Freakonomics Friends in the News, for Better and Worse
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It was great to see some familiar names on this year’s list of MacArthur “genius” awards. They include Roland Fryer of Harvard, who has shown up many times on this blog as well as in Freakonomics and in the New York Times. His work on everything from the black-white baby-name gap to education incentives is well-deserving of MacArthur recognition, and I’m sure this is hardly the last award he’ll win. Another winner was Jad Abumrad of the wonderful radio show RadioLab. If you don’t know this show, you should. I was also very pleased to see Kevin Guskiewicz on the MacArthur list; he’s at the forefront of research into sports injuries, especially the kind of helmet-induced football injuries we’ve discussed in the past.
On the other side of the ledger is the very disturbing news that the online poker site Full Tilt Poker has been operating, in the words of the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, as “a Ponzi scheme,” siphoning off customers’ money to make multi-million dollar payments to Full Tilt’s owners, who include Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, Howard Lederer, and Rafe Furst, who has appeared on this blog multiple times. Yes, we live in a world of presumed innocence; but this Journal article and the lawsuit highlights don’t paint a pretty picture. FWIW, here’s Rafe’s public response.
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