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.
This may well be old news to many of you, but it’s the first I’ve seen of a plausible explanation for why Zinedine Zidane head-butted Marco Materazzi. According to this British TV interview (via YouTube) with Alex Hayes of the French newspaper L’Equipe, Materazzi happened to call Zidane’s mother a whore on the very day she’d been taken to the . . .
Only in Vegas can you, on one day’s notice, get 64 people to put up $500 each to compete in a Rock, Paper, Scissors contest. Phil Gordon was responsible for the tournament. Phil is a great poker player, perhaps an even better poker author, and one of the most kind and generous people I have ever met. The tournament raised . . .
According to the Associated Press, “a survey of 49 American metropolitan areas found that monthly parking rates in midtown Manhattan were the country’s most expensive, averaging $574.” What’s particularly amazing about that figure is that most people who park in midtown only park during the day near their offices, then drive home at night. I live on the Upper West . . .
As we’ve noted before (here and here, e.g.) some interesting e-mail makes its way to the Freakonomics in-box. The latest was from one Stephanie Downs of MarKomm Consulting, which I thought was worth posting here: I am involved with Spay/Neuter programs with various organizations, she began, and the mentality is to fix the problem and not the symptom. In the . . .
What group of people do you think is more likely to have heard of Freakonomics, top bridge players or top poker players? Far and away it is bridge players. We ran some experiments at a big bridge tournament last week and used the Freakonomics name to help recruit volunteers. Many of the bridge players had heard of or read the . . .
That’s because we just keep on posting. The typical blogger, like most people who go on diets and budgets, quits after a few months, weeks, or in many cases, days. For some reason, we haven’t. In fact, if you look at the “Archives” chart to the right, you’ll see that by the time July is over, we will have blogged . . .
The U.S. national soccer team recently embarassed itself in the World Cup. During the Olympics, U.S. athletes regularly get beat in certain sports that, like soccer, are taken much more seriously in other countries than in ours. So why have Americans done so well in the Tour de France? American cyclists have won 10 of the past 20 TdF’s — . . .
Got this message from someone I know who works at a Barnes & Noble whose location shall remain unnamed: “I’ll be glad when [Ann] Coulter drops off the [best-seller] list, for obvious reasons of taste, but also because customers keep turning her book around or taking it off the shelf and hiding quantities in the back of the store.” This . . .
It seems that Stephen Dubner and Kevin Federline (Britney Spears’s husband) find themselves at odds over one of the great crises of the day. Not the Middle East or Social Security, but rather, whether the government should keep making new pennies. Dubner better be careful or Federline’s next rap will be dissin’ him.
I loathe going on TV for so many different reasons. First, doing a TV interview can take the better part of a day and in the end you are lucky if there is one minute of on-air time. Second, it is a terrible medium for expressing any idea with subtlety and complexity. It is all about sound bytes, whether or . . .
When I saw an ad in today’s Wall Street Journal for a mountain resort in North Carolina, the name of the place struck me as — well, terrible. It’s called Bear Wallow Springs (that part’s okay) at Lake Toxaway. It looks like a perfectly lovely place but … Lake Toxaway? Maybe it’s just me, but the only image conjured by . . .
The answer, apparently, depends greatly on where you are in the hotel. In the lobby, a one-day pass to use their wireless internet connection costs $10.95. Not cheap, but standard for nice hotels. Down in the main ballroom, however, the story is very different. A one-day pass to the internet there costs $300! Economists have a name for this: price . . .
Last week, Levitt declared his intention to run some experiments with poker players in Las Vegas. Well, there’s one more player he may want to consider: Mikey the Chimp. He’ll be in Vegas since he’s competing in the 2006 World Series of Poker. Mikey’s gambit is a publicity stunt for a poker website, PokerShare.com. Here’s the press release that tells . . .
A few months ago, we posted about an effort in Sydney, Australia to drive late-night hooligans from a public park — by blasting Barry Manilow songs. So far, it seems to be working. But the people who live near the park are being driven crazy by the Manilow music. The hooligans have probably moved off to some nice quiet spot, . . .
CBS has found a new place to advertise its TV shows: the eggs in your refrigerator. I can’t imagine Michael Pollan will have anything good to say about this.
There are two interesting pieces on the New York Times OpEd page today: one calling for elderly drivers to have to renew their licenses, the other arguing that if your Social Security number is hijacked by an identity thief, the best solution would be to simply get a new SSN — a solution that, as of now, is pretty much . . .
To fans and patrons of the University of Chicago, few other American universities have had a greater recent impact on the fields of economics, philosophy, law, and urban sociology (which was essentially invented at the U. of C.). That said, I wasn’t prepared for the squib I read in this morning’s New York Times, from a Q&A column in the . . .
A headline on the DrudgeReport reads “13 Days, 14 Homicides in D.C.” and links to a Washington Post story on the subject. It shows just how far we have come in reducing crime when this sort of crime spree is headline news. Washington, DC averaged well more than one homicide a day in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It . . .
I might have thought the answer to that question was “nothing,” but it seems I would have been wrong. Tony Vallencourt has an interesting post on his econball blog. He tallies the astrological sign of members of the U.S. House of Representatives. This exercise is inspired by the work of Anders Ericsson and others; they find that month of birth . . .
I’m going to have a team of researchers in Las Vegas running some experiments on decision-making by poker players. We are looking for serious poker players who (a) will be in Las Vegas between July 21 and July 27, (b) want to make a little money and get a signed copy of Freakonomics, (c) read about themselves in the sequel . . .
There’s someone hiring on Craig’s List in Minneapolis: Freakonomics for Baby Names Reply to: jillyouse@yahoo.com Date: 2006-07-11, 9:32PM CDT We are writing a book on baby names and parent occupation. We have some research completed, will need to do more. Will also need someone to help with gathering data for certain harder to reach audiences. Someone witty, who likes to . . .
Today is one of those days when the world seems to be collapsing: Israel, Iraq, India. The newspapers are full of foreboding news. And putting out a really good newspaper every day is an incredibly hard thing to do. Personally, I think the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are both really good newspapers. So, in offering the . . .
After I graduated from college, I took a job in strategy consulting at a small firm called Corporate Decisions, Inc. The guy who had the desk next to mine could hardly have been more different than me. He was an athletic, good looking, Dartmouth frat boy. When he shook my hand that first time, he practically broke it in half. . . .
If you are a retailer, setting a policy for handling shoplifters isn’t simple. Do you call the police for every shoplifter, even a kid who pockets a box of crayons? What about a senior citizen taking some batteries? Do you treat first-timers the same as pros? Wal-Mart has long been known for a very strict policy: call the police on . . .
Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, has a long-running website called The Long Tail. Now he has just published his book of the same name, and it’s doing great. (Congrats; I haven’t read it yet, but it sounds good.) What caught my eye on his website was this fascinating note (end of the post) from an anonymous writer regarding . . .
Entourage is my favorite TV show in — well, forever. Sure, I have my quibbles. In last week’s episode, we learn that Vince and Eric don’t know until well after Aquaman is released that James Cameron hadn’t signed on to direct the sequel. That’s not very believable. And a couple weeks ago, when Vince and his entourage visit the high-schoolers’ . . .
Bobby Fischer, the chess genius and super-self-hating-Jew, is such a ranter that it might seem sensible to have brushed aside his long-ago charges that Soviet chess players used to collude to ensure a Soviet champion in international chess competitions. But the economists Charles Moul and John Nye, both of Washington University in St. Louis, argue convincingly that the Soviets did . . .
A lot of my friends play chess, some of them very well. I’ve never taken to it. (I’m not even a very good backgammon player, Levitt’s claims notwithstanding.) But I was totally smitten by a new book about chess called The Immortal Game. It was written by David Shenk, a guy I know via e-mail and maybe a party or . . .
So I’m playing poker online tonight and one of the players at my table has the moniker “NolimitFreak.” On one of the first hands he plays, on the final round of betting I make a big bet, he raises me, I reraise him “all in,” and he folds. He then proceeds to call me a “turd” in the area where . . .
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