A little-known fact: Steve Levitt is a pretty big NASCAR fan. As for my interest in auto racing — well, I spent five years in North Carolina, both up in the mountains (where, as lore held it, racecar drivers got their training by running moonshine down the mountain roads) and also in Winston-Salem (where the Friday-night roar of cars from . . .
So what do you do if you’re a Jewish cartoonist in Israel and the following happens: a. A Danish newspaper commissions artists to draw editorial cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad, and said cartoons set off a furor in the Muslim world. b. Iran responds to said furor by putting out a call for anti-Semitic cartoons about the Holocaust. (Sure, that’s . . .
Just in time for Torino comes this highly engaging blog posting from Joe Clark in which he makes the seemingly sound argument that women are certainly big enough to play hockey with men. (Size, of course, does not necessarily connote power and aggression and skill, but I’ll leave that question to Joe Clark, and Michelle Wie, and others more qualified . . .
Last night I flew from from New York to Los Angeles. The guy sitting next to me had been in many industries over the years, including apparel, insurance, tech, etc. Pittsburgh Steelers fan that I am, I was reading the current issue of Sports Illustrated, which is so black and gold this week that it looks like a Steelers newsletter. . . .
Here’s a website that lets you do just that, built by the dogged John Walsh. (Hat tip to QualityG.)
Here is a fairly meaty Q&A with Milton Friedman, from New Perspectives Quarterly. The man, unsurprisingly, has some interesting things to say, and he isn’t shy about saying them. (Hat tip, once again, to Adam Scott.)
Freakonomics has just been published in Germany, and according to Amazon.de, it seems to be finding an audience.
Ever wonder what kind of books sell in Dubai? Take a look. I wonder if Tom Friedman and Billy Crystal know that their books are considered fiction in Dubai. Or, for that matter, James Frey.
That is the topic of an article Levitt and I wrote for Play, a new sports magazine being birthed this Sunday by The New York Times. The issue will probably go online late Saturday night (2/4/06) and, as always, we’ll post a page on this website with some supplemental information, including an academic paper that Levitt wrote on N.F.L. gambling. . . .
A friend of mine, Ellen Pall, has started a website to address a pressing need: how to know, when approaching the works of an unfamiliar author, which are the good books to read and which are the ones to avoid. The content of the website will be contributed by users, and Ellen is looking for all willing participants. (I don’t . . .
Not likely. But now that Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink is in development, Wired magazine took a shot at conceiving Hollywood versions of Freakonomics and a few other unlikely books. Here’s the link. (Thanks to Muriel Binder, my mother-in-law, for the tip.)
Brad DeLong, the noted blogger, Berkeley economics professor, and former Treasury Department official, has teamed up with Susan Rasky, a professor in Berkeley’s journalism school, to address economic illiteracy in the media. Here’s the story.
What would you do if you were, say, a prosecutor or a journalist or maybe just a snoop who suddenly gained access to a few hundred thousand e-mails from some rogue company and needed to make sense of them? A company called MetaLINCS has created a tool to analyze such a mountain of e-mails, and is offering a demo version . . .
The Indianapolis Star, a daily newspaper owned by the Gannett chain, had big plans for the Colts’ march to the Super Bowl. I guess what’s bad for the Star is good news, this week at least, for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
It’s all in the title. (Thanks again, Linda Jines.) Check out Lulu Titlescorer, a fairly addictive little website that attempts to calculate whether a book’s title will make it a best-seller.
A lot of people were surprised when Oprah Winfrey called in during Larry King’s interview of James Frey to stand behind Frey in the mess about whether, or just how much, Frey fictionalized his experiences in A Million Little Pieces. Winfrey argued that while some of Frey’s details may not be the stuff of non-fiction, the overall reading experience resonated . . .
Well, probably not. But Freakonomics is among the books that Elizabeth and John Edwards (remember them?) are considering for the next book in their online book group. Here’s the link.
It’s something that a lot of people think about, but rarely does anyone come right out and accuse the National Football League of rigging its games. For a conspiracy theorist, or even just a guy holding a losing betting slip that was a winner right up ’til that bogus call with 30 seconds left that allowed the underdog to close . . .
Last weekend, in the Cincinnati Bengals’ first playoff game in 15 years, quarterback Carson Palmer was badly injured on the Bengals’ second play from scrimmage. Kimo von Oelhoffen, a lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers, tackled him low and Palmer’s knee essentially collapsed. (The Bengals went on to lose to the Steelers, a team that happens to be my favorite, but . . .
If I were a Realtor, I might feel right about now that the entire free world has turned against me, having decided I’m a sharp-elbowed, greed-driven hustler trying to preserve an advantage that I don’t deserve. And I’d probably be right. In today’s New York Times is yet another chronicle of how the National Association of Realtors has used its . . .
For all the talk in recent years of how the Internet will kill off the already dwindling audience of book readers, it struck me recently that perhaps this theory will prove to be exactly wrong. One of the most common Internet memes is the reading list — a 50-book challenge or some such — in which people all over the . . .
One of the frustrations of any author is that very few books are published in large-print editions. I’m guessing the economics are quite perilous but still, it is frustrating that so many elderly and vision-impaired readers don’t have an appropriate version to read. Well, it took 9 months but Freakonomics is at last available in a large-print, paperback edition. Here’s . . .
The first round of signed bookplates, about 800 or so, have been sent out. Another 1,200 should be mailed within a week or two. Thanks for your requests and especially your patience. It turns out, however, that the reward may not be worth the wait. Here is an e-mail from one recent bookplate recipient: Thank you very much for the . . .
In yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, and in accompanying blog posts here and here, we described how one of the stories in our book turned out to be a little less true than we thought. Now comes word that James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces is also more of a based-on-a-true story book than an actual work of nonfiction. The . . .
Our latest column in The New York Times Magazine is a pretty unusual one. In the past, we’ve written about child car seats, dog poop, the price of sex, the economics of voting, and monkeys learning to use money. In this column, we revisited a story we told in Freakonomics. In the chapter called “How Is the Ku Klux Klan . . .
So Levitt and I were in Las Vegas this weekend, doing some research. (Seriously.) We had a little downtime and we decided to play blackjack. It was New Year’s Eve, at Caesars Palace, about 9 p.m. We sat down at an empty table where the dealer, a nice young woman from Michigan, was very patient in teaching us the various . . .
We’ve started to get e-mails from increasingly far-flung places, asking when Freakonomics is being published in other countries and languages. So we asked for a list of the foreign publication schedule, and here’s what we got. The first group is an alphabetical list of the countries where the book has already been published or will be soon. The second group . . .
In today’s New York Times review of Rodney Stark’s book Victory of Reason, which asserts that historical Christianity helped the development of capitalism far more than it hindered the same, William Grimes (the reviewer) offers this tasty example: Christian theology, which Mr. Stark praises as constantly evolving, kept pace with economic developments. Thinkers like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas gave their . . .
We haven’t written much on this blog about customer satisfaction outside of this little rant about rancid chicken and, even more tangentially, this one about mood-tracking software. But here’s something worth looking into a bit more seriously. Claes Fornell, a b-school professor at Michigan and the man behind the American Customer Satisfaction Index, has co-written a new paper asserting that . . .
An economist at an elite university, wishing to remain anonymous, has written the following rap in honor of Levitt. S/he sent it directly to me (Dubner) to ensure that even Levitt doesn’t know who wrote it. I think you’ll agree it’s sick enough to be worthwhile. Sing it to the tune of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems.” If you’re getting rejected I . . .
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