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.
Fight spam by donating to your favorite charity. That’s how researchers at Yahoo are hoping to convince people to put a virtual one-cent stamp on their outgoing e-mails. Sending a penny-stamped e-mail through Yahoo’s (not yet released) CentMail program would automatically mark it as “real mail” and get it past any spam filters.
Lisa Sanders, the diagnosis columnist for New York Times Magazine (and, I should disclose, my close friend), has just published a truly interesting book, Every Patient Tells A Story, on how good doctors go about making difficult diagnoses.
Central Texas is having its worst drought in 50 years, and since May we have been limited to twice-a-week lawn watering. With things getting worse, on August 24 the limit goes to once per week. I’ll abide by the limit, but I’ll set my sprinklers to run longer each session than during the twice-a-week watering.
Next week, after more than four years in, Freakonomics is being published in the U.S. in paperback. We’ve been asked to go on TV to talk about the effects (if any) the book has had, whether in the realm of crime-fighting or baby-naming or book-writing. We need your help in gathering good examples to talk about. Nothing is too large or too small, in your life or the lives of others. Thanks in advance.
Foreign Policy come up with a list of “The World’s Worst Healthcare Reforms.” Keeping company with Russia, China, and Turkmenistan is the good old U.S. of A.
While a zombie attack is one of the least likely ways the world could end, four Canadian mathematicians did a mathematical analysis of a hypothetical zombie outbreak to determine the likelihood of human eradication, should such an attack ever occur.
If you live in Brooklyn and you’re sick of looking at George Washington’s face every time you buy coffee, things may be looking up.
Kurt Andersen sees the economic recession as a one-time opportunity for America to “get back on track.” In his new book, Reset, he explains how he thinks Americans can use the crisis to “reset” and reinvent old systems and ideas and “focus more on the things that make us authentically happy.”
Slums are larger and more dense than two centuries ago — and they’re creating “causal chains that weren’t there before,” says urban historian Mike Davis.
A Slate article mentions that the annual price of a hot-dog stand license near the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is $362,201. Licenses are very limited and are bought at auction. The price presumably reflects the economic rent associated with the particular site (the price would be a lot lower in the middle of Central Park). Yet at a fixed cost of $1,000 per day, how can a hot-dog vendor make enough money to cover his variable cost, including the value of his own time?
When I arrived in Portland last month, the first thing I wanted to do was buy a bike and get around the way the locals do. Since I wouldn’t be in town for too long, and it wasn’t clear that I’d be able to take the bike with me when I left, I wanted something extremely cheap.
Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty offers some hypotheses as to why Chinese restaurants have “secret menus” that only Chinese people seem to know about.
We’ve discussed before what suburbia might look like in the future. Dwell and Inhabitat.com asked designers, planners, and engineers to submit their ideas for a suburban re-do (ReBurbia), and invited readers to vote on the top 20 finalists.
A while back, we began soliciting reader questions for Captain Steve, a pilot with a major U.S. airline. He answered his first two batches of questions here, and is back with another round. Please leave new questions for him in the comments section below.
We posted earlier about how a blogger named Dave Prager tried to figure out why the buses in Delhi kill so many people. Now he’s back to explain how Delhi’s upscale alcohol ads create demand for his empty liquor bottles, and give his maid a nice side income.
Edward Glaeser (over at the Economix blog) and I are doing a few posts on the high-speed rail (HSR) component of the economic stimulus package (find the first post here). HSR promises to reduce carbon emissions, but so does the other hot transportation policy at the moment, Cash for Clunkers (CFC). Under CFC the federal government is providing rebates to consumers who trade in their vehicles for new ones that get better gas mileage. Which program is the more effective way to cool down the ice caps while heating up the economy?
A while back, I invited readers to submit quotations for which they wanted me to try to trace the origins, using The Yale Book of Quotations and more recent research by me. Hundreds of people have responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a few per week.
I’m watching Deadwood, the remarkably well-written HBO series of a few years ago. In Episode 16, several wealthy townspeople, including the hotel owner, are spreading rumors that the gold field claims will soon be voided.
Last week’s excellent article on the just one sign of the market value of number crunching. As I wrote in the afterword to the paperback version of Super Crunchers:
Slate’s interactive End of America site presents 144 possible ways the U.S. could meet its demise and lets you choose your favorites. We’ve covered quite a few of them on this blog
Last week we solicited your questions for Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of the “personal genetics” company 23andMe. Among your interesting questions: are 23andMe’s genetic results taken seriously by doctors? Should children have the procedure done? Will insurance companies engage in genetic profiling?
Thanks for the good questions and to Wojcicki for the compelling answers.
Crematoriums in Denmark want to recycle their “waste heat” by distributing it into local heating systems. The Danish Council of Ethics didn’t have a problem with the idea, as the Economist reports, but it did advise that “burning granny especially to warm radiators would be indecent and illegal.”
Inspired by Bernie Madoff’s 150-year prison sentence, New York state assemblyman Jim Tedesco introduced a bill that, as the Economist reports, would establish a “pay-if-you-go” model for prisons, whereby wealthy inmates pay for their own incarceration costs, thereby easing the burden on taxpayers.
… would probably be dotted with parking lots the size of Greenwich Village in order to accommodate all the daily commuters driving into the city on the equivalent of 84 Queens Midtown Tunnels, predicts Michael Frumin at the Frumination blog.
Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch. Classes start in three weeks, and the bosses have mandated a revolution at UT-Austin: We can no longer give only A, B, C grades, but must give +/- grades too, such as A, A-, B+, etc. With 600 students this Fall, I can imagine a big change in griping.
So does this make you want to go locavore, since so much fuel was likely used in transporting them around the globe, and maybe they’re not the freshest almonds?
You probably heard about the terrible air crash in New York on Saturday between a small plane and a tourist helicopter. Nine people were killed.
As Levitt once noted, getting a paper published in an academic journal is an often comically belabored process, and of course it’s even worse when the paper is rejected.
The cover for our new book, SuperFreakonomics has just been revealed. Come take a look!
Justin Wolfers argues for more stimulus spending, highlighting a recent debate between himself and Reihan Salam on CNN.
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