Back in 2006, Virginia Commonwealth University launched a program to help acclimate new students, including requiring all incoming freshman to read the same book. Guess which book VCU chose as its inaugural “summer read”?
Fire deaths in the U.S. have fallen 90 percent over the past 100 years, a great and greatly underappreciated gain. How did it happen — and could we ever get to zero?
E-books are growing like crazy. Most of the complaining you may have read is from publishers– that it will be ever harder to stay solvent in an e-book world. But it’s actually authors, not publishers, who take the biggest hit.
We’ll be spending a couple of days this week in Washington, D.C. It’ll be my kids’ first trip. Am looking for non-obvious things to do and good things to eat as well. Best suggestion wins a piece of Freakonomics swag!
A Forbes.com article by Jeff Bercovici discusses the New York Times‘s plan to shut down a rogue Twitter feed called FreeNYTimes, which is meant to circumvent the Times‘s upcoming metered model (some people call it a paywall). As Bercovici writes: It’s clever, but it’s not kosher. “We have asked Twitter to disable this feed as it is in violation of . . .
I like Family Guy and I like watching TV with my kids, but I do not like watching Family Guy with my kids. What are your bad combinations?
The Three Mile Island nuclear-power accident in 1979 coincided almost perfectly with the release of The China Syndrome, a Hollywood film about a nuclear meltdown. As we once wrote, this pairing helped gel American sentiment against nuclear power. Several other nations, meanwhile, kept on building nuclear-power plants, Japan among the leaders. Now, how will the earthquake/tsunami-damaged nuclear plant in Fukushima . . .
There are a growing number of churches in the U.S. that can no longer afford their upkeep, as costs are outpacing collections. In Europe, some churches have turned into techno-dance clubs. Would that work here?
For decades, G.D.P. has been the yardstick for measuring living standards around the world. Martha Nussbaum would rather use something that actually works.
If you’re the kind of sports stat-head who loves that the Bill James movement has become mainstream in baseball, and you wonder why basketball doesn’t pay more attention to analytics, you may be pleased to read this article and this one about the annual Sports Analytics Conference at MIT Sloan.
That’s the question posed in a new working paper by Patricia M. Anderson, Kristin F. Butcher, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach. What would the mechanism/s be? “Schools facing increased pressures to produce academic outcomes may reallocate their efforts in ways that have unintended consequences for children’s health. For example, schools may cut back on recess and physical education in favor of increasing time on tested subjects.”
As we’ve written here before, family firms in which a founder hands the business off to the next of kin tend to perform worse than equivalent non-family firms. This isn’t very surprising: what are the chances that the best person to succeed the founder just happens to be his/her son or daughter?
For some time now, Captain Steve, a pilot with a major U.S. airline (and one of the nicest humans you’ll ever meet), has been answering your questions about flying. He has commented on everything from cabin air to maintenance problems and ticket prices. It’s been a while since we had him here, however, and since there’s no shortage of airline headlines — including an eventful winter for weather interruptions — we thought it was time to bring him back for another round of questions.
To get a lot of followers on Twitter, do you need to follow a lot of other Tweeps? And if not, why not?
Thanks to Time.com for naming this blog one of the top “financial” blogs — and the nice writeup from the Wall Street Journal’s Robert Frank — but we didn’t know that we’re a financial blog!
… a New York Times article by Randall Stross about how fast and cheap broadband access is in Hong Kong compared to the U.S.: “Hong Kong residents can enjoy astoundingly fast broadband at an astoundingly low price. It became available last year, when a scrappy company called Hong Kong Broadband Network introduced a new option for its fiber-to-the-home service: a speed of 1,000 megabits a second – known as a “gig” – for less than $26 a month.”
… the jacket of a new book from Princeton University Press called Mafias on the Move: How Organized Crime Conquers New Territories, by Federico Varese.
Roland Fryer continues to work with incentives in education — for students, parents, and teachers. His newest working paper (gated) describes an experiment in New York City that was unsuccessful in moving the needle.
A reader named Ed Woodcock writes to tell us of …: “[A] conversation I had with a WHO (World Health Org.) official I bumped into while touring the Taj Mahal for the first time about 5 or 6 years ago. We introduced ourselves and she told me that she was a “polio advocate,” which obviously led to the question, “What the heck does that mean?” She basically spent her time lobbying organizations for donations to help eradicate polio. Obviously a very worthy cause!”
Since the beginning of civilization, we’ve thought that human waste was worthless at best, and often dangerous. What if we were wrong?
Today is the first day of the rest of our blogging lives. For 3.5 years, this blog has lived at NYTimes.com, very happily for the most part. But as time passed, we became eager to take the blog indie again, and unite it with the other stuff we’ve been working on.
A reader named Sarah Johnson, who is passionate about crocheting, noticed something curious about the demographics of a user-rated knitting-and-crocheting website called Ravelry. Sarah is graduating from high school in June, and plans to major in psychology and pre-med. She writes: “I joined a free site for knitters and crocheters called Ravelry. As far as a little Internet research goes, it’s one of the biggest knitting and crochet sites out there, with over 1 million members. CrochetMe, another big site with comparable features, has 224,000 users. Crochetville, a large crochet forum, has only 46,000 members as of today. 414,974 people like ‘knitting’ on Facebook. By comparison, only 5,560 people like ‘crochet.'”
Five things you don’t know about the NFL labor standoff.
The Salina Journal, a daily newspaper in Salina, Kansas, has published a final exam that was given to local eighth-graders in 1895 (via this friendly website). (“It was taken from the original document on file at the Smoky Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, KS.”)
Could it be that cities are “our greatest invention” – that, despite their reputation as soot-spewing engines of doom, they in fact make us richer, smarter, happier and (gulp) greener?
A while back, we did a Freakonomics Radio program asking why the NFL hasn’t (yet) put advertising on its players’ jerseys. One person we spoke with was Michael Neuman, then of Amplify Sports and Entertainment and now of Horizon Media. Neuman and Horizon have just released a report that tries to put a firm dollar figure on jersey sponsorship.
One session at the recent AEA meetings addressed “popular economics,” with a panel including Diane Coyle, Robert Frank, Steve Levitt, and Robert Shiller. (Shiller wrote a bit about it on Slate.) Many interesting things were said. To me, the most interesting was that Frank is writing a book arguing that Charles Darwin, more so than Adam Smith, is the true forefather of modern economics. (He has already written a Times column on the topic.)
How to respond to a reader request?
Last week, we solicited your questions for Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson, co-authors of the new book Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage, and Dirty Dishes.
Here are their answers, covering everything from sex to divorce to … gulp … apology. Thanks to all who participated, especially Paula and Jenny.
Economic trouble continues. In the U.S., where the Federal government has moved gradually at best to cut spending, the pain — especially at state and local levels — is still rolling in. (The U.K., meanwhile, went directly to austerity mode.) But there are green shoots to be seen, especially at the high end. Plastic surgery, for instance, is on the rise. (Depending on your worldview, you might consider this the end of the world rather than the start of a recovery, but still …)
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