Astute readers of this blog know that we have an abiding interest in the economics of prostitution. One of the people who will be featured in our next book is a high-end call girl who goes by the name of Allie. Without giving away much detail here, let me just say that Allie is a very bright and attractive blonde . . .
When Anders Ericsson and his colleagues in the “expert performance” movement — we’ve written about them before, and we’ll write about them again — try to explain what it is that makes someone very good at what he or she does, they focus on “deliberate practice.” This means that, your level of natural talent notwithstanding, excellence is accomplished mainly through . . .
Why are there so many fake memoirs in the world? The latest is Margaret Seltzer‘s Love and Consequences. (I would link to its Amazon page but, alas, it no longer has an Amazon page.) If you had written a memoir that was, say, 60 percent true, would you try to present it as a memoir or as a novel? If . . .
We’ve written in the past about the (presumed) worthlessness of book blurbs. But I just came across one blurb that I think might be an exception. The book in question is Why Blacks Fear “America’s Mayor”: Reporting Police Brutality and Black Activist Politics Under Rudy Giuliani. You may recall that this was the book Al Sharpton was reading on a . . .
In a recent post revealing the answer to our latest pop quiz, commenter “nemo” asked, “Do you have stats regarding the average [number] of comments per post versus the average number of comments per post that promises schwag?” Excellent question. Over the past few months, for typical posts (i.e., not including “FREAK-est Links” or other similar short posts), here is . . .
Photo: Callista Gingrich, Gingrich Productions Readers of a certain age may think of Newt Gingrich as a book critic, prolific author, and regular TV guest. But before that, he was one of the most powerful politicians in the land. A former history professor at West Georgia College, Gingrich was a long-serving congressman who, in 1994, masterminded the Contract with America, . . .
On Dan Hamermesh‘s always-interesting blog, I read the first sentence of a recent entry: My grandson will be 13 in 13 months. I had to read it three times to realize that this was not a clever way of saying that he had a brand new grandson. The “months” at the end of the sentence tied to the second “13,” . . .
Last week, we asked for your vote to decide the best of the top five entries to our “6-word motto for the U.S.” contest. As promised, we tallied the votes received in the first 48 hours after posting. There was a clear winner: Our Worst Critics Prefer to Stay (194 votes) Here are the runners-up: Caution! Experiment in Progress Since . . .
We posted a pop quiz yesterday asking you to guess the identity of a mustached man on a long flight who read and snoozed before departing in his cashmere coat. My hat is off to the wisdom of the crowds. Even with these very thin clues, and even though it took quite a while — it was the 315th guess, . . .
I sat next to someone fairly famous yesterday on a long flight. He wasn’t at all talkative. Also, I think he had a cold. He read for a while, snoozed for a while, and watched a DVD on his Macbook. Disembarking, he put on a long cashmere coat. He also had a mustache. Who was he? The first person to . . .
That was the question I found myself asking while reading through the Times sports section in recent days. I understand that we are sort of between seasons here. The Super Bowl is over, baseball has yet to begin, the N.B.A. is slogging through its long wintry slog, and the N.H.L. — well, I’m afraid I just don’t pay attention, as . . .
We ran a contest recently asking you to come up with a new six-word motto for the U.S. Your response was quite strong, with more than 1,200 replies to date. Anyone looking for a good snapshot of public sentiment during this most interesting election year would do well to scroll through the comments: they are pretty damn illuminating, and not . . .
Go and read this profile of the artist/author/songwriter Sandra Boynton. Not only is it nicely written (by Phyllis Korkki — great last name, BTW, with 50 percent Ks) but it is also a fascinating business story about how Boynton juggles and, more importantly, measures such variables as time, enjoyment, money, creative thrill, etc. The article is full of surprises — . . .
MySpace is to Facebook as Yahoo! is to ___________. The answer, according to Hitwise, is: Google. Just as Facebook users are higher on the socioeconomic ladder than MySpace users, people who use Google as their search engine are better off than those who use Yahoo!. Google is most popular among users defined as “Affluent Suburbia,” “Upscale America,” and “Small Town . . .
Two little words — “social networking” — have become a giant buzzphrase over the past couple of years, what with the worldwide march of Facebook and headline-ready stories about Web-assisted suicides. So what’s the net effect of social networking? We gathered a group of wise people who spend their days thinking about this issue — Martin Baily, Danah Boyd, Steve . . .
The Freakonomics in-box regularly fills up with interesting tales (like this one and this one). The other day, a reader from Dallas named Erik Hille took reader e-mail to a whole new level. He was writing about the Feb. 1 entry in our fact-a-day calendar, which excerpts a fact from our book in the chapter on crime: “The average sixty-five-year-old . . .
The answer, according to the economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, is … “not much.” Here’s what they describe in a new NBER working paper about the causes and consequences of the current subprime crisis: Our examination of the longer historical record finds stunning qualitative and quantitative parallels to 18 earlier post-war banking crises in industrialized countries. Specifically, the run-up . . .
I was already a big fan of Hal Varian‘s columns on everyday economics in the Times when I had the good fortune to meet him at Google headquarters, when Levitt and I were out there a couple of years ago. He was even more impressive in person. Now you have a chance to ask him whatever you’d like. As Google’s . . .
If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you know that some of the best posts are written by readers, not by us. For instance, we recently received the following e-mail from Steven Goldstein of New York City: I read your book when it came out. My 12-year-old son saw it lying around last spring and asked what it was . . .
The Wall Street Journal reports on a new World Health Organization study about cigarette smoking around the world. The Journal‘s piece includes data from Euromonitor International about the number of cigarettes sold worldwide by various manufacturers. Here are the numbers of cigarettes sold (in billions) in 2006 by Philip Morris: U.S./Canada: 184 Asia Pacific: 197 Eastern Europe: 229 Western Europe: . . .
We’ve written in the past about the very thin line that separates an acceptable expression of racial or ethnic bias from an unacceptable one — for instance, the tumult over Andy Rooney writing that “today’s baseball stars are all guys named Rodriguez to me.” As we wrote in Freakonomics, evidence from the TV show Weakest Link suggested that bias against . . .
As of this writing, the CBS News program 60 Minutes is scheduled to run a segment on Sun., Feb. 10 (7 p.m. EST), on the fate of the penny: should it be abolished or not? I was interviewed on the subject, so if the piece isn’t preempted and if I don’t end up on the cutting room floor, you can . . .
These days, many Americans — including Mike Bloomberg and Chuck Schumer — fear the answer to that question will soon be “no,” if it isn’t already; London is poised to take over. An article [gated] in today’s Wall Street Journal about the credit crunch’s effect on the U.K. economy offers this sobering fact: The financial sector accounts for more than . . .
That is the promise being made by a company called QLess, which offers “virtual queue management” via cellphone* alerts. Its home page makes this alluring statement/threat: “On average, Americans spend almost 3 years of their lives waiting in line.” This is one area (perhaps of many) in which I am way below average. I hate lines, and waiting in general, . . .
The odds are pretty good that if you are a reader of this blog, you’ll have the opportunity to vote today in one of the Super (Duper) Tuesday primaries. Here are today’s Democratic primaries and here are the Republican primaries. Two Novembers ago, we wrote a column headlined “Why Vote?” that discussed the rationality of voting. One point we made . . .
Inspired by a recent trip to London, this recent Times article about England’s reluctant search for a national motto (suggestions range from “No Motto Please, We’re British” to “One Mighty Empire, Slightly Used”), as well as by this new book on six-word memoirs (which we teased not long ago here), I invite you all to attempt the following: Write a . . .
The parties who are suffering from the subprime crisis are vast and varied, as well as in the newspapers every day. One reason the crisis has gotten so much attention, in fact, is because these parties are so vast and varied. The typical financial crisis has one or two big villains (think Enron) and a vague coterie of victims (think . . .
Here’s our latest guest post from “Indexed” creator Jessica Hagy. You can find past posts here and Jessica’s own site here. She will soon be publishing a book of her work — and yes, I blurbed it. But once again, despite my general low disregard for book blurbs, this time I really meant it. Anyway, she calls this latest Freako-Indexed . . .
Patricia Cohen has an article in today’s Times about a recent American Enterprise Institute panel on the notion of repugnance and how it affects markets. In other words, why are some behaviors considered repugnant while others are acceptable, and how and why do such demarcations change over time? Three of the panel’s five participants — Arthur Brooks, Sally Satel, and . . .
If you go into the cafeteria at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, you will come upon a rather extraordinary display in the soda case: It reminded me of a Mondrian painting, maybe “Broadway Boogie Woogie.” As it turned out, the man responsible for the display was standing nearby, and we fell to chatting. His name is Derek . . .
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