Memes are made to be heisted. So here’s one I heisted from the (U.K.) Times‘s Comment Central blog by Daniel Finkelstein, who of course heisted it from someone else.
It’s as simple as this:
One of my classmates wound up _____________________.
From a Wall Street Journal article by Betsy McKay come these tantalizing facts (emphasis added):
The medical costs of treating obesity-related diseases may have soared as high as $147 billion in 2008, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday, as its new director set a fresh tone in favor of more aggressively attacking obesity.
This is the best explanation I have ever read of why I hate meetings so much, and why other people love them. If you are like me, you should save this link and simply forward it to anybody who asks if you’d like to “grab coffee” or “have a quick phone call to pick each other’s brains” or, God forbid, actually go somewhere and sit around a table with a lot of other people and have a proper meeting.
In his very good baseball Q&A the other day, Buster Olney didn’t address the questions some of you asked about how sportswriters vote for the Hall of Fame.
For what it’s worth, however, Zev Chafets, author of the recent book Cooperstown Confidential: Heroes, Rogues, and the Baseball Hall of Fame, recently wrote an interesting piece for the Wall Street Journal about how much players benefit financially once they are elected to the Hall, especially if they are only marginally famous.
You probably know already that 44 people were arrested yesterday, mostly in New Jersey, for corruption and money-laundering. They included mayors, rabbis, and assemblymen (oh my!).
The story is simultaneously vast and banal, seeming to illustrate every cliché of politicians and the people who seek to grease their palms. There are many, many angles to be discussed. A few thoughts that sprung to mind include:
Last week we solicited your questions for ESPN baseball reporter and analyst Buster Olney. There were a lot of really interesting questions, and I think Buster chose well; moreover, his answers are excellent — especially, in my view, his last one. Along the way, he addresses the Steroid Era, budgetary and expansion issues, and how he came to be called Buster. Thanks to all for participating.
This morning, my paper copy of The Times included a replica of the paper’s special section on the moon landing from July 21, 1969. You’ve probably seen the iconic main headline: “MEN WALK ON MOON.” The lead article is by John Noble Wilford (who’s still going strong, btw), and includes one of the most elegant little uses of data I can recall seeing in a news article:
A while back, we began soliciting reader questions for Captain Steve, a captain with a major U.S. airline. He made his debut here, with his rather spirited take on the state of the modern pilot, and now is back with his first round of answers to reader questions. Thanks to him, and to you — and please leave new questions for Captain Steve in the comments section below.
I never set out to be anti-penny, but somehow it happened, and I have gone on the record more than a few times arguing that the penny should be eliminated.
While I stand by my belief that the penny is lousy as currency, someone has finally come up with a use for pennies that has made me reconsider my extinction argument: make a floor out of them!
In two previous posts, we examined laws exempting family members from prosecution for harboring fugitives and laws either granting or permitting sentencing discounts on account of one’s family status, ties, or responsibilities. These are two of the benefits defendants receive on account of their family status in the criminal justice system.
If you care about baseball, you should care about Buster Olney. He is the ESPN baseball reporter who seems to know everything about everything, on the field and in the general managers’ offices, and presents it with a calm authority.
A long-standing pet peeve of mine is that so much academic research is funded by public tax dollars and yet the public is rarely given access to the findings of that research.
In a short Times piece today, I found a hero: Michael Tuts, a particle physicist at Columbia who, among other things, is doing work at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research:
The mother of all deadlines fast approaches: our new book, SuperFreakonomics, is due to be published on October 20. In the meantime, how about a little contest?
Think of it as a guess-the-number-of-jelly-beans-in-a-jar contest except in this case the jar is infinitely expandable, and the jelly beans don’t yet exist.
Two weeks ago, we solicited your questions for White House economist Austan Goolsbee. You will find his answers below. Among the highlights: no, the Obama administration is not socialist; and no, Goolsbee will not be trapped into telling you whether he’d buy an American car. Thanks for the good questions and thanks especially to Goolsbee for the interesting answers.
We recently introduced you to Captain Steve, an airline pilot for a major U.S. carrier, who will be regularly fielding your questions about any and all aspects of air travel. But before we get to that, Captain Steve had something he wanted to say about the overall state of the industry, and particularly how pilots fit in — or don’t.
Last week we solicited your questions for Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. In the interim, Twitter has announced it will begin verifying some high-profile accounts to make sure the Tweeters aren’t impersonators. What was most interesting to me about your questions was that so many of them were skeptical of Twitter’s underlying value.
What he hadn’t written yet, however, was a Freakonomics theme song. That’s the request Mann decided to fulfill. It came from a reader named Spencer, who’ll get his choice of Freakonomics schwag for winning the contest.
So here it is, the theme song we never knew we needed but now wouldn’t want to live without. Thanks to all for participating, and especially to Jonathan Mann for lending his talents to our cause:
A couple of months ago, some Freakonomics readers wondered whether the president really had any discernible impact on the economy. This question has actually received a lot attention from political scientists and political economists. Although these scholars still dispute precisely how presidents influence the macroeconomy, few would deny that the impact is real. The following are three macroeconomic phenomena that have been attributed to a president’s party affiliation.
I wish I had more details, and/or I wish I knew how true this story may be. But the point is that, like cheating schoolteachers or colluding sumo wrestlers, the people who steal money from banks sometimes leave telltale patterns — whether it’s a lack of vacation or a string of Thursdays — that point the finger right at them.
Surely by now you have some questions about Twitter, no?
Few other phenomena have entered the public consciousness so quickly and brashly, to be so rabidly embraced and so grievously disparaged at the same time….
You know that sensation when you’re reading an article in your morning newspaper and, about three grafs in, you start imagining the movie version and you can practically hear the Hollywood studios scrambling to get hold of the writer and the subject in order to lock up their life rights?
Now, on his Market Design blog, Al Roth writes about something that’s perhaps even more interesting: the opposite of repugnance. Or, as he puts it, “transactions that, as a society, we often seek to promote, for reasons other than efficiency or pure political expediency.”
Now even better, the original song-a-day man, Jonathan Mann, has agreed to take a request: he’ll write a song about whatever you want. Leave your suggestions below. It doesn’t have to be about the recession — just make it clever, entertaining, wise, witty, etc. Jonathan (maybe with our input) will pick the best suggestion — and the winning suggester will get a piece of Freakonomics schwag. And, of course, a song. We will, of course, post the song here once it’s recorded.
Good luck.
The good news is that he has agreed to share this knowledge with the rest of us on a regular basis. As longtime readers of this blog are well aware, airline issues have been a recurring theme, ranging from the old cellphone debate to safety precautions to the question of why flight attendants aren’t tipped.
So leave your questions for Captain Steve in the comments section and over time he will answer them in small batches.
So we asked a group of people — Paul Armentano, Mike Braun, Joel W. Hay, Jeffrey Miron, and Robert Platshorn — to think about a national decriminalization of marijuana (unlikely, let’s be honest) and answer the following: What would be some of the most powerful economic, social, and criminal-justice effects?
Yesterday we solicited your questions for an author Q&A that will go in the paperback edition of Freakonomics. Your response has been phenomenal! Great questions, covering the gamut, suitably irreverent, and far better than anything we could have made up ourselves. So … thank you.
Last week we solicited your questions for New York Congressman Anthony Weiner. Here are his answers to a selection of them. Thanks to all.
In the comments below, please pose some questions that you would like to see answered in the paperback Q&A. They can concern anything you’d like: material in the book, modes of collaboration, the price of tea in China, material in the upcoming SuperFreakonomics, etc. We will probably use 8 or 10 or 15, but the more we have to choose from, the better off we’ll be.
Our post last week about shutting down LaGuardia Airport in order to ease New York air congestion filled up the in-box more than usual. The feedback was diverse, with readers calling the idea everything from idiotic to obvious.
Patrick Smith, author of Ask the Pilot, wrote in with some helpful analysis:
New York Congressman Anthony Weiner takes your questions.
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