I’m guessing Doc Rivers doesn’t read this blog, especially when we ponder why he isn’t using a bench player as good as Leon Powe, but I’m also guessing that Rivers is pretty happy he changed things up last night. Here’s Powe’s line for the evening: Playing time: 14:39 FG made: 6-7 FT made: 9-13 Reb: 2 Fouls: 4 Points: 21 . . .
We’ve written quite a bit about various information asymmetries — i.e., when one party in a transaction has a lot more information than another — and how the Internet is very good at correcting that asymmetry. Among the examples we used were the cost of term-life insurance, the price of coffins, and real-estate listings. The Wall Street Journal recently published . . .
Ralph Steadman, self portrait from Stop Smiling magazine. British cartoonist and caricaturist Ralph Steadman is best known as the late Hunter Thompson‘s collaborator. Starting with their first assignment together — illustrating the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan’s (Steadman forgot his “colors” and drew with a friend’s makeup samples) — Thompson and Steadman invented a genre of narrative storytelling that may (or . . .
Sometimes a story is so irresistible that the media can’t stay away from it, even if it’s not much of a story. Consider the following scenario: A. The U.S. is hit by a seeming economic downturn; B. The costs of basic goods like fuel and food begin to rise; C. And so consumers flock to a cheap, old-fashioned staple to . . .
From a reader named Joe McCright of Alexandra, La., comes the following bleg. Please help him out in the comments section. Past blegs can be found here; you can send your own bleg requests here. I teach Spanish to kids in pre-K through 4th grade, and I play music of the Spanish-speaking world to expose them to aspects of the . . .
Here’s the most recent 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. For years I have been posing a question about the term “bargaining chip” that no one has yet answered. This is widely assumed to be a poker metaphor, but I . . .
We recently posted a contest, asking readers to choose the one question they’d ask if picking a partner to play the Prisoner’s Dilemma. I did not expect this contest to generate more than 350 replies. Picking the single best out of 350 seemed impossible, so I thought we should winnow it down to the Top 5 and ask you to . . .
My favorite kind of museum is the one where the deeds being celebrated were actually committed on that site — the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, for instance, or the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. I also love visiting the old homes of interesting people, like Washington Irving. There’s nothing like being able to literally walk in the footsteps of someone . . .
I stayed up way too late last night watching the first hockey game I’ve watched this year — Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Finals. The Detroit Red Wings were up 3 games to 1, playing the Pittsburgh Penguins at home, hoping to clinch the title. The Pens won in the third overtime. It was a phenomenal game, with great . . .
We like to give readers the chance to ask their own bleg — i.e., to use this blog to beg for ideas or information. Here’s an interesting one from a reader named Philip . I look forward to your input; you can send your own bleg suggestions here. Many cities around the country have parking problems in their urban neighborhoods. . . .
A few weeks ago, we posted an item about an ad executive in Australia named James Hurman who auctioned off his smoking habit, agreeing to pay a steep fine (about $800) for every cigarette he smoked after the auction closed. He wound up selling the contract, he writes, “for NZ $300 [about US $240] to somebody at the agency where . . .
Craig Glenday with Lucky Diamond Rich, the most tattooed person. (c) Guinness World Records. Last week we solicited your questions for Guinness Book of World Records editor Craig Glenday. Among other interesting queries, you asked: Is Barry Bonds in this year’s book? What (besides being in the book) is in it for the record breaker? How much alcohol, exactly, can . . .
When Levitt and I were up in Boston a couple months ago to write about the Celtics’ reliance on statistical analysis to make strategic and personnel decisions, one goal was to figure out strengths and weaknesses the Celtics knew about their own players and other teams’ players that weren’t obvious. Danny Ainge and Mike Zarren were understandably not very forthcoming . . .
Here’s the most recent 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. Thanks to the hundreds of people who have responded to my blegging for contributions of modern proverbs over the past two weeks. Now I turn to something that may have . . .
We wrote not long ago about the various negative externalities produced by driving — congestion, pollution, accident risk, etc. — and how pay-as-you-drive insurance might help impose the true cost of driving on each driver. Now a reader named Larry Holt, the director of research of the Birmingham (Alabama) Regional Chamber of Commerce, writes in with an interesting point about . . .
The headline says it all, although the unspoken question is: will globalization indeed result in the hegemony of English, as has long been promised/threatened? We gathered up some wise people who spend their time thinking about such things — Christian Rolling, Mark Liberman, Henry Hitchings, and John Hayden — and asked them to answer our question. Many thanks for their . . .
What do American drivers, the children of Lake Wobegon, and termites have in common? They are all above average. Here’s what a regular reader called LLP pointed out in an e-mail: There is a TV ad running here in Southern California for a pest control company. It states that “the average termite eats 24 hours a day, 7 days a . . .
I’ve been thinking a lot about teeth lately. First I read this post by Ian Ayres on the value of getting a tooth cleaning. Then I was out in Salt Lake City to give a lecture at the University of Utah, and the student who drove me around was a very nice guy whose father is a dentist, and we . . .
The Shangri-La staples. A couple of years back, we wrote about the very interesting research of Berkeley psychology professor Seth Roberts, whose self-experimentation included a weight-loss program that was incredibly simple, cheap, and seemingly effective. Later, Seth turned his method into a book called The Shangri-La Diet. The diet is really a simple appetite-suppressing plan whereby you regularly ingest some . . .
Here’s the most recent guest bleg from Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations. His past blegs can be found here. Last week I blegged for examples of modern proverbs, like “Sh*t happens,” “It takes a village to raise a child,” “Different strokes for different folks,” “The opera ain’t over until the fat lady sings,” “There ain’t no . . .
In keeping with our aptonym tradition, a bunch of helpful readers have sent in good examples of people whose last names go well with their professions. To wit: From a reader named James: Apparently, the city of Boston has a tree inspector named Leif Fixen. (Also, the photo credit on that story goes to a guy named Kamerman.) From our . . .
According to the Yale Book of Quotations (whose future editions are being improved by Freakonomics readers), war is: “hell” (Napoleon Bonaparte), “too serious a matter to entrust to to military men” (Georges Clemenceau), and “a condition of progress” (Ernest Renan). What follows below are 12 replies to the question “What do you think about war in general?” The replies all . . .
I’ve been reading through some economics literature on fairness, altruism, and the like — much of it centered on game-playing that is meant to represent how we make decisions in the real world. One common early game was an adaptation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Here, courtesy of Wikipedia (excerpted from this book, I think), is a description of the Prisoner’s . . .
As prices go, “free” is an interesting one. Dan Ariely plays with the idea in his book Predictably Irrational, as does Seth Godin — and Chris Andersen has gone so far as to suggest that “$0.00 is the Future of Business.” There are, of course, a lot of different kinds of “free.” Giving away a free razor or a free . . .
Here’s the most recent guest bleg from Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations. His past blegs can be found here. Last week about 100 people responded to my blegging for examples of famous computer proverbs. In general, proverb dictionaries are filled with traditional sayings like “A stitch in time saves nine,” ignoring modern proverbs. Yet modern proverbs . . .
We’ve had a lot of conversations on this blog about charitable contributions. For instance: where people like to give, and why; how a young philanthropist should disburse $70 million; whether to give to a street beggar, a hot dog vendor, or neither. So let’s start one more conversation on the subject. There have been a pair of huge natural disasters . . .
… that people who go around saying “I’m a perfectionist” never are, while people who actually are perfectionists never go around saying it? I have.
We’ve written before about pay-as-you-wish commerce, most significantly the case of a bagel man in the Washington, D.C., area, but also a coffee shop in Seattle and three instances of pay-as-you-wish download-able music: Radiohead, Jane Siberry, and SongSlide. Now here’s another baked-goods pay-as-you-wish scheme that’s worth looking at, concerning a bakery in Kitchener, Ontario, called City Cafe Bakery. Below is . . .
Michael Pollan recently wrote a provocative and thoughtful essay called “Why Bother?” in The Times Magazine about whether it’s worth it to make individual behavior changes to fight climate change. There were a lot of pieces of the essay that Freakonomics readers would find of interest, and perhaps would quarrel with. Here is a particularly compelling section about Wendell Berry‘s . . .
In our Times column published last Sunday, we wrote about how Mike Zarren of the Boston Celtics organization uses statistical analysis to help with personnel and strategic decisions. Here’s one paragraph toward the end: Zarren is also responsible for the Celtics’ basketball-related technology and uses a service that delivers video footage tagged with statistical information. With just a few mouse . . .
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