Levitt and I missed a terrific business opportunity. If we had even an ounce of entrepreneurship between us, we would have parlayed the Freakonomics chapter on baby names into a baby-name-consulting business. According to this Reuters report, parents in Britian spend “up to 45 hours” picking out a name for their child, “a combined 30 million hours annually.” Let’s see: . . .
We recently solicited your questions for poker man Phil Gordon. In his answers below, he discusses (among other things) variance, sunglasses, and why he’s not a gambler by nature, but rather “a strategic investor.” This is a really good and smart Q&A (although he did neglect to mention a certain beat-down he once suffered). Thanks to Phil and to all . . .
Remember when the Michigan Wolverines kicked off their football season last year with a loss to Appalachian State University? Some people called it the biggest upset in college football history. Well, as Mike Huguenin notes at Rivals.com, it looks like the big-time schools are being a lot more careful this year in picking their supposedly patsy opponents. Appalachian, meanwhile, is . . .
If you are a parent who’s trying to save for your kids’ college education, you should check out Jane Kim‘s article in the Wall Street Journal about 529 college-savings plans. If you don’t know what a 529 plan is, you should; and if you do, Kim’s article is helpful in assessing whether you’re optimizing your participation. In a nutshell: a . . .
As has now become Thursday custom, we’ve posted below a bleg from Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations. This is easily my favorite so far. I hope you all can help him out. (As always, feel free to send us your own bleg requests here.) Our Daily Bleg by Fred R. Shapiro Last week I blegged, seeking . . .
Doctors at several hospitals in Leipzig, Germany, could not figure out the cause of a recent rash of lead poisoning. Was there an environmental disaster underway? They kept seeking the source and, after several weeks, as they write in the New England Journal of Medicine: … we detected a common pattern: the patients were young, were unemployed or were students, . . .
I was ugly from about sixth grade all the way through high-school. The worst was in high-school. I had braces, acne, glasses, and dark curly hair. I didn’t play any sports — my only real hobby was playing chess and I read a lot of comic books. That is James Altucher, whom I’ve blogged about before, writing in his Financial . . .
I am scheduled to appear on Good Morning America this coming Monday, April 14, sometime after 8:00 a.m. E.D.T., to talk about a subject that was born on this blog: our contest to pick a new six-word motto for the U.S.
Justin Wolfers called a recession here not long ago. Ben Bernanke seems about ready to call it himself. Now a reader named Alexis Tatarsky has put the question to all of you on our Freakonomics Prediction Center: On a scale of 1 to 10, with the recession of 2001 being a 4 and the Great Depression an 8, what will . . .
Tucked into a Times report about a typically out-of-touch New York State budget crafted by the wizards of Albany comes this news: Another $50 million [of state revenue] will come from requiring online retailers like Amazon that do not have a physical presence in New York to collect sales taxes on purchases made by New Yorkers and remit them to . . .
Phil Gordon has made more than a few appearances on this blog, most of them concerning his skills as a jack-of-all-poker-trades: he’s a champion player, author, teacher, ringleader, analyst, and entrepreneur. He hasn’t always applied his smarts to cards: a former computer programmer, he started out working at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company on artificial intelligence projects; he also sold . . .
Last week, Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the The Yale Book of Quotations, inaugurated Our Daily Bleg, with a request to learn the true source of the quote “Read my lips.” A consensus has yet to be reached on the origin, but your thoughtful comments (to which Fred replied) made some headway — and possibly helped out Netflix.
That is the name of a new program being offered by Starlight Ministries, the stripper outreach program in Virginia I recently blogged about. Here’s how Lia Scholl of Starlight describes the program: Our newest venture is called Exotic Dancer, M.B.A. It’s a one-day seminar for women who are exotic dancers (and there will be some private dancers/women in prostitution there, . . .
In response to our bleg request, Rafe Petty of the University of Chicago chemistry department wrote in with the following question(s). Let him know what you think in the comments section, and send future blegs to: bleg@freakonomics.com. I was recently at a lecture by George Whitesides, one of the most well-known living chemists. He gave a very interesting lecture at . . .
The debate about the effectiveness and safety of psychiatric drugs rambles on while new (if not conclusive) psychological studies come out with the frequency of fad diets. We invited some people who think a lot about such issues — David B. Baker, John Medina, Dan Ariely, Satoshi Kanazawa, Peter D. Kramer, and Laurie Schwartz — and asked them the following: . . .
A few days ago, New York’s State Senate passed a bill making it illegal to recruit someone into a street gang. In the never-ending fight by city officials and legislators to combat gangs, this is one of the latest efforts to outmaneuver gang members. Other similar initiatives have included: city ordinances that limit two or more gang members from hanging . . .
This really belongs over in the Naked Self-Promotion box to the right, but: Time magazine has conducted its First Annual Blog Index (totally scientific, I am sure) and guess what landed in the Top 25?
Back in June, 2007, we wrote a column about the research of Itzhak Ben-David, a Ph.D. candidate in finance at the University of Chicago (who has since accepted an assistant professor position at the Ohio State University). He had been studying the cash-back transaction — a real-estate sleight of hand in which cash-poor buyers received an unrecorded cash rebate from . . .
This is the time of year when high-school seniors receive letters, thick or thin, from college admissions departments. (I have two nieces who both just got some thick letters from great schools: way to go, H. and L.!) Those seniors will soon start a new life. What’s in store for them? Freakonomics contributor Nicole Tourtelot put a few questions — . . .
Aptonyms are the gifts that keep giving. You toss out one or two here on the blog, and readers keep coming back with more. This week’s aptonyms include: A home-schooling mom and blogger whose last name is Hermitt. (Okay, it’s not great, but it’s pretty good.) And this Newsday article about teacher-student sex affairs quotes a “former Hofstra University professor . . .
We recently introduced you (or should that be “introductified” you?) to the Freakonomics Prediction Center that Predictify built for this blog. And you all went and predicted like mad. So here’s a new Predictify challenge. You can leave your answer in the comments below if you want but it is more fun and worthwhile to make your prediction in the . . .
Last week we asked you for bleg requests — i.e., questions that the Freakonomics readership could collectively answer well. You responded with vigor, and we’ll turn “Our Daily Bleg” into a regular (if not exactly daily) feature. So look for your blegs to appear here in the future. (You can also send more suggestions to: bleg@freakonomics.com.) To inaugurate Our Daily . . .
I may be wrong, but it strikes me that the articles that appear in nearly every newspaper every day that describe a particular day’s stock-market movements are pretty much worthless. They try to pin a cause or two on the effect that’s just been observed, when in fact the effect may have little relationship with the narrow causes being credited. . . .
Bill James I sure hope the Red Sox don’t start the season with a wicked slump. If so, people might blame this blog. When we solicited your questions for Bill James, the Sox’s data wizard, we didn’t know there’d be so many questions and that Bill would answer just about all of them. I hope he found some time over . . .
Tonight at 10 p.m. E.D.T., ABC will broadcast a Barbara Walters special about longevity — or, really, super-longevity — that tries to sort out the many medical, social, and economic ramifications. I was interviewed for the show and apparently I appear toward the end of the hour. Most of the questions I was asked concerned the consequences, unintended and otherwise, . . .
Here’s a picture I snapped out the window at Newark (Liberty International) Airport not long ago. It’s a Continental Boeing 777 whose nose, as you can see, features the name of former Continental chairman and C.E.O. Gordon Bethune. I wondered: Do all Continental planes from Bethune’s era carry his name? No. According to a Continental spokesperson, this is the one . . .
I love stories about the unintended consequences of rising commodity prices. (Here’s one, and here’s another.) Now Susan Saulny writes in the Times about another strange trend driven by high commodity prices: the rampant theft of cars’ catalytic converters, which contain trace amounts of platinum, palladium, and rhodium. Levitt and I heard about this several months ago when we were . . .
When we recently wrote a column suggesting that philanthropies be run more like businesses, one factor we didn’t look into — but perhaps should have — was fraud. According to a Times report by Stephanie Strom, fraud and embezzlement in the non-profit sector account for a loss of $40 billion a year, or roughly 13 percent of philanthropic giving. The . . .
What’s a bleg? A bleg = blog + beg — i.e., using a blog to beg for information. (This is not to be confused with the Dutch beleg — which is either a sandwich filling or the declaration of martial law.) We have blegged before on this blog, asking our readers for Vegas travel tips, reading material, and new technologies . . .
We’ve blogged in the past about aptonyms — names that fit the people who own them, like a magazine fact-checker named Paige Worthy — and we’ve even held an aptonym contest. So we would have been delinquent to not make note of a byline in a special section of yesterday’s Times called “The Business of Green,” whose lead article, “Millions . . .
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