one person has lost her job — albeit not an actual full-time, paying job — in a fracas over Freakonomics and other books. A few years back, a school-board member in suburban Chicago named Leslie Pinney wanted to pull nine books from the high school’s approved reading list. Among them were Freakonomics, The Things . . .
Thanks to Flickr’s Creative Commons (made possible, in part, by Lawrence Lessig), where Flickr users make their photography available for public use, we often use Flickr images to spruce up this blog.
So how does Freakonomics show up on Flickr?
Despite charges that it simply wants to grab web traffic, Time.com has bravely gone ahead with its second annual list of the Top 25 blogs on the web. And guess who made the list? Yep. For the second straight year. We’d like to thank the Academy … Seriously, we are flattered and thankful. Thanks especially to our excellent contributors and . . .
New York magazine, riffing on Drew Barrymore‘s starring role in the film adaptation of He’s Just Not That Into You, suggests 10 other self-help books that should be Barrymore vehicles, including Freakonomics: Drew Barrymore stars as a free-spirited Northwestern economics grad student who ventures into the Cabrini Green projects on the south side of Chicago to research the lives of . . .
A reader named Jacquilynne Schlesier writes: My book club is reading Freakonomics as our selection of the month and we’re meeting on Wednesday. It’s my selection, so I’m responsible for bringing 10 questions that’ll prompt discussion about the book. Based on the argument that broke out at our last meeting when I merely mentioned the idea behind the abortion/crime bits . . .
I saw my sister Linda when I visited Minnesota over the holidays. Linda is the one who came up with the title Freakonomics. She was complaining how unfair it is that everywhere she looks, she sees people ripping off her idea. I asked her what she was talking about, and she offered up lame examples like “Obamanomics.” I reminded her . . .
This really belongs over in the Naked Self-Promotion box to the right, but: Time magazine has conducted its First Annual Blog Index (totally scientific, I am sure) and guess what landed in the Top 25?
We’ve blogged fairly regularly about prediction markets, so the next step would seem pretty logical: make our own. Enter the folks at Predictify (see the latest news here), who have been kind enough to create the official Freakonomics Prediction Center. It can be found in the right-hand column of our home page. We’ll post questions and you’ll supply the predictions. . . .
A few weeks ago, we solicited your questions for Dubner and Levitt. The high quality and enthusiasm of your response gave us the idea to make the Freakonomics Q&A an ongoing feature. So starting today, the Levitt/Dubner Q&A will run regularly, and will be based on your first set of questions as well as any new questions that you leave . . .
The Freakonomics in-box regularly fills up with interesting tales (like this one and this one). The other day, a reader from Dallas named Erik Hille took reader e-mail to a whole new level. He was writing about the Feb. 1 entry in our fact-a-day calendar, which excerpts a fact from our book in the chapter on crime: “The average sixty-five-year-old . . .
If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you know that some of the best posts are written by readers, not by us. For instance, we recently received the following e-mail from Steven Goldstein of New York City: I read your book when it came out. My 12-year-old son saw it lying around last spring and asked what it was . . .
As mentioned on MarginalRevolution, the economist John DiNardo has been quite busy over the last few years criticizing Freakonomics. He has written no fewer than three papers on the subject. It’s too bad that he didn’t offer the standard academic courtesy of sending his criticisms directly to me before writing them up; if he had, I could have helped clarify . . .
A Cal Tech grad student put together a list of the most popular books across college campuses and then correlated those book choices with S.A.T. scores at those schools. His results reveal that the five books with the highest average S.A.T. scores are Lolita, 100 Years of Solitude, Crime and Punishment, Freakonomics, and Atlas Shrugged. Among those five books, I . . .
We recently published a column describing a few instances of the law of unintended consequences — specifically, what happens when well-meaning legislation winds up hurting the parties it is designed to help. I thought it was a pretty good column. But I see now where it could have been better. Alex Tabarrok, writing on Marginal Revolution, addresses the law of . . .
We’ve been running lots of Q&As of late, with you, the readers, asking the questions. A fellow named Thomas Whitaker recently wrote us to suggest that we submit to a Q&A ourselves. This seemed like a sensible suggestion. We did a bunch of Q&As back when the book came out (see here and here and here, and these FAQs), but . . .
I love the title of Ian Ayres‘ latest op-ed in The Economists’ Voice: “Give Freakonomics a Chance” In the piece, Ian pleads with the N.B.A. to hand over its referee data so that economists can look for evidence of cheating.
March 5, 2021: These bookplates are no longer available. We’re sorry for the inconvenience. I am happy to announce that after some two years of offering free signed bookplates, which turn a plain old copy of Freakonomics into an autographed copy of Freakonomics, we have finally squashed every bug in the system, and we have even caught up with demand. . . .
It’s official: Freakonomics is going to be turned into a feature-length documentary film. It will be an omnibus format, with different stories within the film told by different directors. According to Variety: Doc is being produced by Chad Troutwine (“Paris je t’aime”) and Seth Gordon (“The King of Kong”), and they have enlisted Morgan Spurlock (“Super Size Me”), Rachel Grady . . .