When Freakonomics.com was launched in 2005, it was essentially a blog (c’mon, blogs were a thing then!). The first Freakonomics book had just been published, and Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt wanted to continue their conversation with readers. Over time, the blog grew to have millions of readers, a variety of regular and guest writers, and it was hosted by The New York Times, where Dubner and Levitt also published a monthly “Freakonomics” column. The authors later collected some of the best blog writing in a book called When to Rob a Bank … and 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants. (The publisher rejected their original title: We Were Only Trying to Help. The publisher had also rejected the title Freakonomics at first, so they weren’t surprised.) While the blog has not had any new writing in quite some time, the entire archive is still here for you to read.
Of all the questions that readers of Freakonomics ask me to explore, understanding the explosion in autism is at or near the top of the list. I haven’t read the original study, but this news report offers an interesting hypothesis about the rise in autism: older fathers. Don’t tell Dubner I’m citing Wikipedia, but there is a nice entry there . . .
I am probably typical in that I hate making a customer-service call to just about any large company. The odds of getting useful information in anything under a half hour are pretty slim. One problem is that many companies’ “phone trees” — the automated menus that ask you to mash one button after the next — are silly mazes that . . .
The Asian Sex Gazette, an online (and perhaps offline) publication whose content is a bit risque for this PG-rated blog (I found the link over at the excellent Marginal Revolution website, which plainly has a pervier crowd), reports that some Chinese funerals feature graveside strippers: The more people that come to a funeral in China, the better the deceased is . . .
There are three key words missing from this news report about a new Al-Qaeda videotape: Osama bin Laden. He is generally assumed to be alive but doesn’t it seem fairly likely that he may already be dead? If he can’t be found in order to be captured or killed, how are we to know that he’s still alive? But here’s . . .
For the record, I like Wikipedia just fine, as long as people understand what it is and what it isn’t. What it is: a useful and engaging enterprise in user-generated content about a mind-blowingly diverse range of subjects. What it isn’t: a dependable substitute for a reference work, at least not in many cases. We have touched on this dichotomy . . .
As of today, Google Book Search affords you the opportunity to read or even download the complete text of many out-of-copyright books, including Hamlet, Aesop’s Fables, the Inferno, and many more. Here’s the news on Google’s own blog. If you’re looking for a current book, and you also don’t want to pay a penny, you might consider Book Mooch. And . . .
One of the regular commenters on this blog, who calls himself Zbicyclist, has a very interesting post on his own blog about how and why Floyd Landis may have doped himself up for that miraculous Tour de France stage. (For previous posts about the TdF and/or sports doping, see here and here and here.)
It’s one man’s invention, called the Shovelglove. Here’s how he came upon it: It was a rainy Sunday. I hadn’t gone to the gym in over three months, and I was feeling painfully out of shape and antsy to do some kind of exercise. But I didn’t want to go out in the rain, and the prospect of subjecting myself . . .
In our continuing effort to bring you news of interesting first names from around the globe (see here and here and here and here), please consider this recent e-mail from an Australian reader named Alex Lasky: Gents: I write regarding the effect of names on the performance of those who bear them as discussed in “Freakonomics,” particularly when it comes . . .
In today’s New York Times comes word that Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, an old friend of Karl Rove who was booted last year from running the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with a political agenda, has run into trouble again in his current job, as the overseer of Voice of America and other government broadcasts to foreign countries. This time he is . . .
… then you have to admit that this one is pretty good: sending a piece of bogus research material to a biographer whom you happen to hate. In this case, the biographer is A.N. Wilson, who was writing a book about the poet John Betjeman. Wilson made use of the bogus letter, only to discover too late that the letter . . .
Seven years ago a Harvard undergrad named Ilyana Kuziemko emailed me asking if I had any summer research positions available. At the time, nobody ever sent me this kind of email, so I hired her and she spent the summer in Chicago doing research with me. It was clear then that she had a very special talent for economics. Consequently, . . .
Here is a very interesting and, to my mind, useful letter to the editor of Sports Illustrated, written by Brandon Gaut of Irvine, Calif., whose home page is here: As a scientist and a sports fan, I believe the current doping scandals compromise science as much as sports. The tests are performed by entities motivated by and funded to achieve . . .
Matthew Broderick just broke his collarbone while riding a horse. This makes Broderick the fourth or fifth person I have heard of in recent months who was injured while riding a horse. This got me to thinking: how dangerous is horseback riding, especially as compared to, say, riding a motorcycle? A quick Google search turns up this 1990 CDC report, . . .
The movie “Snakes on a Plane” had enormous internet buzz before being released , but fizzled at the box office. This has led to a great deal of discussion in both the traditional media and online about what does or does not make internet buzz translate into commercial success. One reasonable answer to that question may be that when the . . .
Today’s New York Times has a long and very interesting article on the recent plot by radical Muslims in Britian to blow up a bunch of airplanes. But the article, written by Don Van Natta Jr., Elaine Sciolino, and Stephen Grey, is not available online (not yet, at least), because of legal concerns. As the Times explains, “This arises from . . .
I’ve written in the past about how much I have enjoyed the TED conference held annually in Monterey, as well as the associated blog. Now, you can get a taste of TED without even leaving the house. At TedTalks, a handful of the presentations have been posted, including ones by Al Gore, Larry Brilliant, and Daniel Dennett (who is indirectly . . .
Forwarded to me by my good friend Sherman Shapiro, but originally published here in The Onion : WASHINGTON, DC – Congress is considering sweeping legislation, which provides new benefits for many Americans. The Americans With No Abilities Act (AWNAA) is being hailed as a major legislation by advocates of the millions of Americans who lack any real skills or ambition. . . .
In the epilogue of Freakonomics, we admitted that we had written a book that had no unifying them and which probably didn’t help a reader solve any real problems. The best we could hope for, we wrote, was that “You might become more skeptical of the conventional wisdom; you may begin looking for hints as to how things aren’t quite . . .
From A Treatise on Diseases of the Nervous System, by William A. Hammond (published 1871), here are some of the then-known causes of dementia: Among the physical causes, drunkenness, the use of opium, and other narcotics, excessive veneral indulgence, masturbation, blows on the head, exposure to severe heat or cold, the puerperal state [being pregnant], and certain diseases may be . . .
One of my favorite blogs is OrthoMom, the musings of an Orthodox Jewish mom. It is nicely written, almost always interesting, and intimate in the best sense of the word — as if it were a conversation between friends. (And I love her “Heroine of the Day” series.) The most recent posting is about the real-estate needs of Orthodox Jews, . . .
Dubner recently posted about criminal names in England. The American parallel to that list is one maintained by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The Texas list has information about all 396 people currently on death row in that state. It includes first names, as well as details about their life and crimes in some instances. The most likely first . . .
Mark Cuban, who is the richest blogger that I know of, and also one of the most prolific, shares a story about the Wikipedia entry about himself. To all you Wikipedia fundamentalists: I do not hate you, or Wikipedia. (If I hated it, I probably wouldn’t have called Wikipedia “generally fun, sometimes useful, often entertaining” in my last post on . . .
Because I am not left-handed, I have never taken much pleasure in the endless parade of studies, articles, and anecdotes about how left-handed people are better at everything than right-handed people. But that doesn’t mean the studies stop coming; here’s the latest, by the economists Christopher S. Ruebeck, Joseph E. Harrington, and Robert Moffitt. At least we righties can console . . .
Thanks to the section of Freakonomics that dealt with unusual first names, we regularly get e-mails from readers telling us about a particularly good example. (Maybe we should make such submissions a regular feature of this blog?) Anyway, I don’t think there’s been a better submission that the one that came this morning, courtesy of David Tinker of Pittsburgh. He . . .
I think that every son, and especially every male writer, has an awful lot to say about his own father. My father died when I was a kid; I wrote quite a bit about him in this book and in this one. One of my favorite father-son memoirs of all time is The Duke of Deception, by Geoffrey Wolff, who . . .
Grigori Perelman is the 40-year-old Russian mathematician who has been credited with resolving the Poincare Conjecture, one of the most important questions in math. But Perelman chose not to attend the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, where he was to be given a Fields Medal by Spanish king Juan Carlos. Perelman has also neglected to pick up the $1 . . .
Anybody care to know the most common first names of Liverpool’s criminals? Martin Rosenbaum, on his BBC News blog, has posted such a list, including types of offenses. Now all someone has to do is cross-index the most popular criminal names with the most popular names in general and break them out according to socioeconomic status, etc. As it now . . .
In New York City, at least, it sometimes seems that way. Not long ago, we wrote a column about how a real-estate boom actually lowers median Realtor income because of all the new agents who rush in to join the boom. Homethinking.com, a new website that allows customers to rate Realtors, has posted an interesting item on Realtor density. It . . .
A 30-year-old Belgian municipal worker named Reno has a website called Shoot My Blog, a sort of meta-site on which he posts user-submitted photos of computer monitors showing his blog page. I am particularly fond of the family of computers in bed together. Reno says he is running this submission contest merely to engender creativity (and promote his own website), . . .
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