At least not on airplanes. That’s what Boeing has decided. As someone who has bought wireless internet aboard a Boeing flight (I believe it was on Lufthansa, going to Germany), I recently received this e-mail: Dear Customer, On August 17, 2006, the Boeing Company announced that after a detailed analysis of the Connexion by Boeing business, the company has decided . . .
There have been many discussions on this blog, probably too many, about Realtors. (Click here or here or here, or, if you’re really twisted, just type “Realtor” in this page’s search box.) The gist? The National Association of Realtors has done a great job protecting its members but at the expense of allowing homesellers and buyers to enjoy a truly . . .
A 62-year-old man in Columbus, Ohio, robs a bank and promptly turns in the cash — and himself. Why? According to this CNN article, because he’s jobless and broke, and wants to get sent to jail to get his three square meals. The judge obliged, giving him a three-year sentence. It’s too bad this news didn’t break until he’d already . . .
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what the Internet was created for: Floyd Landis, the tainted Tour de France winner, has used his website to post a voluminous defense against doping charges. The material includes: + his attorney’s motion for dismissal + a “complete World Anti-Doping Agency document package, inclusive of the testing information from Landis’s ‘A’and ‘B’ samples” + a . . .
… in the book of Genesis, when the world is created. Can you imagine the loot He could have landed for the naming rights of every animal, mineral, and vegetable? If God was unlucky to toil in the days before corporate sponsorship, at least the Chicago White Sox, thank God, are not so unlucky. They have just announced that for . . .
There’s a really interesting profile of Tavis Smiley in today’s N.Y. Times. (FWIW, Levitt and I were on his talk show back in July.) Smiley is perhaps best known these days for putting together The Covenant With Black America, a collection of essays about education, health care, crime, finance, and so on. The implicit point is that black America still . . .
… you read this headline on the front page of Yahoo! News: “World’s 15th-Largest Rough Diamond Sold.” I guess the owners of the fourteen larger rough diamonds are too busy celebrating Columbus Day to make a deal.
I am one of those people who grew up living, breathing, and playing baseball but who has since become a casual observer at best. That said, since I live in New York it’s hard to not get caught up in the apocalyptic reaction to the Yankees’ elimination (and, though it has far less Shakespearian gravitas, the Mets’ currently lovely position). . . .
I have long heard the argument that one reason for the decline in teacher quality in U.S. schools (if in fact there has been such a decline) was the feminist movement. The argument goes like this: until the mid-1960’s or so, teaching was one of the few career paths wide open to women; as feminism opened up opportunities for women . . .
In the interest of not piling on, I was initially reluctant to mention this working paper, posted on the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies website, about the flaws in the commission structure used by Realtors. Especially since its author, an attorney for the federal government named Mark S. Nadel, cites our book as well as a more recent article . . .
There’s a pretty fascinating Editors’ Note in today’s New York Times concerning Hugo Chavez and Noam Chomsky. (An Editors’ Note is the most serious of three types of corrections the Times runs; the other two types are called For the Record and Corrections.) You all probably all remember Chavez’s performance at the United Nations a couple weeks ago, during which . . .
I’m not much for fashion magazines, but judging from my wife’s reading habits, Allure is a pretty good one. That’s why I was happy when a nice blogger named Elsa Kaminsky (whose blog combines her interests in economics and fashion) alerted us that a copy of Freakonomics can be seen poking out of a model’s Chanel bag in the current . . .
Ever wonder what are the most common searches among Yellow Pages users? Here’s a list of the top 300 categories, from the Yellow Pages Association research institute. The top 10 categories are: 1. Restaurants 2. Physicians and Surgeons 3. Automobile Parts 4. Automobile Repairing & Service 5. Pizza 6. Attorneys/Lawyers 7. Automobile Dealers 8. Dentists 9. Hospitals 10. Plumbing Contractors . . .
Eric Clapton famously stopped performing the J.J. Cale song “Cocaine” once he got sober. But now he’s resumed. Why? After all these years, Clapton decided that the song is in fact anti-drug; plus, he admits, he just really missed playing the guitar riff. In other cocaine news, there’s a new carbonated energy drink called Cocaine, with about three times the . . .
I posted earlier about how Soviet chess players used to collude in international tournaments. As documented in today’s New York Times, and far more thoroughly on chessbase.com, we learn that the world chess championship has come to a halt because Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria filed a protest against his opponent, Vladimir Kramnik of Russia. Kramnik was leading 3-1 at the . . .
Think of all the service people who habitually get tips: hotel bellmen, taxi drivers, waiters and waitresses, the guys who handle curbside baggage at airports, sometimes even the baristas at Starbucks. But not flight attendants. Why not? Maybe it’s because they’re thought to earn a pretty good living and don’t need the tips. Maybe it’s because they’re simply thought to . . .
I am pleased to announce that the Freakonomics website is now a part of Federated Media Publishing, a consortium of blogs (including BoingBoing, BuzzMachine, Digg, and GigaOM) founded by John Battelle. This means, among other changes, that our site will now accept advertising. (You may have already spotted a banner for CNBC earlier this week.) We are also planning a . . .
I really like my dentist, Dr. Reiss. He’s in his late 60’s, maybe even in his early 70’s. To say that he knows his way around the mouth is an understatement. But that’s not the only reason I like him. A couple years ago, he told me how he solved a particular problem. Because he’s getting on in years, a . . .
That’s the question posed by a reader named John from New York City. I am not sure whether he wrote in response to our New York Times column on hand-washing, which has prompted a lot of e-mails on all matters medical. Regardless, John raises an intriguing and important question whose answers I know nothing about, but I’d love to learn . . .
Our latest “Freakonomics” column in the New York Times Magazine is about hospital-acquired bacterial infections, and how doctors don’t always do a very good job of washing their hands, and how one hospital set out to fight this problem. As always, we’ve posted some of the research behind the column elsewhere on this website.
Just arrived in the mail is a handsome new book called Freakonomics: Revised and Expanded Edition, which should be in stores in a week or two. (Here is the Amazon link.) As the name implies, it is a little bit revised (mostly correcting errors or things that have changed in the world since the book was originally published, in April . . .
If anyone is still reading this blog, let us offer our apologies for a couple of weeks’ worth of very buggy behavior. The site has often been inaccessible, even to us, which is why we have barely blogged in recent days. The problem seems to be largely the fault of — well, of you. When we started this blog and . . .
The final chapter of Freakonomics is about first names — whether they have an impact on a person’s life and how they travel through the different strata of society. While it’s true that most popular names start out among the middle and upper classes and then travel downward, it’s also true that some old-fashioned names (we cite Max and Sophie . . .
A few days ago, I posted about GetHuman and Bringo!/NoPhoneTrees.com, two sites that help people deal with customer phone support. I then received this follow-up e-mail from Clement Wang, one of the founders of Bringo, who wanted to respond to some of the reader comments on this blog and elsewhere. It read, in part: I’d like to make a few . . .
… is an e-book version of the North American Business Islamic Directory. One likely reason it’s ranked so high on Amazon is the price: one cent. (So much for my support of the penny’s extinction.) But does anyone have any idea why this unusual book is ranked, as of this writing, at No. 5? In related news on book pricing, . . .
I am probably typical in that I hate making a customer-service call to just about any large company. The odds of getting useful information in anything under a half hour are pretty slim. One problem is that many companies’ “phone trees” — the automated menus that ask you to mash one button after the next — are silly mazes that . . .
The Asian Sex Gazette, an online (and perhaps offline) publication whose content is a bit risque for this PG-rated blog (I found the link over at the excellent Marginal Revolution website, which plainly has a pervier crowd), reports that some Chinese funerals feature graveside strippers: The more people that come to a funeral in China, the better the deceased is . . .
There are three key words missing from this news report about a new Al-Qaeda videotape: Osama bin Laden. He is generally assumed to be alive but doesn’t it seem fairly likely that he may already be dead? If he can’t be found in order to be captured or killed, how are we to know that he’s still alive? But here’s . . .
For the record, I like Wikipedia just fine, as long as people understand what it is and what it isn’t. What it is: a useful and engaging enterprise in user-generated content about a mind-blowingly diverse range of subjects. What it isn’t: a dependable substitute for a reference work, at least not in many cases. We have touched on this dichotomy . . .
As of today, Google Book Search affords you the opportunity to read or even download the complete text of many out-of-copyright books, including Hamlet, Aesop’s Fables, the Inferno, and many more. Here’s the news on Google’s own blog. If you’re looking for a current book, and you also don’t want to pay a penny, you might consider Book Mooch. And . . .
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