We get a lot of different kind of e-mail response to our book: some friendly, some antagonistic, some curious, etc etc etc. This one, which came the other day, may be one of my all-time favorites: Hello. I am Rohan Patel, I am 10 years old. Your book was amazing! I loved it, but I found one mistake in it. . . .
The Aplia Econ Blog, subtitled “News for Econ Students,” has just been launched. It’s the blog arm of Stanford economist Paul Romer’s business venture, Aplia, which aims to streamline, automate, and otherwise perfect the instruction of college-level economics.
Because the abortion/crime theory put forward by Steve Levitt and John Donohue in this 2001 paper was so jarring, on so many levels, it drew great interest and occasional controversy. The noise really began in 1999, when a preliminary version of the paper was written about. So by 2003, when I first wrote about Levitt in the N.Y. Times Magazine, . . .
First came prosper.com, “the online marketplace for people-to-people lending” — think eBay meets Craig’s List meets (potentially) Shylock. Then comes word that WalMart wants to get into the banking business. In tomorrow’s papers, look for news that Robert L. Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television and majority owner of the NBA’s Charlotte Bobcats, is buying Metro Bank in Orlando, renaming . . .
Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and, over the years, a collection of startlingly good New Yorker articles, has addressed on his blog the question of why he endorsed Freakonomics (by writing a blurb before it was published) even though its explanation of the 1990’s crime drop dismissed as a cause the “broken windows” theory of law enforcement . . .
Not the typical Freakonomics fare, but: a magazine editor I know, Amy Goldwasser, has sent out this A.P.B. for a book project she’s curating: Thrilled to finally say I’m putting together a book of essays written by teen girls. What will make this one special, elevate it from any teen genre-type collection, is that I’m absolutely committed to their words, . . .
I’m a bit late on this but last night I finally read Jon Gertner’s profile of economist Ed Glaeser in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. It’s a wonderful article, to my mind a great example of what happens when you’ve got a smart, interesting, candid subject and a smart, curious, agreeable writer. We learn a lot about economics from . . .
Because we wrote this article, a lot of people are visiting this Web site to get our e-mail address to write in various comments. I’d suggest anyone who does so should feel free to post comments here so that everyone can see them.
There’s a brand-new, four-part Freakonomics Study Guide, available for free for anyone who uses the book for teaching. (The four parts are: Teacher’s Guide, Student’s Guide, Test Answers and Test Questions.) The Guides were commissioned by HarperAcademic and seem to be very well done. Click here for all the information you need.
A couple weeks ago, I blogged about a gadget called Skybox, which would give people at sporting events access to all kinds of data, ranging from player stats to concession prices to instant replays. Tim Hayden of Vivid Sky, the company behind Skybox, has been kind enough to invite readers of this blog to play around with a demo. I . . .
The devotion exhibited by some Freakonomics fans is downright inspiring. And inspired. Click here to see what I’m talking about. (Make sure you scroll down one screen.)
Freakonomics, apparently. Just published in France, the book (as of this posting) was sitting in the Top 10 on Amazon.fr.
An Italian court has found that a man who sexually abused his 14-year-old stepdaughter should receive a lighter sentence because the girl was not a virgin — and, therefore, the damage to her was not as significant as it would have been otherwise. The price of virginity is a subject that has received much attention over the centuries (the Talmud, . . .
Our new “Freakonomics” column, appearing in today’s New York Times Magazine, takes a look at NASCAR’s recent record of crashing and fatalities. Not surprisingly, the Times’s sports section is full of NASCAR articles, since today is the running of the 2006 Daytona 500 (which marks 5 years since the death of Dale Earnhardt). One of these articles, by Viv Bernstein, . . .
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 . . .
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