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 . . .
The playwright David Mamet, writing in the Village Voice, declared that he had renounced his unabashed liberal world view for a more conservative one, due primarily to the influence of economists like Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. Mamet found: … that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic . . .
We’ve blogged fairly regularly about prediction markets, so the next step would seem pretty logical: make our own. Enter the folks at Predictify (see the latest news here), who have been kind enough to create the official Freakonomics Prediction Center. It can be found in the right-hand column of our home page. We’ll post questions and you’ll supply the predictions. . . .
Bill James If the name Bill James doesn’t mean anything to you, then you are probably not a baseball fan and have no need to read further. If, however, you are a baseball fan — ranging from fairly serious to obsessively statistical — then the name Bill James probably sets your brain and heart a-clattering. Here’s what his bio says: . . .
I recently whined about some of the historical inaccuracies in the HBO mini-series John Adams. If I had seen this list first — the Ten Most Historically Inaccurate Movies — I would have held my tongue. Here, according to Yahoo!’s list, are the ten worst offenders: 10,000 B.C., Gladiator, 300, The Last Samurai, Apocalypto, Memoirs of a Geisha, Braveheart, Elizabeth: . . .
Between 2004 and 2007, the spot price of uranium more than quadrupled, reaching more than $140 before falling off sharply in the past several months to less than $80. Why was there such a huge spike in price? One reason is because there’s been an increased demand from nuclear power plants around the world, as nuclear energy becomes more palatable . . .
Sudhir Venkatesh’s book Gang Leader for a Day has been optioned for a film to be directed by Craig Brewer, who wrote and directed Hustle & Flow. Who should play Sudhir? And J.T., and Ms. Bailey?
With this third and final post, we wrap up our day of divorce. Find our other D-day contributors here and here. History shows that we Americans generally like to elect politicians who have a stable family life, or at the least the appearance of one: a spouse, perhaps a couple of children, etc. Among candidates running for national and statewide . . .
Here is the latest from our Indexed friend Jessica Hagy. Her past pieces can be found here, her own blog here, and her new book here. This piece is called “Impressions & Press”:
The black-white gap in U.S. education is an issue that continues to occupy the efforts of a great many scholars. Roland Fryer and Steve Levitt have poked at the issue repeatedly; a recent study by Spyros Konstantopoulos looked at class size as a possible culprit, to little avail. We gathered a group of people with wisdom and experience in this . . .
This week in reader e-mail brings a note from a 46-year-old man in Rockland County, N.Y., a director in a private company that outsources invoicing for telecommunications companies and newspapers. It turns out that he and I have something in common. Here is a tale of identity theft I am happy to report: Hello Stephen, My name is Steven Dubner. . . .
Last night, I watched the first two parts of HBO’s new seven-part series John Adams, based on the wonderful book by David McCullough. It was very, very good — as intricately crafted as any theatrical release and totally compelling. But I don’t think I’ll be watching the other five parts. Why? In part because Paul Giamatti just doesn’t work for . . .
Levitt had some advice last week for our friend Sudhir Venkatesh, who went on The Colbert Report to talk about his book, Gang Leader for a Day. Sudhir sure seemed to take the advice to heart, especially the smiling part. He did great, and Colbert was no slouch either. In case you missed it, here’s the clip, which might well . . .
… the new editor of this blog, Annika Mengisen. She comes to Freakonomics from TheStreet.com, where she was small-business editor and staff reporter. She studied journalism and fine arts at Rutgers; her current extracurriculars include boxing, small-scale theater, and serving as a rape-crisis counselor at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Her name alone would seem to be fitting for this job. You . . .
Photo: Callista Gingrich, Gingrich Productions Last week, we solicited your questions for Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House whose latest book is “Real Change: From the World That Fails to the World That Works.” His answers, below, are comprehensive, measured, and often fascinating. I think this is easily one of the best Q&A’s we’ve had on this blog. . . .
This is a few months old, but still well worth a listen: an NPR interview with Lia Scholl of Star Light Ministries, an outfit in Springfield, Va., that counsels exotic dancers. Here, from Star Light’s Web site, is its mission statement: Most exotic dancers are young women who come from varied socio-economic backgrounds. Their education levels vary — some have . . .
James Hurman, a 30-year-old man from Auckland, N.Z., is selling his smoking habit to the highest bidder. (Apparently, he hasn’t run across StickK, or been offered a 0 percent interest bank account to quit.) Here’s what Hurman has to say for himself: I’ve smoked cigarettes for twelve years and I’ve tried all the usual ways to quit smoking. Now that . . .
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