In the wake of the Andy Rooney scandal and Alberto Gonzales’ resignation, Dubner takes a closer look at the social and political costs of discriminating against Latino-Americans.
Courtesy of Playboy Enterprises, Inc. Last week, we solicited your questions for Playboy editorial director Chris Napolitano. You responded with vigor. And now, so has he. This may be the longest Q&A in the history of the printed word. Unlike our previous Q&A subjects who picked five or ten of your questions to answer, Napolitano answered every last one of . . .
In a new Freakonomics video clip, Levitt explains his own strategies for parenting, and describes a few unique tools for teaching his kids to think creatively.
Here’s my nominee for quote of the day, from a (gated) front page article in today’s Wall Street Journal: “This plant will save humanity, I tell you.” The person who said that is O.P. Singh, a horticulturist for the railway ministry of India. What plant is he talking about? A shrubby weed called jatropha, whose seeds contain an oil that . . .
I blogged recently about a linguistics paper so stuffed with jargon that it read to me as if it had poorly translated from the original Croatian. I also wondered what the paper had to do with belly buttons, as was suggested by its title (“Have You Noticed That Your Belly Button Lint Colour Is Related to the Colour of Your . . .
Is cheating really so bad, particularly when there’s no punishment involved? Dubner discusses the vote rigging scandal behind the winners of Fishbowl DC’s “Hottest Media Types” contest.
If you had to guess when the Texas Rangers scored last night’s 30 runs over 9 innings against Baltimore, how would you distribute the runs? Dubner analyzes the answer, which will likely surprise you.
Freakonomics video introduces its mysterious new on-screen talent, who will explore the theory that playing sports may actually encourage teenage boys to commit crime, contrary to the conventional wisdom that athletics instill values and discipline.
Is obesity really the Black Plague the media makes it out to be? Is the “overweight epidemic” real? We’ve assembled a team of prominent economists, doctors, authors and experts to offer inside views on health, nutrition, and whether America is eating itself to death.
The post that follows isn’t likely to make anyone happy. It is our third recent post about Freakonomics.com’s RSS feed. Here is No. 1 and here is No. 2. For the readers who have no idea what a feed is and don’t care, this post is probably of zero value. Feel free to skip it. The people who do read . . .
A while ago, we wrote a New York Times Magazine column about talent — what it is, how it’s acquired, etc. The gist of the column was that “raw talent,” as it’s often called, is vastly overrated, and that people who become very good at something, whether it’s sports, music, or medicine, generally do so through a great deal of . . .
Bruce Wydick, a professor of economics at the University of San Francisco, has written an interesting OpEd in USA Today about sunk costs and the Iraq war. Here is his lead: Our inability to think clearly about sunk costs is impeding our ability to make clear decisions about our involvement in Iraq. Failing to correctly identify sunk costs (those that . . .
It has recently come to our attention that roughly 90% of the people who read this blog via RSS feed had their subscriptions interrupted when we moved our blog to NYTimes.com about 10 days ago. (If you don’t read this blog via feed, you probably have no idea what I am talking about, and nothing in this post will matter . . .
Video In the video player over to the left, you’ll find a new short video that’s a brain tease about your brain. Go give it a click, and then leave your answer in the comments section of this post.
A one-time religion student at Columbia University, Chris Napolitano took a job at Playboy in 1988 as an editorial assistant in the fiction department. He went on to become features editor, executive editor, and in 2004 reached the top job, editorial director. (The editor-in-chief title remains reserved for founder Hugh Hefner.) In the spirit of Jim Cramer, Mark Cuban, and . . .
One of my favorite people from graduate school (a writing program at Columbia) was Peter Temes. He worked incredibly hard, writing and teaching and raising a family all at once, which meant that he kept his head way out of the clouds, which couldn’t be said of all of our peers. He has gone on to write some books (including . . .
For reasons that may not make sense to anyone else, I recently performed a Google search for “They Might Be Giants” and “Belly Button.” This was the second hit: a paper by a Stanford linguist named David Beaver (that’s not an aptonym, is it?) called “Have You Noticed That Your Belly Button Lint Colour Is Related to the Colour of . . .
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.
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