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.
Dubner and I wrote a column in the NY Times that told people to bet on Seattle in the Super Bowl. The bet lost. Not more than three people mentioned this to me afterwards. Not a single angry e-mail from a stranger who lost their college tuition fund because of our column. I’m glad people didn’t write me, but still, . . .
Chris Anderson from the TED conference passes along this link to an interesting slide show of Edward Burtynsky‘s photographs. Burtynsky was a 2005 TED prize winner. Warning to Canadians: you will not like how many of the images are from Canada.
Back in September I blogged about my admiration for Kevin Murphy after he won a MacArthur Genius grant. Here are links to two interviews with Murphy that give you a real flavor of what he is like. The first interview is in the Chicago GSB magazine. Note the size of the truck he drives (it is in the background of . . .
A little-known fact: Steve Levitt is a pretty big NASCAR fan. As for my interest in auto racing — well, I spent five years in North Carolina, both up in the mountains (where, as lore held it, racecar drivers got their training by running moonshine down the mountain roads) and also in Winston-Salem (where the Friday-night roar of cars from . . .
Freakonomics pieces are scheduled to run on Good Morning America and World News Tonight on Friday, February 17th. The GMA piece will run in the first hour and will be a preview of Sunday’s New York Times column about NASCAR. The WNT piece will address the Freakonomics of parenting.
So what do you do if you’re a Jewish cartoonist in Israel and the following happens: a. A Danish newspaper commissions artists to draw editorial cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad, and said cartoons set off a furor in the Muslim world. b. Iran responds to said furor by putting out a call for anti-Semitic cartoons about the Holocaust. (Sure, that’s . . .
Just in time for Torino comes this highly engaging blog posting from Joe Clark in which he makes the seemingly sound argument that women are certainly big enough to play hockey with men. (Size, of course, does not necessarily connote power and aggression and skill, but I’ll leave that question to Joe Clark, and Michelle Wie, and others more qualified . . .
Walter Park, an associate professor at American University in Washington, DC sends along the following story: I’m using your book as a required reading in my principles microeconomics class (of 300 students). The students enjoy the book and are better appreciating the course as a result. Interestingly, as I gave a lecture on “Price Discrimination”, using an example of the . . .
A blog reader named Mark Winburn pointed me to a remarkable website called www.zillow.com. You type in an address and it gives you a satellite view of your home with a dollar value on top of it, as well as on all of the neighboring houses. Unfortunately, I don’t think you want to put too much stock in the house . . .
Last night I flew from from New York to Los Angeles. The guy sitting next to me had been in many industries over the years, including apparel, insurance, tech, etc. Pittsburgh Steelers fan that I am, I was reading the current issue of Sports Illustrated, which is so black and gold this week that it looks like a Steelers newsletter. . . .
Here’s a website that lets you do just that, built by the dogged John Walsh. (Hat tip to QualityG.)
Here is a fairly meaty Q&A with Milton Friedman, from New Perspectives Quarterly. The man, unsurprisingly, has some interesting things to say, and he isn’t shy about saying them. (Hat tip, once again, to Adam Scott.)
The answer is at least one. This morning I saw Barack Obama dropping off his child at nursery school. Obama is the junior senator from Illinois who exploded onto the national political scene with a fantastic speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. Long before that, he wrote a really outstanding memoir about growing up as a mixed-race child, his struggle . . .
The February 5, 2006, Freakonomics column in the New York Times Magazine isn’t really a Freakonomics column, and it’s not really in the New York Times Magazine, either. This blog post supplies additional research material.
The Chicago Graduate School of Business student newspaper has an interview — they call it a smackdown and I have no idea what that means so I must be getting old — with Gary Becker, probably the world’s greatest economist alive. It very much gives you the flavor of how Gary thinks.
I spent three years in something called the “Society of Fellows” at Harvard. They paid me a stipend and let me do whatever research I wanted. My only obligation was to go to a fancy dinner every Monday night and eat with some of the most erudite people you could ever imagine. It was always hit or miss, depending on . . .
Freakonomics has just been published in Germany, and according to Amazon.de, it seems to be finding an audience.
A Freakonomics segment is scheduled to air Friday, February 3rd on World News Tonight (if it doesn’t, it should air February 4th.) The segment addresses Super Bowl gambling, also the topic of February 5th’s article in the New York Times sports publication Play.
Ever wonder what kind of books sell in Dubai? Take a look. I wonder if Tom Friedman and Billy Crystal know that their books are considered fiction in Dubai. Or, for that matter, James Frey.
That is the topic of an article Levitt and I wrote for Play, a new sports magazine being birthed this Sunday by The New York Times. The issue will probably go online late Saturday night (2/4/06) and, as always, we’ll post a page on this website with some supplemental information, including an academic paper that Levitt wrote on N.F.L. gambling. . . .
This is the newly designed cover for the British Freakonomics paperback. Pretty cool, eh?
A friend of mine, Ellen Pall, has started a website to address a pressing need: how to know, when approaching the works of an unfamiliar author, which are the good books to read and which are the ones to avoid. The content of the website will be contributed by users, and Ellen is looking for all willing participants. (I don’t . . .
Yesterday Frey “admitted” that his girlfriend Lily did not hang herself in Chicago as he had written, but rather, slit her wrists. There is no record in the mortality detail files of any young women committing suicide by slitting their wrists in Chicago around this time period that even remotely fits his description. Maybe it was just a paper cut.
Not likely. But now that Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink is in development, Wired magazine took a shot at conceiving Hollywood versions of Freakonomics and a few other unlikely books. Here’s the link. (Thanks to Muriel Binder, my mother-in-law, for the tip.)
I’ve always loved Oprah. So I was very disapointed when she called into the Larry King show and defended James Frey when thesmokinggun allegations first arose against him. She more than redeemed herself on her show today with James Frey as her guest. Unlike Larry King, who tossed softball after softball to Frey, she repeatedly asked the hard questions. And . . .
ABC News, in its infinite wisdom, has signed up Levitt and Dubner as regular Freakonomics contributors to its various programs (Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and 20/20). The next installment will be on Friday, Jan. 27, when Dubner visits G.M.A. (between 8:00 and 9:00 a.m.) to discuss a topic which cannot be revealed here but which is certifiably freaky.
Brad DeLong, the noted blogger, Berkeley economics professor, and former Treasury Department official, has teamed up with Susan Rasky, a professor in Berkeley’s journalism school, to address economic illiteracy in the media. Here’s the story.
What would you do if you were, say, a prosecutor or a journalist or maybe just a snoop who suddenly gained access to a few hundred thousand e-mails from some rogue company and needed to make sense of them? A company called MetaLINCS has created a tool to analyze such a mountain of e-mails, and is offering a demo version . . .
There are many sterotypes associated with undergraduates at the University of Chicago. They are typically thought to be really smart, very overworked, and a bit odd. Two U of C undergrads, using a data-driven approach worthy of the Freakonomics imprimatur, set out to test one of these stereotypes: that the co-eds are not so attractive. A write-up of their approach . . .
A friend of mine, Patrick McCusker, recently received an email from Amazon.com that read as follows: Dear Amazon.com Customer, We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt also purchased books by Tom Evslin. For this reason, you might like to know that Tom Evslin’s hackoff.com: An . . .
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