A reader named Joel Margolese of Andover, Mass., while on holiday vacation in Boca Raton, Fla., wrote the following:
Doing the annual pilgrimage to South Florida this holiday season, we’ve all been struck by how
everywhere seems to be more crowded than usual. Parks, beaches, even stores are jammed. We could barely find a parking space at our favorite park, which is usually empty.
Simon Rogers moved to New York from London when he was 28 to begin his modeling career. About two years ago, he created UglyNY, a talent and modeling agency affiliated with Ugly in London, which is run by a friend. You’ll see photos of his clients throughout the rest of this post.
As Rogers once told The New York Times, UglyNY serves the market for “great-looking people, people who’ve really been hit with the ugly stick, and everything in between.” UglyNY’s recent clients include Clairol, Walmart, and Vanity Fair. Demand for “real people,” Rogers says, is growing — in part because of the influences of reality TV, MySpace, etc. Plus they are often cheaper.
So today is a two-fer: both Tom Daschle and Nancy Killefer will not be joining the Obama administration, as planned, as Health and Human Services secretary and chief performance officer, respectively. They were both undone by failure to pay taxes.
I’ve made no secret of my Pittsburgh Steelers fandom — the most recent example is here — and so yes, Sunday was a happy day in our house. The problem is that my productivity suffers afterwards because there’s so much post-game stuff to monitor.
One year ago, we ran a simple contest on this blog: come up with a new six-word motto for the U.S. There were more than 1,000 submissions, a heated runoff between the finalists, and eventually a winner: “Our worst critics prefer to stay.” The year that followed has been dramatic to say the least: the historic presidential election, a train . . .
We’ve invited a special guest to judge our Bernie Madoff limerick contest: Chris J. Strolin, founder and editor-in-chief of The OEDILF, The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form. The OEDILF is an international online dictionary-writing project, the goal of which is to write at least one limerick for every definition of every word in the English language. Not quite five . . .
That’s how PMSBuddy.com pitches itself. To wit: PMSBuddy.com is a free service created with a single goal in mind: to keep you aware of when your wife, girlfriend, mother, sister, daughter, or any other women in your life are closing in on “that time of the month” – when things can get intense for what may seem to be no . . .
After the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York, a lot of people wrote or called to ask if my family and I were O.K. Some of these people were casual acquaintances at best but, for many of them, I was the only person they knew who lived in New York. Their concern was extremely moving even if, at first, a . . .
For anyone who read, even casually, about the welfare wars of the 1990’s, it seems strange that there is so little conversation, political or otherwise, about the topic these days. That may soon be changing, of course, as the proposed Obama stimulus plan attempts to direct money toward the poorest segments of our population.
Mario Batali is one of the best-known chefs/entrepreneurs in the world. During college, at Rutgers, he double majored: Spanish theater (who knew?) and economics. He was good enough to submit to our FREAK-Quently Asked Questions (past entries here).
An FAQ with Mario Batali:
A reader named Jacquilynne Schlesier writes: My book club is reading Freakonomics as our selection of the month and we’re meeting on Wednesday. It’s my selection, so I’m responsible for bringing 10 questions that’ll prompt discussion about the book. Based on the argument that broke out at our last meeting when I merely mentioned the idea behind the abortion/crime bits . . .
A Palestinian in a tunnel between Gaza and Egypt. (Photo: Moises Saman/The New York Times) A pair of recent articles — one in The New York Times and the other, a McClatchy report, in The Seattle Times — describe in close-up detail how Palestinians living in Gaza have gotten back to work digging tunnels that lead into Egypt. These tunnels, . . .
I rarely have occasion these days to see new movies in theaters, but I had the good fortune recently to see two of the Oscar-nominated best films, Frost/Nixon and Slumdog Millionaire, within 24 hours. It was a strange coincidence that both of them were time-jumping stories built around TV shows.
Now that New York Governor David Paterson has appointed Kirsten Gillibrand to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, here’s a strange fact to consider: There are six positions in New York State for which statewide elections are held: governor, lieutenant governor, the two U.S. senators, attorney general, and comptroller. But at the moment, only . . .
The Times recently reported the death of Constance E. Cook, a former assemblywoman from upstate New York who co-wrote the measure that legalized abortion in that state in 1970, three years before the U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade did so for most of the rest of the country. While the history of Roe is widely known — and, . . .
Hospitals may be more recession-proof than many other industries, but they are hardly immune. If you are running a hospital these days and want keep your beds full, what should you do: Try to raid your competitors for the best doctors available? Undertake an ad campaign that trumpets the excellence of your care? Or maybe just install wireless internet and spruce up the rooms?
A reader named Abhishek Rawat writes in to describe, and then solve, a puzzle he has noticed in his native India:
In India all major cities have public transport vehicles called autorickshaws. They are mounted on three wheels, operate on very low horsepower, and have a center of gravity that allows them to swivel in impossible twists around the traffic. In short, they’re the perfect transportation vehicle for people who do not have a personal transport and do not wish to take the bus.
With the Super Bowl coming up in less than two weeks — and yes, thanks, my team made it — it’s worth considering what sort of end-zone demonstrations will be allowed and which will not. Here’s Mike Pereira, the N.F.L.’s outgoing head of officials, with an explanation from earlier this year: If you don’t feel like watching the video, here’s . . .
Last week, we solicited your questions for Keith Hennessey, the outgoing White House chief economic adviser and director of the National Economic Council.
In his answers below, Hennessey explains (among other things) what he thinks are some of the “most absurd economic assumptions” by Washington politicians; where, exactly, the first few hundred billion dollars of the TARP money has gone; and why he had “the coolest job ever.” Thanks to all of you for the good questions and to Hennessey for his candid and thorough answers.
From a reader named Raymond DeCampo comes this interesting, poignant bleg. (Read up on blegs here; send your own blegs here; and see some other new Freakonomics-coined words here.) My wife and I recently undertook the task of securing our son’s future in the event we would not be there to secure it for him. In the process I realized . . .
I came home this evening and found five magazines waiting in the mailbox: Time, BusinessWeek, The Economist, Columbia (a university alumni magazine) and Natural History (from the Museum of Natural History). Four of the five magazines had the same guy on the cover. Yeah, that one, a.k.a. Barack Obama. I have read a lot of interesting things by and about . . .
Sometimes the e-mail in-box captures a pitch that’s just too good to not share. It is probably not the best time to be casting a reality show about fun-loving flight attendants, but show biz waits for no one:
Because a new year has begun, it seems a good time to unveil some of the aptonyms that we’ve been accumulating. (Earlier aptonym posts can be found here.) 1. During a recent N.F.L. game between the Bears and the Vikings, played on a frigid Monday night in Chicago, I learned that the city has a prominent meteorologist named Amy Freeze. . . .
Keith Hennessey Keith Hennessey is the outgoing chief economic adviser to President Bush and director of the National Economic Council. When Obama takes office, Lawrence Summers will take his place. “Our assumptions are that the economy will begin to recover early in the next president’s term,” Hennessey recently told CNBC, “but it’s too early to say exactly when.” (I can . . .
Last month we solicited your questions for Alex Rigopulos, co-founder of Harmonix, the video-game development company best known for its Guitar Hero and Rock Band games. Alex Rigopulos One of the most-asked questions was whether his games discourage players from learning to play real music. Rigopulos doesn’t think so; the games, he says, give people “a taste of what lies . . .
A few months ago, we coined a new word on this blog: “penultamour,” defined as “the last person to date another person before that other person took up with his/her eventual spouse.”
The word hasn’t exactly caught fire; but at least someone grabbed the domain name www.penultamour.com.
Andrew Zimbalist Andrew Zimbalist is the Robert A. Woods professor of economics at Smith College and one of the most prominent sports economists in the land. (Yes, this is a big day for Andrews.) His most recent book — he’s published 18 — is The Bottom Line: Observations and Arguments on the Sports Business. He’s written broadly for the media, . . .
Andrew Lo Andrew W. Lo is the Harris & Harris Group Professor at M.I.T. and director of its Laboratory for Financial Engineering. (Here are some of his papers.) To my mind, he’s one of the most fluent guides to the state of modern finance in that he combines the rigors of a quant with a behavioralist’s appreciation for human intricacy. . . .
From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: The 15 highest-rated television shows in the local market in 2008 were Steelers games, according to N.F.L. and Nielsen Media Research. The only reason there weren’t 16 games is because the September 14 game at Cleveland was not rated because of Hurricane Ike. Once again, the Steelers led the league with the highest television ratings in . . .
In my prior post, I blogged about introducing variable tolls on America’s highways. The basic idea: fight congestion by imposing tolls that vary in response to traffic levels. When roads are too crowded, hike the tolls, keep some drivers out, and thus keep traffic free flowing at all times.
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