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 . . .
We blogged here recently about Connsumer Reports study declaring that most infant car seats failed miserably in side-impact crash tests. Now comes word that Consumer Reports is retracting the study, an acknowledgment that the study’s methodology was flawed. According to this MSNBC report, the study was meant to test the seats in 38-mph crashes, whereas the actual speed of the . . .
Due to a busy day today, the best I can do here is link to a few noteworthy articles in this morning’s N.Y. Times: … a report by Denise Grady on a small but significant drop in cancer deaths, an article that includes a concise but very good rollup of the state of cancer in general. (Here, in a paragraph . . .
Richard Branson’s new Virgin America airline, that is. The U.S. Dept. of Transportation has rejected Virgin America’s application to fly domestically, on the basis of its foreign ownership. So Virgin is taking is plight straight to the people, with a tantalizing website replete with petition.
I am scheduled to appear on Good Morning America tomorrow (Thurs., Jan. 18), sometime between 8:00 and 8:30 a.m. E.T., to talk about this stuff. Later in the day, I get to sit on an author’s panel at a conference that Google is holding on the digital future of book publishing.
Most people who need to have an MRI aren’t thrilled about it. It’s not a very pleasant experience, and it generally means that something’s wrong with you. A few years ago, however, I was clamoring to get my brain inside an fMRI machine (the “f” stands for “functional”; an fMRI is capable of measuring neural activity). I was about 18 . . .
This place claims to have invented the hamburger. This one claims to have invented the Bloody Mary, or at least introduced it to Americans. And this guy claims to have dropped nine pounds by playing the Wii for a half hour every day for 6 weeks. (He also broke his girlfriend’s laptop in the process.)
And a N.Y. State Supreme Court justice says so.
John Burns is a brilliant reporter and writer at the N.Y. Times, currently reporting from Iraq. Today he’s got the lead front-page article headlined “Second Hanging Also Went Awry, Iraq Tape Shows … One of 2 Men Decapitated.” The man in question is Saddam Hussein’s half-brother. The second paragraph begins like this: “An official video played to a small group . . .
Benjamin Hoffman has an article in today’s N.Y. Times about an investment banker named Gary Boren whom the Dallas Mavericks use as their free-throw guru. He films the players’ free-throw attempts, breaks down their mechanics, and then teaches them to improve. “Since he joined the Mavericks [in 1999],” Hoffman writes, “they have finished in the top six in the league . . .
There’s an article in today’s N.Y. Times about how many women buy luxury items with cash instead of a credit card so their boyfriends or husbands won’t find out and hassle them. “His tastes aren’t as expensive as mine, and he doesn’t understand the need to have so many pricey things,” says one woman who is paying cash for a . . .
From an article in today’s N.Y. Times about Manhattan’s eternal congestion woes: 35.1% of government workers drive to work instead of taking public transportation, second only to workers in “transportation, warehousing and utilities,” at 36.1%. Comparatively, only 15.1% of workers in the retail trade drive into the city, and 14% of finance workers. Now these numbers are not nearly as . . .
My favorite TV show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, has finally come in No. 1 in some category: Time-Shifted Primetime TV Programs, as measured by Nielsen Media Research. This means shows that are watched, typically via a DVR, after they are broadcast live. I am not sure if it includes sales via iTunes (if anyone knows, please shout), which . . .
One of the most interesting reporting experiences I ever had was attending a four-day seminar that the National Football League runs each year for its incoming rookies, trying to prepare them for life in (and after) the N.F.L. Not the football part, but the life part: handling money, staying away from bad influences, etc. It soon emerged that, for a . . .
Not because higher gas prices will spur people to walk or ride bicycles instead of driving. No, I’m thinking it might work like this: — Notwithstanding the recent drop, high oil prices have driven a demand for ethanol made from corn. — Accordingly, the price of corn is rising fast, with July contracts at $4/bushel, about 60 percent higher than . . .
Plainly, a lot of people these days are interested in happiness — how to get happy, why some people are happier than others, etc. For example, there’s Dan Gilbert’s best-seller Stumbling on Happiness and, currently at No. 1 on the N.Y. Times‘s list of most e-mailed articles, a piece by Dan Max about university happiness studies. Among the most intriguing . . .
I blogged recently about a small controversy over the film Happy Feet. It was about whether the tap dancer Savion Glover (whose website has the best possible opening-title sequence) should have gotten more credit for doing the actual dancing that Mumble, the animated penguin, performs in the film. My wife and I took our kids to see the film for . . .
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