Here is a very interesting and, to my mind, useful letter to the editor of Sports Illustrated, written by Brandon Gaut of Irvine, Calif., whose home page is here: As a scientist and a sports fan, I believe the current doping scandals compromise science as much as sports. The tests are performed by entities motivated by and funded to achieve . . .
Matthew Broderick just broke his collarbone while riding a horse. This makes Broderick the fourth or fifth person I have heard of in recent months who was injured while riding a horse. This got me to thinking: how dangerous is horseback riding, especially as compared to, say, riding a motorcycle? A quick Google search turns up this 1990 CDC report, . . .
Today’s New York Times has a long and very interesting article on the recent plot by radical Muslims in Britian to blow up a bunch of airplanes. But the article, written by Don Van Natta Jr., Elaine Sciolino, and Stephen Grey, is not available online (not yet, at least), because of legal concerns. As the Times explains, “This arises from . . .
In the epilogue of Freakonomics, we admitted that we had written a book that had no unifying them and which probably didn’t help a reader solve any real problems. The best we could hope for, we wrote, was that “You might become more skeptical of the conventional wisdom; you may begin looking for hints as to how things aren’t quite . . .
From A Treatise on Diseases of the Nervous System, by William A. Hammond (published 1871), here are some of the then-known causes of dementia: Among the physical causes, drunkenness, the use of opium, and other narcotics, excessive veneral indulgence, masturbation, blows on the head, exposure to severe heat or cold, the puerperal state [being pregnant], and certain diseases may be . . .
One of my favorite blogs is OrthoMom, the musings of an Orthodox Jewish mom. It is nicely written, almost always interesting, and intimate in the best sense of the word — as if it were a conversation between friends. (And I love her “Heroine of the Day” series.) The most recent posting is about the real-estate needs of Orthodox Jews, . . .
Mark Cuban, who is the richest blogger that I know of, and also one of the most prolific, shares a story about the Wikipedia entry about himself. To all you Wikipedia fundamentalists: I do not hate you, or Wikipedia. (If I hated it, I probably wouldn’t have called Wikipedia “generally fun, sometimes useful, often entertaining” in my last post on . . .
Because I am not left-handed, I have never taken much pleasure in the endless parade of studies, articles, and anecdotes about how left-handed people are better at everything than right-handed people. But that doesn’t mean the studies stop coming; here’s the latest, by the economists Christopher S. Ruebeck, Joseph E. Harrington, and Robert Moffitt. At least we righties can console . . .
Thanks to the section of Freakonomics that dealt with unusual first names, we regularly get e-mails from readers telling us about a particularly good example. (Maybe we should make such submissions a regular feature of this blog?) Anyway, I don’t think there’s been a better submission that the one that came this morning, courtesy of David Tinker of Pittsburgh. He . . .
I think that every son, and especially every male writer, has an awful lot to say about his own father. My father died when I was a kid; I wrote quite a bit about him in this book and in this one. One of my favorite father-son memoirs of all time is The Duke of Deception, by Geoffrey Wolff, who . . .
Grigori Perelman is the 40-year-old Russian mathematician who has been credited with resolving the Poincare Conjecture, one of the most important questions in math. But Perelman chose not to attend the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, where he was to be given a Fields Medal by Spanish king Juan Carlos. Perelman has also neglected to pick up the $1 . . .
Anybody care to know the most common first names of Liverpool’s criminals? Martin Rosenbaum, on his BBC News blog, has posted such a list, including types of offenses. Now all someone has to do is cross-index the most popular criminal names with the most popular names in general and break them out according to socioeconomic status, etc. As it now . . .
In New York City, at least, it sometimes seems that way. Not long ago, we wrote a column about how a real-estate boom actually lowers median Realtor income because of all the new agents who rush in to join the boom. Homethinking.com, a new website that allows customers to rate Realtors, has posted an interesting item on Realtor density. It . . .
A 30-year-old Belgian municipal worker named Reno has a website called Shoot My Blog, a sort of meta-site on which he posts user-submitted photos of computer monitors showing his blog page. I am particularly fond of the family of computers in bed together. Reno says he is running this submission contest merely to engender creativity (and promote his own website), . . .
If there is a more insightful, interesting, appealing, or prolific writer on pro football than Peter King, someone please point me to him.
My son Solomon turned six the other day. This morning, he watched me on Good Morning America. My wife Ellen and four-year-old daughter Anya were also watching at home. Ellen later reported Solomon’s reaction: When Diane Sawyer said the word “economics” during the segment, Solomon turned to his mom and said, “Hey, why’d that lady say economics? Didn’t she mean . . .
I recently got an e-mail from someone who works for the Community Financial Services Association, the national trade group of payday lenders. She is unhappy that Congress wants to put a cap on the rates that payday lenders can charge. The proposed cap is 36% APR. If this legislation were passed, the CFSA woman writes, “Payday advance lenders could not . . .
Here’s a quasi-serious letter, putatively written by a Marylander named Paul McGlaughlin, asking his senator (Paul Sarbanes) to revoke his status from legal citizen to illegal immigrant. He’s after the tax break, of course. You have to admit, it’s a pretty clever ploy. (HT: Chris Albon)
David Cay Johnston, who does an incredible job covering U.S. tax policy and other business issues for the N.Y. Times, today has an interesting article about how the I.R.S. is outsourcing the collection of back taxes to third parties — i.e., collection agencies. “The private debt collection program,” Johnston writes, “is expected to bring in $1.4 billion over 10 years, . . .
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is starting a massive campaign against drunk driving. “We’re taking the gloves off on drunk driving,” Nicole R. Nason, the NHTSA administrator, told the New York Times. “This country has made tremendous strides against drunk driving through the 1980’s and into the early 1990’s. But the numbers have been flat for the last decade.” . . .
I am not a big fan of animal feces left lying about, whether on sidewalks or parks or at the beach. We even devoted one of our N.Y. Times columns to addressing the problem of dog poop in NYC. But dogs at least have owners, who sometimes pick up after their pets. Wild Canadian geese have no such overseers — . . .
I realize I am a little late on this, but a small company in Minnesota has decided to place ads in college textbooks, which means that instead of paying $500 or $1,000 for a semester’s worth of textbooks, a student might someday pay … $0. (HT: Alon Nir.)
I am in the middle of a Cape Cod vacation with my family, so I haven’t been to a Starbucks lately. But I’ve been told that Starbucks is now featuring a coffee cup with a Freakonomics quote on it, which goes something like this: “Morality describes the way that any of us would like the world to work. Economics describes . . .
This guy is offering to be your best friend, for a price, via eBay. He lives in New York City and calls himself Rent-a-Pal: “The lucky Winning Bidder and RENTAPAL will exchange unlimited emails for a period of 30 DAYS on any subject that you like. RENTAPAL will provide you with a compassionate ear, good conversation, feedback and advice – . . .
There is a new study claiming that music with sexually explicit lyrics causes teenagers to have sex earlier. The lead author is Steven Martino, a Rand researcher, and the study will be published in the August issue of Pediatrics; the data come from telephone interviews with 1,461 participants, aged 12 to 17. I haven’t read the study itself, but here’s . . .
That’s what I learned these past few days, when I took my 5-year-old son Solomon to visit the Pittsburgh Steelers’ training camp in Latrobe, Pa. Watching a pro football team in camp is awesome in a very different way than watching a game live, even if you watch a game from the sidelines, as I’ve done a few times. A . . .
Wikipedia is generally fun, sometimes useful, often entertaining. What it isn’t is very dependable, for the very reason that makes it fun: it is an encyclopedia whose content is generated by random contributors. We’ve touched on this subject a few times on this blog, here and here and here. But Stephen Colbert has done a better job of ridiculing Wikipedia . . .
It may be that the unattractive man has a lot of money, or some other compelling attribute. But a new study by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, suggests it may be a simple supply-and-demand issue: there are more beautiful women in the world than there are handsome men. Why? Kanazawa argues it’s because good-looking . . .
The answer is, apparently, not very. Several months ago, Newsweek magazine proclaimed economics the “sexiest trade alive,” arguing that “There’s no doubt that Freakonomics did its part in glamorizing the trade.” But in Turkey, where our book has recently been published, the book alone clearly did not have enough sex appeal. So the publisher had to sex it up with . . .
The main event of the World Series of Poker gets underway today at the Rio in Las Vegas. Why do I want Phil Gordon to win? It’s not just because he’s such a nice guy, or because he’s so smart, or because of his philanthropic endeavors, or even because he’s so tall. It has to do with the game of . . .
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