Last weekend, I went to New York Comic Con with my 14-year-old nephew. As someone who’s never been heavily into superheroes, manga, anime, or gaming, I found it utterly fascinating. Gary Coleman was there, signing autographs (huh?), and I ran into a guy I knew from grad school, Roland Kelts, who has just published a book called Japanamerica: How Japanese . . .
This is an obviously important question on many fronts, especially since SSRI’s are among the most heavily prescribed drugs in the world, and because their safety and efficacy have lately been seriously questioned. So it would be helpful to know if, at the very least, anti-depressants decrease the probability of suicide. In this new working paper, Jens Ludwig, Dave E. . . .
They would both like to see the new Federal ban on Internet gambling overturned. At least D’Amato is getting paid to do something about it. Am I the only one surprised at how easily Congress enacted the ban? One day it seemed as though Internet gambling was a quasi-legal, hugely profitable, generally accepted practice. Then, all of a sudden, Congress . . .
In his New York Times column the other day (gated), David Brooks wonders aloud, and compellingly, if perhaps New Mexico governor Bill Richardson might somehow rise above the glamorously noisy H. Clinton/B. Obama fray and become the Democratic candidate for President. Here’s what Brooks likes about Richardson: He’s down to earth, accessible, funny, and smart. He is “the most experienced . . .
In the recent dustup over a Wikipedia administrator dubbed Essjay who lied about his academic credentials in a New Yorker profile, here’s how Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales responded when The New Yorker recently ran a correction: Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay’s invented persona, “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really . . .
This one is pretty top-notch. It’s a lecture/performance by Yoram Bauman, who bills himself as the world’s first-and-only stand-up economist. (Hat tip: Roberto Ruiz)
Here’s an interesting new working paper by T. Clifton Green, Narasimhan Jegadeesh, and Yue Tang, all of Emory University, who looked at nearly 8,000 sell-side Wall Street equity analysts in order to assess gender and job performance. In terms of sheer representation, they found that women actually lost ground from 1995 to 2005, from 16% to 13% of analyst positions; . . .
Yesterday I blogged about Al Gore blaming the media for inaction on global warming. Some of you asserted, albeit quite politely, that I am an idiot for disagreeing with Gore. I may well be an idiot, but let me clarify a bit. I acknowledge that I should have put a finer point on my objection to what Gore said. And . . .
The rosters of teams in the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League, and Major League Baseball have all become quite international by now. Not so the National Football League. This isn’t very surprising, since American football is barely played outside of the U.S. and Canada, while the other sports are. But the N.F.L., which dreams of expansion the way . . .
Here’s what he had to say. I would argue that he is, um, wrong. Anyone who can say with a straight face that the mainstream media’s portrayal of global warming has been overly skeptical deserves — well, an Oscar. P.S.: David Remnick wrote a very interesting essay on Gore in this week’s New Yorker (and his long Gore profile from . . .
The other night, I got to give a lecture at California State University, Fresno. I particularly like college lectures because of the audience blend: students (young), faculty/staff (usually medium age), and members of the community (typically older). It made me realize how seldom these different age cohorts assemble naturally. Too bad: the folks at Fresno were a great audience, and . . .
For the record, I do not hate Wikipedia, as I tried to make clear here. As a showcase of communal knowledge, it is astonishingly interesting and useful. But it is also, alas, a showcase of communal knowledge, which can lead to complications. There are other issues too. Back in July, Stacy Shiff published a really interesting piece about Wikipedia in . . .
This morning’s quiz was almost aggressively simple: name the new non-fiction book that was so mesmerizing that I nearly missed my lunch date. Your answers were, as always, pretty sensible: The Audacity of Hope, Infidel, Wikinomics, Survival of the Sickest, Blind Side, Pistol, The Race Beat, US Guys, Oil on the Brain, Size Matters, Stumbling on Happiness. What really surprised . . .
I had a lunch meeting in midtown Manhattan the other day, scheduled for 1:00 p.m. When I got out of the subway at Columbus Circle, I realized that I had about 20 minutes to kill. So I went into a Borders bookstore. I picked up a book on the front table, a new non-fiction book, and became so engrossed in . . .
We received an interesting e-mail not long ago from a gentleman asking if there had been much empirical work done on grief and mourning. His wife had died and he found that he recovered quite readily, but that many others in his situation were severely affected by their grief, to the point that they couldn’t really function in their jobs. . . .
Late notice, but: tonight I’ll be appearing on a two-hour John Stossel 20/20 special called “Scared Stiff: Worry in America” (9-11 p.m. EST). I loved the theme of the show when first approached and, when I started to think through what Freakonomics material would be worth talking about, I realized that nearly everything we’ve written about, either in the book . . .
At least in New Yorker cartoons. Because, as explained here, “the tacit assumption … is that the child is not of Polish origin.”
Anyone with even an ounce of Anglophile in them has to appreciate the news out of the U.K. this morning: 1. The U.K. bookmaking shop William Hill is so sure that countrywoman Helen Mirren will win the Oscar for best actress that it has closed its book on Mirren bets, paying out nearly $100,000 in winnings from the bets already . . .
Barry Bonds‘s baseball career, and his life in general, have been equal parts accomplishment and tumult. I won’t rehearse the details here, since anybody who cares at all is already familiar with them. The most interesting question to me is: Now what? It seems quite likely that if Bonds really wants to break Hank Aaron‘s all-time home run record of . . .
It is stunning to me how the threat of climate change has moved so swiftly from a big, simmering news story to a gigantic, omnipresent news story. One question I hear a lot, however, is this: Does big business care about climate change as much as everyone else? Judging from the pages of the Wall Street Journal, the answer is . . .
How many people read this blog? Who knows. Our hosting service says about 50,000 unique visitors come each day. That’s a lot of people — but when our traffic is analyzed by other companies, the number is considerably less. The other day, I noticed something strange. The little box in the right-hand margin of this page that lists the number . . .
We have been accused of making economics cool. But compared to this Def Poetry Jam performance by Tommy Bottoms, we are bush league. The piece is called “Basic Economics,” and to my mind it is as well-written as it is well-performed. If I were a high-school economics teacher, I’d use it in my class (although truthfully it’s more of an . . .
Here’s what showed up in the in-box today: You believe “economics is how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing,” What else are you going to pull out of high school economic text books? What is even more disturbing is the large amount of readers that believe this sort of . . .
About a year ago, we wrote this article about how real-estate agents would seem to be an endangered species. The article included an interesting piece of research (by Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti) which showed that even during a real-estate boom, the typical agent doesn’t make a whole lot of money. Why not? Because the barriers to entry are so . . .
How dangerous is the flu? Probably more than most people think. Influenza/Pneumonia is regularly among the ten leading causes of death in the U.S. But there is more to it than that. This paper by Doug Almond makes a broad and interesting argument about the flu. By using the shock of the 1918 influenza pandemic, Almond measured the effect of . . .
We recently wrote about how some $8 billion in gift card value goes unredeemed in a given year, representing 10% of all gift card purchases. In the retail industry, this $8 billion gift is called “breakage.” State lotteries, it turns out, also rake in a bit of breakage. Here’s a N.Y. Times article about winning lottery tickets that go unclaimed, . . .
If you worry about your home being burglarized, you might want to take a look at this interview with a burglar who gives some advice about where to hide your valuables. His obvious answer: “at the bank.” But he’s got a few other pointers too, including: 1. If you do keep cash in the house, leave a little of it . . .
David Mills, a TV writer who used to write for newspapers, is regularly surprised — and irked — when newspapers and magazines misidentify black people in articles and photo captions. “I mean famous black people,” Mills writes on his Undercover Black Man blog. So he has begun a Misidentified Black Person of the Week feature, with the aim of creating . . .
Lenny “Nails” Dykstra now writes an investing column on TheStreet.com. And the rest, as they say, is commentary.
Daniel Gross, who writes good popular economics pieces for Slate, the New York Times, and sometimes New York, published a Times piece on Sunday that will cheer fans of congestion pricing, the practice of charging higher tolls when roads are busier: “[T]he $2.9 trillion fiscal 2008 budget released by President Bush on Monday contained some excellent news: $130 million in . . .
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