The 2007 Economics Report of the President is to be released this afternoon, and posted online here. Then at 4:30 p.m. EST, Ed Lazear, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, will discuss the report in a conference call with … bloggers. I don’t know whether the decision to do this was made before or after it was revealed that . . .
NASCAR recently made several changes for its 2007 Nextel Cup season. Perhaps the most significant was increasing the incentive to actually win the races. Since the Nextel Cup is a points tournament, a driver can do very well by just hanging around and finishing near the top. But now, by awarding more points to the winner of each race, NASCAR . . .
In Sicily last Friday, during a soccer match between Catania and Palermo, fans rioted outside the stadium with bombs and steel pipes, resulting in the death of a police officer. As a result, most soccer matches throughout Italy this weekend will be played in empty stadiums. That’s right: fans are being barred from soccer games until the authorities can figure . . .
Here’s what it looked like then. The stats are fun, too. But here is the best page. Hat tip to James Altucher’s Daily Blog Watch. Between DBW and Stockpickr, it looks like my friend James has kinda taken over TheStreet.com. As I’ve said before, James is an amazing guy. He was going to be one of the main characters in . . .
In responding to yesterday’s post about the astronaut love triangle (or, more appropriately, “love V,” as one wise commenter put it), you all offered a number of compelling explanations for the story’s explosion. I must say, however, that I was surprised to read that so many people think of astronauts as larger-than-life heroes, only because I thought that image was . . .
I have been traveling yesterday and today, and have therefore caught more unintentional snippets of media — blaring TV’s in restaurants, hotel lobbies, airport lounges, etc. — than usual. And the same story has been on every single TV: the astronaut love triangle. First I thought it was because I’m in Houston, where Lisa Nowak began her 900-mile diapered drive. . . .
In the section in Freakonomics about online dating, we referred to some of the more specialized dating sites: ChristianSingles.com, LatinMatcher.com, USMilitarySingles.com, PlusSizeSingles.com, etc. Now there’s a new dating site that serves a shrinking but apparently underserved market: American farmers. FarmersOnly.com is “THE place for farmers, ranchers, and down-to-earth people who relate to the agricultural lifestyle to meet their match.” The . . .
Despite speculation about Rudy Giuliani’s reluctance to run for President, and skepticism that he’s a viable candidate, it looks as though he’s about ready to officially declare himself a candidate. This comes as little surprise to anyone who received the following “Team Rudy” e-mail from Brent Seaborn, a former Bush operative now putting together the Giuliani campaign team. Are Giuliani’s . . .
I read a Wall Street Journal article a few weeks ago about how one very promising form of biofuel, palm oil, is in fact having deleterious effects on the environment. In Southeast Asia, farmers cleared huge swaths of rainforest in order to create palm plantations; they also drained and burned off peatland to create arable land, generating massive smoke pollution. . . .
A friend spotted this book in a store the other day, and thought it bore a certain resemblance to another book he’d seen. I have to say, I don’t get what a dollar bill has to do with an apple. But I was particularly tickled by the title: This is not the first book cover that’s a bit familiar. There . . .
They are among the celebrities featured in a new ad campaign by the Wall Street Journal. Here’s the story — which, unfortunately, doesn’t mention Levitt. But trust me, he’ll show up in the campaign. Remember when Levitt blogged about a very, very strange photo shoot? This is the one. In exchange for appearing in the ad, Levitt (and I assume . . .
Whenever I get change for a dollar, I ask the cashier to keep the pennies. They aren’t worth my time, or hers, or yours. Sometimes the cashier refuses for bookkeeping purposes, in which case I politely accept the pennies and then throw them in the nearest trash can. (Is this illegal? Maybe so, but then so is throwing pennies into . . .
When I first read this headline — “Doctors Warn of Poisoning From Hand Gels” — I assumed the accompanying Reuters article was about the potential danger of becoming too dependent on alcohol-based disinfectants like Purell. (Here’s an article we wrote about hospital-acquired infections and the pressing need for medical personnel to clean their hands; here’s a more recent development.) The . . .
That is my conclusion after seeing this Google Book Search Page for a book called How to Build Your Own Furniture. The page lists three “Related Books,” including How to Make Your Own Recreation and Hobby Rooms, How to Build Your Cabin or Modern Vacation Home, and … Freakonomics. Huh? I am trying to think of what may have fooled . . .
Here’s a new website, from the Dept. of Health & Human Services, that lets you see how your hospital compares to others. Here’s another new site, from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, that lets you see how a particular news story is covered in various media outlets. And if you just need to complain about something, here are some . . .
Even though Americans may be less concerned with global warming than people in many other countries, it is amazing how the subject has recently become so omnipresent. The media is brimming with global warming stories every day, from a variety of angles: environmental, economic, political, etc. How did this happen? How has such a sweeping, complex, controversial issue become such . . .
There’s a new John Tierney column out today, a good one, on doomsday predictions (mostly concerning biological weapons), and who’s backing up their predictions with cash (including Tierney) on LongBets.org. There’s more information on Tierney’s blog, including a link to this interesting essay by Steven Pinker about the overall decline of violence in modern times.
The other day, I posted here about a reader’s complaint that the San Francisco Chronicle turned into a podcast. It was a voicemail message from a man who objected, very strenuously, to some redundant language in a Chronicle article. It was the first installment of a new audio feature the Chronicle is calling “Correct Me if I’m Wrong,” and as . . .
It’s one thing to see a flame war break out on a Web site. But it can’t compare to actually hearing the flamer at work. That was the realization of the S.F. Chronicle, which just had the insanely entertaining idea of turning irate readers’ phone messages into podcasts. Here’s the first one. I will give a prize to the first . . .
Nice post here at Complete that breaks down Web traffic not by unique visitors or even page views, but by time spent at a particular site. The winner, by a gigantic landslide: MySpace. Most of the rest of the top 20 aren’t that surprising (Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Facebook, eBay, etc .). It’s interesting to me that only one bank made the . . .
Jon Tester, the new senator from Montana, posts his daily appointment schedule on his website for all the world to see. According to this A.P. article by Mary Clare Jalonick, such transparency is “fulfilling a promise the Democrat made in his campaign against Republican Sen. Conrad Burns last year. Burns attracted heat for his relationship with Washington interests — most . . .
David Shenk, author of a bunch of really interesting non-fiction books including this one on chess, and this one on Alzheimer’s disease, has begun working on a book about talent. In one key regard, Shenk is following in footsteps of, inter alia, Chris Anderson, who used a blog to help develop the content of his book, both called The Long . . .
Levitt posted a quiz here, and then gave one hint, and then another. Nobody has come up with exactly the right answer yet, however. I’m not all that surprised: what the conference organizer did was indeed pretty tricky. A lot of you were close, or had different elements of the answer right, but not quite. Now Levitt has gotten on . . .
Pardon this brief interruption of contest fever (see three previous entries) but … Here’s a nice observation written by Nicole Tourtelot, who toils away here in the Freakonomics office (maintaining this Web site, fulfilling bookplate requests, etc.): Dubner posted recently about intentionally misspelled domain names, such as Stockpickr.com, that aim to grab clumsy typists and/or poor spellers. The idea that . . .
As a creative response to last night’s State of the Union Address, the N.Y. Times OpEd page today prints the lyrics to a recent Randy Newman song, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country.” If you are thinking of satire along the lines of Newman’s “Short People,” you are mostly wrong. The lyrics are mostly in earnest, with Newman . . .
In Freakonomics, we wrote about how Sudhir Venkatesh, at the time a graduate student in sociology, stumbled across a crack gang who promptly held him hostage until they determined he wasn’t a cop or a rival gangster. Well, if you like that kind of story then you’ll probably love a new book called The Birthday Party, a memoir by a . . .
It’s true: one week from today, it will be Milton Friedman Day, “a day of national celebration and remembrance of Friedman’s life and his influence on American society and economic systems.” It will feature, among many other things, a day of web-based discussion hosted by The Economist; debates and discussion at various universities; and a national PBS broadcast of The . . .
This story sounds too weird to be true, and yet I have a feeling it is true. It concerns knitting. It seems that knitting has become an increasingly popular hobby among a large slice of middle- and upper-class American women. We here at Freakonomics are not unfamiliar with this phenomenon: Levitt’s sister runs Yarnzilla, an online and brick-and-mortar knitting emporium; . . .
I guess Levitt and I should talk a bit more often. Less than half an hour ago, I posted here about Consumer Reports retracting a study on infant car seats. Eight minutes later, Levitt did the same.
It’s for Art Buchwald, who died today. Here’s his obituary in the N.Y. Times; click on the “video feature” link, and you’ll see a brief video obituary, with Buchwald himself delivering an opening line that, in a newspapers-moving-to-the-web way, ranks right up there with Alexander Bell’s famous “Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you.” Here’s what . . .
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