Jim Cramer offers candid answers to readers’ questions.
Dubner discusses Jonathan Rosen’s “The Life of the Skies”
Barbara Corcoran, Robert Shiller, N.A.R. chief economist Lawrence Yun and others discuss whether housing bubbles exist (and, if so, whether we’re in one)
A friend writes: My girlfriend was in the Hamptons and could not get into a particular bar because she said that their strategy has gone from letting as many hot girls into the bar to letting as many guys in. It struck me as perhaps a change in thinking. Hot places in Vegas and Atlantic City still let a disproportionate . . .
Studies show that individual CEOs and baseball managers have less of an effect on their organization’s performance than conventional wisdom assumes. So couldn’t the same logic be applied to the President?
More on Dubner and Levitt’s discussion of work v. leisure: Stitch ‘N Pitch, a group of knitters at baseball games
A reader inquires why weather and infrastructure disasters are treated so differently from terrorist attacks.
Dubner weighs in on Google News’ new feature, which allows the subjects of news articles to comment on the pieces about them.
“Mad Money” host Jim Cramer will submit to a reader Q&A, so bring your questions.
A roundtable discussion about panhandling featuring, among others, Arthur Brooks, Tyler Cowen, and Barbara Ehrenreich.
We hear you. And we are trying to work out a solution. There have been a lot of changes in the migration to NYTimes.com, there are a lot of details to work out, and things don’t always move fast. Thanks for your patience.
Dubner discusses an excellent article in the New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa, a former illegal immigrant who is now the director of the brain-tumor stem-cell laboratory at Johns Hopkins.
After announcing our “Who will pitch home run No. 756 to Barry Bonds” contest winner, Dubner muses on whether the fateful pitch will prove good or bad for Nationals pitcher Mike Bacsik’s career.
Dubner puts his foot in his mouth by accidentally insulting a stand-up comedian he met at a New Orleans conference.
Freakonomics.com announces its move to the New York Times Online.
For the next several hours, while this blog undergoes some rehabilitation — no, not that kind of rehabilitation; we are fine, thanks — comments will be shut down. If all goes well, this condition won’t last past nightfall (in New York)..
We got an e-mail the other day from a certain Sara in Chicago. She had a question about the virtual world Second Life, but it could be asked of many pursuits, virtual and otherwise. (Even though I’ve never visited Second Life, I have been thinking about this issue lately since I have become a gold farmer for my own kids, . . .
If all goes as planned, I will be appearing on Good Morning America tomorrow (Wed., 8/8 — lucky in China!) at about 8:30 a.m. EDT to talk about this very blog, and to announce a fairly significant change. Hope to see you there. As one result of this change, comments on the blog will be temporarily suspended today, starting in . . .
We recently solicited your questions about street gangs for Sudhir Venkatesh, the then-grad student we wrote about in Freakonomics who is now a professor of sociology at Columbia. His answers are, IMHO, fascinating. Your questions were really good, too; thanks. Venkatesh will publish a book, Gang Leader for a Day, in early 2008. Q: Do you think the HBO series . . .
A few months ago, I attended yet another boring Knicks game at Madison Square Garden. This time, at least something good came of it. I met a guy named Weber Hsu, one of two young Merrill Lynch employees who left finance to start a yo-yo company, Yo-Yo Nation. Weber asked if we wanted them to create a special promotional Freakonomics . . .
Who will give up Barry Bonds’s 756th home run? The first person who correctly identifies the pitcher who winds up surrendering Bonds’s record-breaker will get a signed copy of Freakonomics. One guess per comment, please. And a related question: for all the talk about not wanting to be the pitcher who gives up Bonds’s 756th, would it really be such . . .
Not long ago, we took our kids to Hershey Park in Hershey, Pa. We stayed at the Hershey Lodge, which is an official Hershey Park hotel. My 5-year-old daughter, Anya, had heard from a schoolmate that Hershey Lodge gave away free Hershey bars — big ones — whenever you wanted and as many as you wanted. My wife and I . . .
A few days ago, we solicited your questions for hedge fund manager Neil Barsky. As always, your questions were terrific, and so are Barsky’s answers, below. One thing that surprised me, however, is that nobody asked Barsky, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, what he thinks about Rupert Murdoch‘s purchase of the Journal (and the rest of Dow Jones). This . . .
Tyler Cowen is giving away 15 copies of his new book, with a clever twist: you have to write in to Tyler on his Marginal Revolution blog and explain why you want his book, and why you want it for free. Hurry! As I type this, Tyler already has 55 comments in one hour. While he is a generous man, . . .
There’s a new news aggregator in town, called Newser.com, and from the quick look I gave it this morning, it immediately looks like one of the best I’ve seen. It summarizes the major news stories in a good paragraph or two, then provides prominent links to the major newspapers and wire services that did the original reporting, which makes the . . .
The legendary Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni died on Monday (which happened to be the same day that the legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman died). In its Antonioni obituary that ran yesterday, the New York Times noted that Antonioni “attended the University of Bologna, where he was a tennis champion and earned a degree in economics and commerce in 1935.” . . .
This morning, my six-year-old son Solomon was having breakfast and watching his favorite TV show, Really Wild Animals. (It’s a great show, National Geographic cinematography with quippy narration by — I kid you not — Dudley Moore.) Apparently the same commercials come on the show every morning, because I heard Solomon reciting along with one commercial as it played: “Whether . . .
While it may be true that we have no fans at the National Association of Realtors, at least there is someone in the real estate industry — a commercial leaser in Memphis — that likes us. Enough, at least, to rip us off. I have to say, I really like the subtle shadowing they did on the book title; it’s . . .
In today’s New York Times, Jennifer Steinhauer writes about California farmers whose irrigation systems are being stripped of their copper wiring, presumably by methamphetamine addicts who sell the metal in the recycling market: Theft of scrap metal, mostly copper, has vexed many areas of American life and industry for the last 18 months, fueled largely by record-level prices for copper . . .
I have a friend named Neil Barsky who used to be a journalist and now runs a hedge fund. This is not a typical progression in the journalism field. But that’s the fact. He did most of his journalism for the Wall Street Journal, principally covering real estate, and then he worked as a research analyst at Morgan Stanley, where . . .
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