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 . . .
Ralph Steadman, self portrait from Stop Smiling magazine. Last week we solicited your questions for British cartoonist and caricaturist Ralph Steadman. He graciously fielded your questions about his friendship with the late Hunter Thompson (a “partnership and provocation,” he called it), why his work can be found on beer labels, and why an artist should constantly imitate himself. He also . . .
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 Motley Fool used my blegging for modern proverbs as an inspiration to write about “investing proverbs.” Wall Street is indeed a rich source of memorable quotations, including: “Buy on the . . .
In today’s Times, Andy Revkin reports on a new study by the Lenfest Ocean Program that will surely inspire a rush to the barricades for certain environmentalists: Some shark populations in the Mediterranean Sea have completely collapsed, according to a new study, with numbers of five species declining by more than 96 percent over the past two centuries. “This loss . . .
We wrote earlier about how concern over climate change may lead to a nuclear-power revival in the U.S., despite longtime opposition and fear on many fronts. The issue is unfolding similarly in Europe. Here’s a fascinating short article from Spiegel, via BusinessWeek: Italy on Thursday said it would join a growing number of European countries returning to nuclear power in . . .
From the Journal of the American Medical Association, the results of a randomized controlled trial using St. John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum) to treat children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: To our knowledge, this is the first placebo-controlled trial of H perforatum in children and adolescents. The results of this study suggest that administration of H perforatum has no additional benefit beyond that . . .
David Singh Grewal, an Eliot Fellow in the Social Sciences at Harvard University, is author of the book Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization, in which he explores, among other topics, the relationship between language, networks, and globalization. In the wake of the recent quorum we ran on this very subject, David has agreed to guest blog here. We . . .
There is a very interesting nugget in a paper by Benjamin Hippen about the market for human organs in Iran, which I blogged about not long ago. Hippen writes that in the earlier days of kidney transplantation, both the U.S. and Iranian governments “paid for dialysis while continuing to develop transplant options.” As more and more patients needed dialysis, the . . .
Mere hours after Apple’s announcement of a new GPS-enabled iPhone, I received this e-mail from Amazon.com: Is this in response to the new iPhone? Wouldn’t surprise me. Amazon.com never ceases to amaze me in its responsiveness, flexibility, and willingness to try new things — even if a lot of them fail. Experimentation is so cheap on the web that it’s . . .
We made some ice cream at home last weekend. Someone had given one of the kids an ice cream maker a while ago and we finally got around to using it. We decided to make orange sherbet. It took a pretty long time and it didn’t taste very good but the worst part was how expensive it was. We spent . . .
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