Our Daily Bleg

What’s a bleg?

A bleg = blog + beg — i.e., using a blog to beg for information. (This is not to be confused with the Dutch beleg — which is either a sandwich filling or the declaration of martial law.)

We have blegged before on this blog, asking our readers for Vegas travel tips, reading material, and new technologies worth adopting.

And you, the readers, always respond with great generosity, breadth, and insight.

But why should we be the sole beneficiaries of such blegs? Surely our readers, in addition to providing a great reservoir of diverse knowledge, also have bleg requests of their own.

Perhaps you or someone you love has just been diagnosed with a rare disease and you are looking for good data and advice. Maybe you just landed a semester abroad in India and want to arrive fully prepared to take advantage. Maybe you — like me — have finally grown weary of wrestling with all the glitches in a new PC laptop and wonder if it is time to convert to Mac.

So let’s put you, our readership, to work on behalf of you, our readership. You can post your blegs in the comments section below, and/or send them to bleg@freakonomics.com.

It might be helpful to add a bit of contextual information to your bleg (see the examples linked to in the third paragraph, above) rather than just floating a question on its own. We’ll then select blegs and post them one at a time; I am guessing that the response to these blegs will prove to the world that the people who read Freakonomics.com are indeed among the wisest and most thoughtful people in the land.