Seth Schiesel wrote a fascinating piece in the Times about a new collaboration between game maker Electronic Arts and the energy company BP in designing the latest version of E.A.’s SimCity computer game. In case you don’t know, SimCity “focuses on building and managing a modern metropolis.” As Schiesel tells us, “coping with environmental pollution has long been part of . . .
Whenever we run a contest or quiz on this site, we offer the winner/s some kind of prize. Until now, we’ve never gotten around to showing what the prizes look like. So here, friends, is our current assortment of Freakonomics schwag. The T-shirt and yo-yo are, as they say, unavailable in any store. (So is Don King, as far as . . .
Courtesy of Craigslist Last week, you submitted lots and lots of questions for Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster, the founder and CEO, respectively, of Craigslist. They couldn’t answer every question but I think you’ll agree they’ve given us a lot of good answers, time, and ideas. I was particularly intrigued by Jim’s statement that investigative journalism has actually been damaged . . .
I recently blogged about a suboptimal customer service experience with Delta Air Lines. (As a couple of commenters pointed out — see Nos. 28, 36, and 44 — one of my assumptions was probably wrong, but that doesn’t change the thrust of the story very much.) So it’s nice to report a really good customer service experience. We recently had . . .
I first met Liz Seymour some 20 years ago. She lived then in the same house where she now lives, in Greensboro, N.C. She was (and still is) roughly ten years older than me, a Smith grad with a bohemian streak who wrote freelance articles for national magazines and newspapers, often about the home furnishings industry that had a strong . . .
We have temporarily floated our tag cloud up to the top of the right-hand column of our home page so you can take a good look at it. We haven’t tagged our entire archives yet, but we’re getting there. So feel free to play around with the tags to see what’s in the vault, and know that there’s more to . . .
That is the very good question posed on the British Psychological Society’s research blog. The answers, provided by leading psychologists, are even better. In many cases, it’s not that the experiments haven’t been done, but that they can’t be, often for ethical or practical reasons. But even if the proposed experiments are only thought experiments, they are well worth reading. . . .
The British Medical Association calls attention to a new study in the Postgraduate Medical Journal that assesses the efficacy of individually tailored herbal medical treatments. The outcome? “There is no good evidence to suggest that individually tailored herbal medicine treatment works well,” the BMA declares. The nuances here are interesting. While studies on the efficacy of herbal medicine have grown . . .
In today’s Washington Post, George Will profiles Austan Goolsbee, a colleague of Levitt’s at the University of Chicago and an economic adviser to Barack Obama. (You can see what we’ve written in the past about Goolsbee here.) Will’s piece contains Goolsbee’s interesting take on imports from China and elsewhere, with facts that I am sure most Americans don’t know: As . . .
So this was a nice surprise: after I went on Good Morning America today to talk about The Boy With Two Belly Buttons, the book shot up to the No. 1 slot on Amazon’s list of best-sellers for ages 4-8. By the time you read this post, it may have slunk down the list, but for at least half a . . .
Raise your hand if you’ve never visited Craigslist. Just as I thought: I don’t see many raised hands out there. In my opinion, Craigslist is one of the most revolutionary elements of the Internet revolution: simple, scalable, useful, powerful, and therefore omnipresent. So I am very happy to announce that Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster, the company’s founder and CEO, . . .
I am scheduled to appear on Good Morning America tomorrow (Wed., Oct. 3), at about 8:30 a.m. E.D.T., to talk about my new kids’ book, The Boy With Two Belly Buttons. I have no delusions about my chances of success as a children’s author. (They are slim.) Nor do I have any delusions about why I, a first-time kids’-book author, . . .
Video The Americans with Disabilities Act was considered landmark legislation. Here’s a summary of the law from the Department of Justice Web site: The Americans with Disabilities Act gives civil rights protections to individuals with disabilities similar to those provided to individuals on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, age, and religion. It guarantees equal opportunity for individuals . . .
Of all the changes we’ve made to this blog in recent months, my favorites are the reader-generated Q&A’s (here’s a recent example) and our Freakonomics Quorums (the most recent of which was about the future of the music industry). (I also love the “Freak-TV” videos that Nick Graham is making, but they are kind of hard to view right now, . . .
It isn’t easy to convey the intricacies of class warfare, housecleaning, immigration, a sci-fi classic, and the lottery in a couple of index cards. But Jessica Hagy, the proprietor of Indexed, has done it. (You can find her previous Freakonomics entries here.)
Video The latest FREAK-TV video features Levitt discussing the ever-interesting topic of naming your kid. We have had many people write to us since the book came out to say they chose their baby’s name (or, just as often, rejected a name they were considering) based on the data in our book. What nobody knows (until now) is that one . . .
Anyone who’s ever written a book — and these days, who hasn’t? — can tell you that watching your sales rank on Amazon.com can be a pretty fun sport. But something happened recently that made it a lot more fun for some people, and a lot less fun for others. I noticed the change the other day when I checked . . .
Arthur Frommer Last week, we solicited your questions for travel pro Arthur Frommer. Thanks for the strong response and thoughtful questions. As for Arthur’s answers, below — well, they are IMHO fantastic. Now I see why his books are so popular. He is opinionated, colorful, informed, passionate, and a few dozen other things. We hope you enjoy. Q: As the . . .
We wrote recently about nuclear energy in the U.S. — how, after much early promise, the industry faltered badly but now seems poised for a renaissance. (Here is some supporting evidence for the column.) Two related stories broke yesterday, one of which is good news for the nuclear industry. The other is probably — hopefully — not very consequential in . . .
I first became a published writer at age 11, when a poem that I wrote for school (“The Possum”) appeared in Highlights magazine. While I have since written about thieves, terrorists, and even economists, I guess it is fitting that I have finally written a children’s book. It’s called The Boy With Two Belly Buttons, with illustrations by the remarkable . . .
In Freakonomics, we make the argument that a child’s first name doesn’t affect his or her life outcome. I am guessing that most inanimate objects, too, are relatively unaffected by the names they happen to pick up — even if the names aren’t very good. It has always struck me that a lot of the things we do and use . . .
Last week, Passenger X arrived at the Orlando airport with a first-class e-ticket for New York City. At the airport, the ticket machine spat out a boarding pass for a seat in the back of coach. Why? The plane, he was told, had been “downsized” from a large jet to a smaller one. There was no first-class section on the . . .
Video Our International Woman of Mystery returns in a new video, “Do Doctors Wash Their Hands?” Here’s a column we wrote on the subject, and here’s some recent bad news. For a real time warp, read this 1859 essay by Ignaz Semmelweis, and ask yourself why on earth we are still talking about hand washing.
The latest in our Freakonomics Indexed series, by Jessica Hagy, needs no introduction — although, if you’re wondering, as I was, what goat she was thinking of, you’ll find the reference here, in a BoingBoing/BBC mention of how Nepal’s state-run airline fixed an electrical problem on one of its planes by sacrificing a goat. Hanging Out:
Before I was in the writing industry, I was in the music industry. While the economics of journalism have changed a lot over the past 20 years — witness the demise of Times Select and the potential demise of the Wall Street Journal‘s pay site — many other aspects of the writing industry haven’t changed much at all. If you . . .
Video There’s a new Freakonomics video today, the third and final installment of Levitt talking about his academic research, co-authored by John Donohue, that linked a rise in legalized abortion to a drop in crime. (You can access Parts 1 and 2 in the thumbnail images beneath the video player.) In this piece, Levitt talks about the initial, stormy reaction . . .
Travel much? While we’ve written a good bit about traveling on this site, from airplane dining to nightmare vacations to chocolate-friendly hotels, we are plainly pikers compared to Arthur Frommer. He is the founder of the omnipresent Frommer’s Travel Guides as well as Budget Travel magazine. His career was accidental: after graduating from Yale Law School in the midst of . . .
There were two fascinating page-one articles in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that reinforce why it is so hard to predict the future. “U.S. Farmers Rediscover the Allure of Tobacco,” by Lauren Etter, is about how tobacco farming has spiked in the U.S. in the three years since federal tobacco subsidies ended. Although the U.S. tobacco/cigarette industry has taken a few . . .
Randy Pausch, a prominent computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon, yesterday gave his farewell lecture. He is 46 years old, and he is dying from pancreatic cancer. Read this remarkable article, by Mark Roth, about a remarkable man. I will give you a dollar if you make it to the end without crying. My condolences and best wishes to Pausch’s family . . .
Among a certain type of criminal — think mafia, think crack gang — there is no greater dishonor than to snitch. Giving information to the police is a betrayal of the worst sort, often punishable by death. Which is why this article from the British magazine New Statesman is so interesting. The article, by Martin Bright, is about the recent . . .
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