It is amazing to me that in the several days after it was announced that the second-ever woman was nominated for a major-party vice-president slot, so much of the news has concerned her and her daughter’s reproductive activities. Part of the reason to have a female candidate in the first place is presumably to be an advocate for women’s rights, . . .
Photo: Secretly Ironic Are there more guns in the U.S. or more opinions about guns? Hard to say. This blog has featured a variety of posts about guns in the past; today we present a quorum with a very narrow focus: what are some good ideas to cut gun deaths? Let’s put aside for a moment the standard discussions about . . .
Brock Lesnar Last Friday, we solicited your questions for U.F.C. fighter Brock Lesnar. The next day he won his fight against Heath Herring — and mocked him when he was down. According to Sports Illustrated‘s Ben Fowlkes, a “pro wrestling-style heel” like Lesnar “is exactly what the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s heavyweight division needs right now. … Thanks to Lesnar, watching . . .
Photo: Peter Katz On a forum at the Chicago outpost of City-Data.com, a certain JohnDoe2008 asked suburbanites: Why do you like suburbs over [the] city? Be honest please, I never understood it, still don’t. I might have serious problems, because I hate even looking at pictures of suburbs. Respondents cited backyards, quiet and cheap living, and congestion-free commutes — the . . .
Let’s begin with two questions: 1. Do you consider yourself financially literate? 2. If so, how did you get that way? And now, a third question: 3. How important is widespread financial literacy to the health of a modern society? Before you answer the first question, take this little quiz, borrowed from the website of Annamaria Lusardi, a professor of . . .
I recently blogged about whether we form our opinions more from information than experience. The starting point was a passage in David McCullough‘s book The Great Bridge, and he was comparing modern Americans with our 19th-century counterparts. I was interested not just as a historical comparison but because the information/experience question is compelling in its own right. Consider a doctor, . . .
Last week, I learned two important things. They both happened as the result of a post I wrote about various errors, typographical and otherwise. I noted that the excellent Economist magazine dropped an “r” from the word “pastries,” inadvertently rendering it “pasties.” Well, The Economist was not wrong but I sure was. Many readers informed me that a pasty (pl.: . . .
It doesn’t seem fair that one person can be so good at so many things. Nathan Myhrvold is one such person. He is probably still best known as the former chief technology officer of Microsoft. These days, he runs an invention company and spends his free time digging up dinosaur bones, experimenting with old and new cooking methods, and taking . . .
We recently featured a Q&A with Julie Salamon, author of Hospital, and last week Julie wrote her first guest post for us. Here is her second. It touches on a subject of great interest to me, something we hope to address empirically in future writing: the cost/benefit dilemma of end-of-life medical care. End of Days A Guest Post by Julie . . .
We’ve written before about various “beauty premiums”: the advantages gained in the marketplace by people who are better looking, taller, or have better teeth than the average person. Empiricism and theory have their place, of course, but we decided to ask some real people to discuss how much looks really matter. Here are their answers; feel free to add your . . .
Our resident quote bleggar Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, is back with another request. If you have a bleg of your own, send it along here. Thanks to all for the hundreds of responses to the movie lines bleg. I was looking for 21st-century quotes, but there was some confusion on the issue. My sense is . . .
Folio reports that Time Inc. is starting a new magazine-subscription service called Maghound that sounds a bit like Netflix’s movie model: Maghound.com allows consumers to choose titles from a variety of publishers for mix-and-match “subscriptions” where they pay one monthly fee and have the ability to switch titles at any time. Unlike traditional subscriptions, members aren’t locked in their memberships . . .
Photo: Rhett Redelings An $11 billion seasonal industry has just gotten underway: summer camp. This morning, my wife and I sent our kids off to their first-ever day of camp. They are too young for sleep-away camp, so they’re going to a day camp that’s a short bus ride away. All over the city of New York, the summer-camp rhythm . . .
Our resident quote bleggar Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, is back with another request. If you have a bleg of your own — it needn’t have anything to do with famous quotations — send it along here. Now, before you consider Fred’s latest request below, just ask yourself: Are you having a laugh? Thanks to the . . .
Health care is an important, huge, and growing piece of our economy. But as a reader named Beth Wieder points out, the design of medical devices isn’t always as user-friendly (or, I would add, as cost-efficient or as practical) as one might like. For instance, we blogged some time back about a very cheap and portable asthma spacer. Here is . . .
We’ve written repeatedly about pay-as-you-wish commerce or honor-system payment schemes, ranging from music to bagels to coffee. A reader named Seth sent in an interesting new example, all the more so because it shows how one firm is using the pay-as-you-wish mechanism as an experiment to find a good price for a new product: I am writing to tell you . . .
The latest bout of racial consternation in our great land includes: Another Don Imus comment; will it reverberate as loudly as the last one? A white valedictorian at historically black Morehouse College; maybe the would-be black valedictorian wound up at any Ivy?
I am always surprised at how easily, and cheaply, we humans lie. Have you ever been in a conversation about, say, a particular book and been tempted to say you’ve read it even though you haven’t? I am guessing the answer is yes. But why would anyone bother to lie in such a low-stakes situation? The book lie is what . . .
There’s been a lot of noise recently about a Sports Illustrated poll in which Major League Baseball players named Derek Jeter the most overrated player in the league, with 10 percent of the vote. The poll was based on a survey of 495 MLB players. Since SI runs a new poll every week, I assume the questions were asked all . . .
Elizabeth Royte‘s new book is called Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It. I haven’t read it yet, but I gather that it ably summarizes the growing economic and environmental backlash against bottled water. So maybe the world is ready for the Xziex Atmospheric Water Generator, a tiny machine that makes “fresh clean water from thin . . .
Whenever the subject of global warming comes up on this blog, readers have plenty to say. There are a lot of things to think about, of course, including the effectiveness (or lack thereof?) of carbon taxes; the environmental impact of a global food market; even whether it’s greener to drive than walk. For the average person, the issue probably seems . . .
Photo: Rhett Redelings The papers yesterday were full of news about bananas. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chiquita Brands International, “the Cincinnati-based banana distributor” (I love that phrase; it evokes Lardner, or at least Runyon), was expected to report a third-quarter loss due to higher fuel costs and bad weather in banana-growing countries. Chiquita stock fell sharply on the . . .
Here’s the latest guest bleg from Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations. His past blegs can be found here; send us your own bleg requests here. The Yale Book of Quotations has a large section of the most famous television catchphrases. The list is stronger on pre-1980 catchphrases than post-1980 catchphrases, perhaps reflecting the fact that my . . .
Three Mile Island, Control Room 1. Well, someone has come right out and said it: “Sen. John McCain called Wednesday for the construction of 45 new nuclear reactors by 2030.” That’s according to an A.P. article by David Espo, well worth reading in its entirety. We have written quite a few times about the likelihood of a return to nuclear . . .
The e-mail gods recently delivered this interesting query from a reader named Derek Wilhelm: I go to the University of Richmond, which requires [us] to take a class called Core, where we read famous historical books. (Gandhi, Marx, Plato, Augustine, just to name a few). Anyway, my question for you is: Who do you think is the greatest modern-day thinker? . . .
We ran a contest asking readers to submit the one question they’d ask to help pick a partner for the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Then we had a special treat: the University of Chicago economist John List (whose writings, by the way, were the inspiration for the contest) agreed to comb through the 350+ entries and choose the Top 5. He did . . .
A reader from Boston named Robert Veneman-Hughes writes in with a bleg request on a subject we’ve wondered about before here: gas siphoning. Here’s what I wrote not long ago at the end of a post about an increase in theft of catalytic converters: I haven’t read many articles lately about people who steal gas out of people’s tanks, even . . .
My vote is for the companies that design closets. The photos in their ads routinely show closets that are drenched in sunlight while the owners of those closets always seem to possess exactly three pairs of (identical and very clean) pants or skirts but not a single accordion, hockey stick, papier-mache dragon, or any of the other stuff that actually . . .
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