Our recent New York Times Magazine article on the use of cash-back transactions in home sales produced a mountain of e-mail responses. Among the most interesting was this one from New York attorney Nishani Naidoo, a former real estate lawyer and member of the New York State Bar Association’s Real Property group. He has been distressed by the growth of . . .
An article from the Cox News Service that was published in the State, the daily newspaper of Columbia, S.C., tells the story of a family camping trip gone wrong. You should read the article here. For those who don’t feel like clicking through, I’ll summarize: 1. A suburban Atlanta man named Chris Everhart, a former Marine who now works as . . .
There has been a lot of talk, on this blog and everywhere, about the price of gas. Levitt wrote recently in favor of higher gas taxes. I went on Good Morning America last week to talk about factors that do and do not affect gas prices. (Among the events that matter: the International Olympic Committee’s 2001 meeting in Moscow that . . .
An article in the current Sports Illustrated about the underappreciated San Antonio Spurs, by Jack McCallum, includes a brief profile of the Spurs’ principal owner, Peter Holt. A son of privilege, he was a drinker and a hell-raiser who joined the Army to straighten himself out and was sent to Vietnam in 1967. He tells McCallum about walking through the . . .
Daniel Gross is a very good and quite prolific writer on the economy, from his “Moneybox” columns in Slate to his “Economic View” columns in the New York Times; soon, he will be taking his skills to Newsweek. His new book, Pop! Why Bubbles are Great for the Economy, tells the story of various American investment bubbles, from frenzied railroad . . .
I blogged recently about a strange little incident with Northwest Airlines and a can of Pringles. Your comments indicated that Northwest has been plagued by rocky service. (Your comments also indicated that I’m a [expletive deleted] whiner, but I would argue that such comments missed the point of the post.) As Joe Sharkey reports in today’s New York Times, Northwest . . .
Slate, the 11-year-old online magazine that can lean pretty hard to the left, has just launched a video channel called Slate V. By the current standards of web video, these things are genius. It is interesting to note that the two leading GOP presidential candidates, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson, seem to be abnormally enthusiastic about prescribing mental-health treatment. Click . . .
As I’ve written before, I am a big fan of the writing of Atul Gawande, a surgeon who also happens to be a wonderful writer. His current book is called Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance. Between his operating and his writing, he also found time to answer this Q&A we sent him. After you read this, go read his . . .
The Cornell economics professor Robert Frank (not to be confused with the excellent Wall Street Journal writer Robert Frank, or the great photographer Robert Frank) begins a semester by asking his students to ask and answer a real-world economics question in 500 words or less. He has now compiled these essays in a book called The Economic Naturalist. It is . . .
In today’s New York Times, Anthony Ramirez reports on the sharp decline in smoking in New York City. According to a study that interviewed 10,000 city residents, only 17.5% of the adult population now smokes, compared to 21.6% in 2002. What accounts for this huge drop? The article offers three potential causes: anti-tobacco TV ads, a smoking ban in restaurants, . . .
John Steele Gordon writes great historical non-fiction; his last book was Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power. Among many other things, he discusses how it was the Erie Canal that really turned New York City into the center of American capitalism, bringing crops and goods from the Midwest to be shipped to Europe and elsewhere. In . . .
There is a Shell station in San Francisco, at Sixth and Harrison, that was recently charging $4.33 a gallon for regular gas and $4.43 for premium. Across the street is a Chevron station that charges about 70 cents less per gallon. Can you guess why? I seriously doubt it. You might think it has something to do with Shell vs. . . .
I have been alerted that my recent post on PowerPoint and its failings would have been richer had it referenced the earlier work on the subject by Seth Godin. He’s been trying to help PowerPoint people help themselves for years. His e-book on the subject, reproduced here on his blog, is called Really Bad PowerPoint. As with many good ideas, . . .
Even though I try hard to avoid meetings in general, and business meetings in particular, I have sat through my share of PowerPoint presentations. In general, I hate them. There are at least two big problems with PowerPoint presentations. The first is that the speaker, because he’s got the visual crutch of the slide show, doesn’t work very hard to . . .
When I saw the first headlines, I thought it was some kind of a prank, but it’s not: the Vatican has issued a document concerning “the pastoral care of road users,” which includes a sober discussion of “the phenomenon of human mobility.” It also contains a section called “Drivers’ ‘Ten Commandments,’” which has been the focus of tons of news . . .
I recently flew business class on Northwest Airlines. When it came time for dinner to be served, I decided I would decline dinner for three reasons: 1. I had eaten just a few hours earlier. 2. I was busy working and I didn’t want to put away all the papers I had spread out on my tray. 3. I caught . . .
Last week, I blogged about the conservative/Christian website Conservapedia, one of several Wikipedia copycats. Another of these sites is Uncyclopedia, which pokes fun at Wikipedia’s credibility issues by fudging practically every fact. The site is an impressive piece of mockery, perhaps best judged by its very excellent entry on Freakonomics — a book written, per Uncyclopedia, by “economist Bill Reichstag . . .
After two years of submitting cartoons and getting nothing but rejection, Robert Mankoff finally succeeded in selling his first cartoon to The New Yorker in the 1970’s. He went on to become one of the magazine’s premiere cartoonists and ultimately its cartoon editor. He also had the clever idea of founding The Cartoon Bank, a company meant to syndicate and . . .
The answer is: they both have Cyril Wolf as a patron. Who? You may remember Wolf as the gentlemanly doctor in Houston who shared with me his research on how some drug-store chains charge 1000% more for generic prescriptions than Costco and Sam’s Club. (Yes, 1000% more.) The reason he was so distraught by this fact is that he has . . .
Yesterday, we posted a Q&A with economist and all-around smart guy Steve Landsburg, who addresses a lot of everyday riddles in his writing. Sometime in the next few days, we’ll be posting excerpts from the economist Robert Frank‘s new book The Economic Naturalist. So far, I am loving Frank’s book. It poses a series of questions about small, real-world riddles, . . .
It’s been a few years since I bought any “Thomas and Friends” toys for my son, so I don’t think any of the approximately 18,000 trains he owns are part of the recall that was just announced. It covers toys sold in the U.S. from Jan. 2005 through June 2007; they are thought to contain lead paint, and they were . . .
Google’s new Street View feature has caused a predictable sort of hubbub. Privacy advocates are upset; one woman freaked out when she could see her cat through the window of her house; one man was caught peeing by the side of the road. (We interviewed Google’s project manager on our site; his answers, hardly earth-shaking, were still interesting.) I understand . . .
Steven Landsburg is not known for having temperate opinions. An economics professor at the University of Rochester and a prolific writer, Landsburg regularly raises provocative theories in his Slate column: women choke under pressure, e.g., or miserliness is a form of generosity. He is the author of the books Armchair Economist and Fair Play, which are in some ways direct . . .
Anyone who cares about autism, and particularly the supposed spike in autism in recent years, would do well to read this very informative, cogent, and non-hysterical OpEd by Paul T. Shattuck and Maureen Durkin. It is written on the occasion of a case before the U.S. Court of Federal Claims that’s investigating whether autism is linked to childhood vaccinations, as . . .
Have you all heard of Conservapedia? It bills itself as “a conservative encyclopedia you can trust,” and it is pretty fascinating. It has a strong pro-Christian, anti-liberal (and especially anti-N.Y. Times) bent, and is just one of several user-run encyclopedias that have taken root in response (or tribute) to Wikipedia. (Here are our previous posts on Wikipedia). These also include . . .
Over at the very, very compelling Strange Maps site (warning: do not click unless you have an hour to kill) is a map of the U.S. with each state renamed for a country with a similar GDP. In case you’re wondering where the really big countries are, here’s another map, in which Japan gobbles up our entire midsection and New . . .
We are still getting e-mails, like this one, concerning our New York Times column a while back about the leisure/work distinctions in “hobbies” like gardening, cooking, knitting, etc. But the following message, from economist Shoshana Grossbard, is easily among the best. She teaches at San Diego State and is the founding editor of the Review of Economics of the Household. . . .
What’s wrong with this picture? A contest sponsored by Time Out New York to pick the book that is “most essential to life — and cocktail conversation — in New York City” has reached the semifinals. Freakonomics is still in the running, pitted this week against Jane Austen‘s Pride and Prejudice. Talk about apples and oranges. If we happen to . . .
As every writer knows, beginnings are hard. Endings are perhaps even harder. So how hard is it to satisfyingly end a series like The Sopranos? If you like the show, you already know what happened; if you don’t like it, you don’t care. But one measure of just how unsatisfying many viewers found the finale can be gained by conducting . . .
Itzhak Ben-David is a Ph.D. candidate in finance at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. (Levitt is one of his dissertation advisors.) While pursuing his original research idea — the degree to which housing prices efficiently incorporate anticipated tax increases — Ben-David stumbled upon a slightly juicier topic: a real-estate sleight of hand known as the “cashback transaction,” . . .
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