I was recently reading a famous old economics paper called “The Fable of the Bees,” by Steven N.S. Cheung. In a footnote, Cheung writes one of the most wonderful sentences I’ve read in a long time: Facts, like jade, are not only costly to obtain but also difficult to authenticate. From what I can tell — hey, I’m no Fred . . .
Reading about the sad and sudden death of the actress Natasha Richardson, I’ve come to wonder if perhaps, in some small part, she died not in spite of her fame but rather because of it.
Last week we solicited your questions for Penn Jillette, the prolific (and, yes, libertarian) entertainer.
Among other interesting topics, your questions covered magic, politics, Scientology, and Jillette’s red fingernail.
Computers are sophisticated enough to play a flawless game of checkers. They can beat the world’s greatest chess masters. But humans still put them to shame on the Go board.
When the stock market plummets, where does the value of your holdings actually go? This article from Investopedia explains it well.
Matthew J. Darnell, writing on Yahoo!’s N.F.L. blog, talks about how Andre Smith, an Alabama offensive lineman slotted as a potential overall No. 1 draft pick, has destroyed his own value with a series of bad decisions and, most recently, a really bad workout in front of pro scouts: I can’t recall anyone’s draft stock falling quite like Andre Smith’s. . . .
Nate Silver is the proprietor of FiveThirtyEight.com, where his statistical wizardry (and common sense) during the recent elections made him the biggest new political star after a certain family named Obama.
He didn’t do quite so well on the Oscars but, really, do we care?
That’s the judgment of the esteemed Richard Posner, whose forthcoming book, to be published in May, is called A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent Into Depression. Here are a few excerpts from the preface:
At about 8:30 a.m. yesterday, Yahoo!’s Tech Ticker posted an interview with Barry Ritholtz, noted finance guy and blogger. In recent times, he has also been very bearish on the market. But he thinks the bottom may be near. Here’s his money quote from the interview: “There’s a big bear market rally coming.” Seven and a half hours later, the . . .
Susanne Freidberg is an associate professor of geography at Dartmouth and the author of a forthcoming book called Fresh: A Perishable History. It’s about food.
Susanne has agreed to write a few guest posts for us on the topic. We present her first one today but, before that, a brief Q&A with the author:
We wrote a column a while back about a variety of powerful unintended consequences.
One example was the Americans With Disabilities Act, and we told the story of a Los Angeles orthopedic surgeon named Andrew Brooks. When a deaf patient came to him for a consultation, he realized that the A.D.A. required him to hire a sign-language interpreter for each visit if that’s what the patient wanted.
The subject of piracy — real pirates attacking ships on the high seas — has come up more than a few times on this blog, notably with the guest posts of economist/pirate scholar Peter Leeson. His book on the subject, The Invisible Hook, will be published next month. In the meantime, those of you looking for a pirate fix should . . .
We’ve said it before many times: the best feature of this blog is its readers. Case in point is a recent e-mail from one Chris Markl. It concerns philanthropy, a topic we’ve covered in various ways before on this blog: the economics of street charity; conservative vs. liberal giving; the efficiency of Smile Train; and most recently, Penn State’s THON . . .
Guy Judge is deputy head of the economics department at the University of Portsmouth (U.K.), and is a principal lecturer in quantitative economics and computing. He is also a football (soccer) fanatic, a 50-year fan of Watford Football Club and contributor to that team’s now-defunct fanzine, BsaD (Blind, Stupid and Desperate). Like our friend Dan Hamermesh, who put a summary . . .
Here’s an e-mail I received the other day: I own a manufacturing company and have been a successful investor and equity trader for 20 years. I have an in-depth understanding of the current O.T.C. derivative crisis that is infecting the global financial system. This led me to the acquisition of [REDACTED]-nomics.com as I saw the developing theme. I currently do . . .
Penn Jillette is a magician, comedian, actor, producer and, generally, a curator of interesting and intelligent things. But he is best known as the self-described “larger, louder” half of Penn & Teller, a stage show that Penn and his magician partner Teller Jillette have put on since 1975. It currently plays at the Rio in Vegas. I saw it there not long ago, and it was phenomenal.
Saw this poster taped to a lamppost in my neighborhood last weekend. There is so much to admire about it. My first thought concerned the talent/practice angle as espoused by Anders Ericsson.
I played in a bunch of bands when I was a kid. Although we were generally dreadful, playing clumpy versions of bad cover songs at poorly attended basement gigs, it was hard to deny that all that very deliberate practice paid off.
There’s been much talk about how philanthropies may be one of the greatest casualties of the recession. (Considering their various inefficiencies, maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world.) It’s hardly just the foundations who were invested with Bernie Madoff; donors simply have fewer discretionary dollars. (And, long-term, the picture may get bleaker if President Obama downsizes the charity . . .
Last week we solicited your questions for Stanford Law School Professor (and open-source hero, and anti-corruption leader) Lawrence Lessig. (Past Q&A’s can be found here.)
You asked good questions about copyright, corruption, and other topics, and Lessig responded with equally thoughtful answers, including such tasty pieces of advice as:
This blog’s host, The New York Times, has a set of guidelines for blog commenting, available here as an FAQ, that are worth glancing at now and again. Everyone who moderates comments on this blog tries to be as inclusive as possible. But when your comment fails to show up, the odds are that it crossed one of those guidelines. . . .
As a writer, I enjoy listening to people speak and, when they’re in the middle of a particularly interesting sentence, I try to imagine how I’d like to see it finished.
Usually I am disappointed. But with some select people, the payoff is far greater than I could have imagined. They have something to say that’s remarkably insightful or unexpected or even just articulate in a way that takes your breath away.
Laura Goldman is a money manager who claims to have figured out back in the 1990’s, in the space of about 45 minutes, that Bernie Madoff was a fraud. In this Fox Business interview, she discusses (very entertainingly) her encounters with Madoff. At the time, Goldman worked for Paine Webber (remember them?): He was buying stocks and also trading options . . .
Our friend James Altucher, in an interview at Yahoo!’s Tech Ticker, talks about visiting Bernie Madoff and his son Mark back in early 2005 to pitch them his fund of funds: I had a fund of what’s called PIPE [private investment in public equity] hedge funds. And I went through the whole pitch. My returns were great, they were very . . .
You submitted your mottoes, more than 300 strong. You voted on the six finalists. So you, dear blog readers, are solely responsible for having chosen the United States’ new six-word motto. The finalists were: 1. Consumption’s the Cure That Ails Us. (Submitted by Quin.) 2. We Will Get It Right, Eventually. (Herb) 3. We Are Too Big to Fail. (Jonathan) . . .
We recently ran our second annual six-word motto contest for the U.S. The six finalists have been chosen and voted upon; we will announce the winner tomorrow. In the meantime, take a listen early tomorrow morning to The Takeaway, where I’ll be discussing the contest. Even better, The Takeaway is planning to interview some of the finalists, so that should . . .
Reputations are powerful, vulnerable, fragile things. Sometimes they shift overnight (think Bernie Madoff); often they are decades in the making. I’ve always been interested in the reputations of institutions, especially universities, and the degree to which relatively small events loom very large in long-term reputation. Latest example: George Mason University is, in the public mind (or at least my mind), . . .
Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig has spent much of his career focused on technology and the law, and how the two affect copyright. He represented internet publisher Eric Eldred in Eldred v. Ashcroft, wherein Eldred and others challenged the constitutionality of the Copyright Term Extension Act, which extended terms of copyright protection in the United States by 20 years. Eldred lost the case.
If you’ve visited the home page of Amazon.com anytime in the past several months, it’s hard not to notice its big house ad for the Kindle (and now the Kindle 2). And I don’t blame them. Amazon is an amazing company that could probably sell just about anything. (As a writer, I am grateful they started out with books.) With . . .
Now that A-Rod has delivered the annual Yankees Substance Abuse Lecture to kick off spring training, I think we’re all ready for some actual baseball. Micah Kelber is a writer and freelance rabbi who lives in Brooklyn, currently writing a screenplay about divorce in New York in the 1940’s. He has written a terrifically entertaining guest post on the oft-neglected . . .
Do you shop at Trader Joe’s? From what I have seen, the world is divided into three sets of people. 1. Those who have never been to a Trader Joe’s, and perhaps have never heard of it. 2. Those who love Trader Joe’s more than they love their own families. 3. Those who love Trader Joe’s more than they love . . .
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