And, actually, it isn’t Freakonomics either. It is Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. My good friend Jimmy Golen, a sportswriter for the AP, forwarded me this interview with Joe Maddon, the new manager of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays Q: Are you doodling lineups, doodling rotations — JOE MADDON: You know what? No, not yet. We’re talking about that on the way . . .
I’ve just returned from a quick trip to British Columbia (specifically to the ski town of Whistler, to which one can only properly say “wow”), and a couple of things from western Canada caught my eye. The first is this blog post about the use of urinalysis for construction job applicants in Alberta, where the long-standing oil rush is headier . . .
On a few occasions in the past, we’ve asked you to vote for awards for which Freakonomics was nominated, and you did, and we were and remain grateful. Now, if you’re not too exhausted to vote again, there’s another award (albeit a very small one, given the posted vote tally), and it’s actually a little closer to home because it’s . . .
Thanks to articles in the Wall Street Journal and the Economist, a working paper by Chris Foote and Chris Goetz that is sharply critical of John Donohue and me has gotten an enormous amount of attention. In that working paper Foote and Goetz criticized the analysis underlying one of the tables in our original article that suggested a link between . . .
Michael Lewis writes in today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine about Mike Leach, the innovative coach of the Texas Tech football team. As Lewis describes it, Leach takes a totally different view of football and is on the cusp of revolutionizing the game. It is a very interesting article, and beautifully written. As usual with Michael Lewis, there is a . . .
The person who made this web page is plainly crazy, in a really good way. It is a visual rendering of the Freakonomics chapter titled “Why Do Drug Dealers Live With Their Moms?” The coincidence is that, inspired by the amazing work of Edward Tufte, I have been thinking about how our next book (SuperFreakonomics, natch) should include visuals to . . .
The Ebay charity auction of the first signed copy of Freakonomics ends around 1 pm eastern time today. Please don’t bid any higher, because I have pledged a matching donation for whatever the price of the book. 🙂
Amazon.com asked us to compile of list of good economics books (well, books that are at least loosely concerned with economics), and since we’re often asked that same question by our readers, I’ll go ahead and post the Amazon link here.
Patri Friedman, who is among other things a high-stakes poker player and a relative of Milton Friedman (I think), has an interesting interview with Tim Harford at the blog catallarchy. Patri’s webpage is pretty amusing as well.
Or at least that is the impression you might get if you read this article in today’s Wall Street Journal. I will post a longer blog entry once I have had time to fully digest the working paper by Foote and Goetz which is the basis for the article. For now, I will say just a few things: 1) It . . .
Jeffrey Lacasse, a PhD. candidate in social work at Florida State University, has co-authored a paper claiming that pharmaceutical companies allowed to market directly to consumers take maximum advantage, exaggerating the benefits of their products in large part because the F.D.A. doesn’t pay much attention to the ads. Here’s the paper. In related news, here’s an article from today’s New . . .
Although I’ve written a fair amount for magazines and newspapers, I always believed an inevitable drawback of such work was that today’s article became tomorrow’s bird-cage liner. That may be why this photograph is somewhat disheartening: by writing books, I thought I had escaped the whole write/read/poop cycle. The photograph may also represent some sort of cosmic payback for our . . .
If so, you might want to let them know that our monthly Freakonomics column in The New York Times Magazine is now being distributed for secondary publication through The New York Times Syndicate. The column has already been picked up by a number of U. S. papers including The Boston Globe and The Las Vegas Journal-Review, and a number of . . .
While it is true that Dubner and I sometimes feel that we are held hostage by our blog (in the sense that the constant need to provide new content weighs on us), it has never been our intention to hold reader comments hostage. We had no idea that if a reader comment contained one of hundreds of suspect words (automatically . . .
There’s a Top 100 Amazon.com reviewer named Loyd Eskildson — that’s what he calls himself anyway — who is not only prolific but, um, hyper-current as well. What do I mean by this? Well, it seems that any time you see a review by Eskildson, it is near the very top of a given book’s page of reviews — even . . .
Po Bronson is, among other things, the author of five books. The first two were novels. The third, The Nudist on the Late Shift, was a rat-a-tat chronicle of Silicon Valley during its most chaotic and muscular era. His fourth book became a big best-seller; it’s called What Should I Do With My Life? and constitutes many different chapters on . . .
Tim Harford has generously chosen to donate to charity the proceeds from the Ebay auction of the first copy of Freakonomics I ever signed. He was even kind enough to let me pick the charity, SmileTrain. I don’t think he ever dreamed it would go for what the current bid is on Ebay. My best guess would have been one . . .
Well, we took our lumps in the U.K., losing out to “The World Is Flat” in the inaugural Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. But here’s some consolation: it turns out we’re huge in Canada. Having grown up in upstate New York, I’ve got an “accent” that’s often mistaken for Canadian, and friends over the years have . . .
I’ve just returned to my hotel in London, from the inaugural Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, for which Freakonomics was short-listed. Well, you can’t them all. The award was won by Tom Friedman for The World Is Flat. As it turns out, this was the one book for which no author was present — Friedman gave . . .
Just before Freakonomics hit the bookshelves, a reporter from the Financial Times named Tim Harford flew out to Chicago to write a profile about me, which you can read here. At the end of the interview, he asked me to autograph his book. I was surprised because no one had ever asked me to sign anything ever before. But I . . .
Csaba Toth, a blog reader from Hungary, sent me the link to an article that claims that fresh fruits, whole-grain bread, and a salad bar are the real way to fight crime. The most compelling part of the article reads as follows: Bernard Gesch, physiologist at the University of Oxford, decided to test the anecdotal clues in the most thorough . . .
Once again, Levitt is sending me off to an awards ceremony. The last time it was the Quill Awards, which Levitt thought we’d win and I thought we wouldn’t. Happily, Levitt was right. This time, neither of us think we’ll win but since the ceremony is bing held in London, I thought it’d be fun to go. The award is . . .
I checked Freakonomics books for sale on Ebay for the first time since the book was published. 38 copies currently up for auction. None of them signed. Does anyone know what premium a signed copy goes for? The part I liked best was that 4 copies of the book were categorized under “Fiction.” I guess those sellers were not so . . .
I hardly ever drive anymore since I moved close to where I work. So whenever I do, the incivility on the roads leaps out at me. People do things in cars they would never do in other settings. Honking. Swearing. Cutting to the front of the line. And that is just my wife. The other drivers are far meaner. One . . .
Sudhir Venkatesh, the amazing sociologist who was my co-author on the gangs research that we write about in Freakonomics, has a great new documentary. It will be showing on WTTW, Chicago’s PBS affiliate at Thursday, Nov. 17th, 9pm Friday, Nov. 18th, 10pm. If you don’t live in Chicago, you are out of luck, at least for now. I have seen . . .
It is late Monday night, and Levitt and I just completed an entire day’s worth of Freako-chat in Columbus, capital of Ohio and proud home of the Ohio State Buckeyes. A buckeye, we learned today, is a tree whose nut looks just like a chestnut but is poisonous. We also learned the OSU cheer, which even we were able master . . .
Stephen Dubner was on Good Morning America this morning to talk about Seth Roberts, self-experimentation, and the Shangri-La Diet. Those of you seeking more information can read the original Times column here, background info here, and Roberts’s own contributions to the Freakonomics blog here and here and here and here and here and here. If you’re seeking full diet instructions, . . .
Dubner is scheduled to appear on Good Morning America on Monday morning, between 8:00 and 8:30 am. I guess he has suddenly turned shy and decided not to publicize it.
A couple days ago, Levitt and I were in Orlando for a lecture. Driving down the freeway, I spotted a flashing billboard for the Orlando Sentinel. The first screen was headlined “TODAY:” and trumpeted the current issue’s lead article. Then the next screen flashed. It said “TOMORROW: RIOTS IN PARIS.” Tricky business, I thought, trying to predict tomorrow’s news. The . . .
The official murder rate in New Orleans has dropped to zero. The last recorded murder in the city occurred on Aug. 27, two days before Hurricane Katrina. It seems that Katrina, along with ruining a few hundred thousand lives, also dispatched most of the criminals, particularly the drug dealers and their customers. As N.O. criminologist Peter Scharf told the New . . .