| You’re so frustrated by the stock market that you want to break something, so you insert a coin into this objet/vending machine, which slowly spins out a piece of china until it drops to the ground, shattering. But the market (like all complex human systems) is more like these sculptures by Michael Kontopoulos, which whack themselves into instability, teeter . . .
We are hard at work on SuperFreakonomics, which will be published as soon as it finishes simmering in our computers. This may well occur before the end of the year. In the meantime, how about some pants? A company named Bonobos makes what it calls “awesome fitting trousers.” New York magazine agrees, as does The Times; their pants have even . . .
I blogged yesterday about my theories as to why KFC seems to have bad customer service, even though the chain gives so much lip-service to customers. If you can’t provide good restaurant service, how about doing public service instead? As part of a new marketing campaign, KFC has offered to fill potholes in city streets in return for being allowed . . .
Ah, spring! You know it’s here when drugstore shelves fill up with marshmallow eggs and pink Peeps. But few people realize that real chicken eggs used to be as seasonal as their candy imitators. Even fewer know that the egg was once a speculative tool as controversial as credit default swaps are today. “Not even a quant, at first glance, . . .
| In its highly anticipated series finale, Battlestar Galactica ended with a meditation on humanity’s evolutionary baggage and our tendency toward technology-driven, apocalyptic violence. That’s where this episode of Carl Sagan‘s groundbreaking public television series Cosmos picks up. Happily, Sagan’s entire series is now available free on Hulu. [%comments]
| Does panhandling work better through the web? A Houston father and son team thinks so. They gave a homeless man named Timothy Dale Edwards a sign to hold while panhandling; it directed passersby to his website, PimpThisBum.com. In less than two months, the site has garnered $50,000 in pledges and donations. The project’s creators believe its success has to . . .
| Every weekday in March, a judge at The Morning News has pitted against each other two novels published last year, with one emerging as the winner and going up against the next book. The winning book of the championship match will be announced tomorrow — and its author, per the website, will receive a live rooster. [%comments]
My family is somewhat obsessed with all things Sarah Dooley. We were first won over by her oddly moving songs. Check out this love song, “Watching Goonies at My House.” But she is also writing and staring in her own comedies. As an undergraduate at Barnard College, she has started posting to YouTube a series of short And Sarah films . . .
| “I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this, but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930’s is true in 2010.” That’s Sen. Byron Dorgan (D.-North Dakota), from a 1999 Times article on the repeal of the Glass-Steagall . . .
| A California pornography company that owns the trademark Virtual Sex lost its bid to take over ownership of the domain name virtualsex.com from another company. The World Intellectual Property Organization ruled that Network Telephone Services, the current owner of the domain, “offered all the appropriate merchandise to match its namesake.” Might “Freakonomics” one day face a similar challenge from . . .
Photo: emile I’ve loved the chicken at KFC ever since I was a kid. My parents were cheap, so KFC was splurging when I was growing up. About twice a year my pleading, perhaps in a combination with a well-timed TV advertisement, would convince my parents to bring the family to KFC. “What is so ironic about the poor service . . .
| For 16 years, police in Germany hunted a female serial killer whose DNA was identified at 40 crime scenes, including six murders. Exasperated, investigators dubbed her “the phantom of Heilbronn,” after the town in which she allegedly killed a policewoman. A state prosecutor on her trail said he “just couldn’t believe that the same woman could be capable” of . . .
| A California-based company took millions of dollars from infertile couples, matched the couples with surrogate mothers, and agreed to use the money to pay the surrogates until their children came to term. Only now the company has vanished, along with the money, and the surrogate mothers are no longer being paid. What will happen to the children they carry? . . .
Here’s a post I coauthored with Peter Siegelman (an economist who teaches at University of Connecticut law school) who is one of my earliest and most frequent coauthors (see, for example, here and here). Screenshot from YouTube.com. By now, virtually everyone in the country has heard that the Peanut Corporation of America knowingly shipped peanut products contaminated with salmonella bacteria, . . .
| A challenge for our readers: the Fraser Institute is offering a $1,000 top prize for proposals on what economic or public policy issue it should try to measure. More information is here. Submit a brief essay or video with a clear thesis on what should be measured, why it should be measured, and how it might be measured. Let . . .
My 9-year-old granddaughter announced, “I feel very sorry for my friend Olivia.” “Why?” her father asked her. “Because I will be away and won’t be able to attend her birthday party,” she replied. This struck me as a typical child’s self-centered behavior. But another way of looking at it is that it’s the epitome of altruism. Most young kids view . . .
| For admirers of Indexed, we bring you: New Math. On this site, Craig Damrauer offers up one new formula each Monday to describe our world. In case you were wondering: Carjacking = Can I borrow your car? – No, you can’t. [%comments]
Photo: hoggardb The Internal Revenue Service presumably never likes tax cheats, but when money is tight there is more pressure put on the I.R.S. to step up enforcement and collect more money. The most recent gambit, reported today, is an amnesty program designed to root out offshore tax havens. We once wrote of another I.R.S. measure that produced $3 billion . . .
| It’s been a year since the American Journal of Psychiatry tried to have the internet committed — O.K., well, since it published an editorial arguing for the classification of internet addiction as a certifiable mental illness. The editorial isn’t clear about what exactly constitutes “excessive” internet use, but it points to a number of internet-related deaths in South Korea. . . .
| Google doesn’t know why, but China blocked the entire YouTube site on Monday, cutting off access for all Chinese citizens. Maybe, posits Wired‘s Eliot Van Buskirk, one of China’s censorship workers mistakenly blocked the entire site (instead of just select URL’s, as had been done in the past); maybe a single video really offended the Chinese government; or maybe . . .
Quotes Uncovered Here are more quote authors and origins Shapiro’s tracked down recently. Did Emerson Define Success? Why Go To Hell Via Handbasket? Your Quote Authors Uncovered Ten weeks ago, 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. Scores . . .
Last week’s news about the Obama family vegetable garden shows how far locavorism has come since the term entered the foodie lexicon in 2005. It also shows how Americans’ food supply has changed — and not changed — since Eleanor Roosevelt planted the last White House garden in 1943. Back then, Victory Gardens helped fend off wartime food shortages. Today’s rake-wielding first lady is waging war against obesity.
A reader named Eric Eilberg writes with the following bleg: My family has run Marlen Jewelers since 1914. Over the years a lot of things have changed, and the business has survived and prospered. We’re a freestanding building in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. We employ six full-time and one part-time sales associates. Dad is the third generation to run . . .
| You might have learned about the hidden elves of Iceland if you read the Michael Lewis article we blogged about recently. (Note: for Icelandic pushback to Lewis’s colorful tales, see here.) The Icelandic government apparently takes these elves very seriously, and often requires that new construction sites be certified as clear of elves before building begins. So how do . . .
Last post, I let you know about Walk Score, the website that tallies a district’s commercial, recreational, and cultural opportunities, then assigns it a numerical score based on its pedestrian-friendliness. Walk Score also ranks the 40 largest cities and provides neat walkability maps of them. Here are the 10 most pedestrian-oriented: Los Angeles, from Walk Score. 1. San Francisco 2. . . .
| As the economic slowdown wallops the “world’s factory,” some people think China is like the Soviet Union in the 1980’s, or like Japan in the 1990’s. James Fallows has a more sobering comparison: America as it entered the Great Depression. If so, is the upcoming production of Das Kapital — The Musical China’s answer to The Cradle Will Rock? . . .
Are such products too weird to take hold in the U.S.? Remember that the Walkman, the great cassette-tape ancestor of portable CD players and iPods, also started out as one of those wacky Japanese inventions.
Like many other journals in economics and other disciplines, the Economic Journal, the main scholarly organ of the Royal Economic Society, has paid referees (judges of submitted scholarly papers) for prompt reports (e.g., the American Economic Review offers $100 for a prompt report). The purpose of this is to provide an incentive to get the job done quickly. I have . . .
| Alison Flood, writing on The Guardian‘s Books Blog, asks why Freakonomics and most other books that make “serious non-fiction subjects accessible and popular” weren’t written by women. She theorizes that either women are better at storytelling (think Factory Girls and The Big Necessity) than “sell[ing] our hypothesis about the world” — or it’s just a “numbers game,” as male . . .
The economics meme of the day appears to be naming the current downturn. A while back, our friends at Economix solicited reader suggestions, of which my favorite was “The Great Deception.”