How You Know It's Been Too Long Since You Published Your Last Book
I asked my 8-year-old daughter Amanda if she had any suggestions as to how I could be a better dad. “Finish SuperFreakonomics,” she answered. “I am tired of waiting to read it.”
I asked my 8-year-old daughter Amanda if she had any suggestions as to how I could be a better dad. “Finish SuperFreakonomics,” she answered. “I am tired of waiting to read it.”
Penn Jillette is a magician, comedian, actor, producer and, generally, a curator of interesting and intelligent things. But he is best known as the self-described “larger, louder” half of Penn & Teller, a stage show that Penn and his magician partner Teller Jillette have put on since 1975. It currently plays at the Rio in Vegas. I saw it there not long ago, and it was phenomenal.
Is the message of this Barclay’s ad: “The banking industry is going down the tubes anyway, bringing all aspects of society with it, so you might as well have fun on the way down”? (HT: Andrew Sullivan)
Saw this poster taped to a lamppost in my neighborhood last weekend. There is so much to admire about it. My first thought concerned the talent/practice angle as espoused by Anders Ericsson.
I played in a bunch of bands when I was a kid. Although we were generally dreadful, playing clumpy versions of bad cover songs at poorly attended basement gigs, it was hard to deny that all that very deliberate practice paid off.
The total number of hate groups operating in the U.S. has increased by more than half since 2000, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.). Photo: upload The report, and subsequent news coverage of it, blames this distressing trend on the deteriorating economy and the election of Barack Obama. But economic downturns don’t necessarily stoke . . .
Some things — Terminator, Elvis — were better in their original incarnations. Forbes‘s Andy Greenberg thinks the Kindle was too. The Kindle2, which came out this week, doesn’t “feel as natural for reading” as the original Kindle, Greenberg writes. Its “cold and slippery” aluminum back and smaller page-turning buttons, he says, make the Kindle2 seem “more interested in wowing customers . . .
A seatmate on a flight I took described her interesting business to me. She organizes seminars where she speaks to groups of professionals in her field.
She rents a meeting room in a hotel (her fixed cost) and incurs the variable costs of her time and travel. I asked her about her business during the recession, since I assume that the demand for her seminars has decreased. Doesn’t she have a lot of empty seats? Isn’t she losing money?
It probably seems obvious to most people that being likeable and having good friends could be valuable in life. Since most economists are neither likeable nor have good friends, it is an idea that hasn’t been studied by economists until now. My friend Gabriella Conti and a host of co-authors try to quantitatively measure the association between high-school popularity and . . .
Undergraduates are turning to the study of economics in droves. They’re all Facebook friends with Paul Krugman. Myths about marriage that won’t die (but should). (Earlier) If you want to expand your fantasy-baseball vocabulary, or just need the definition of “bean up,” the third edition of the Dickson Baseball Dictionary came out this month. (Earlier) Carry-on potties: a consequence Ryanair . . .
The abstract of a recent paper by Colander, Föllmer, Haas, Goldberg, Juselius, Kirman, and Sloth: The economics profession appears to have been unaware of the long build-up to the current worldwide financial crisis and to have significantly underestimated its dimensions once it started to unfold. In our view, this lack of understanding is due to a misallocation of research efforts . . .
If cigars were the big-money culture item of the booming 1990’s, and ever-larger SUVs and McMansions were the status symbols of the mid-2000’s, maybe it makes sense that we’re wrapping ourselves in Snuggies as the recession sets in.
Photo: ceeb Inside a Los Angeles bus. In the last posts, we learned that Los Angeles is not a poster child for sprawl, that the air has gotten a lot cleaner, and that the freeway network is surprisingly small given the region’s enormous population. What about the charge that Los Angeles’s mass-transit system is underdeveloped and inadequate? By U.S. standards, . . .
In middle school I was taught that in order to be president of the United States, you had to be native-born and at least 35 years of age. My teachers left out the requirement that you be left handed. While not formally a requirement, lately being a lefty has been pretty helpful for becoming president: five of the last seven presidents have been left handed.
There’s been much talk about how philanthropies may be one of the greatest casualties of the recession. (Considering their various inefficiencies, maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world.) It’s hardly just the foundations who were invested with Bernie Madoff; donors simply have fewer discretionary dollars. (And, long-term, the picture may get bleaker if President Obama downsizes the charity . . .
Ants invented farming millions of years before we did. They perfected traffic control, too. Thanks, ants. Everything you know about Darwin is wrong. (Earlier) What does oil sand mining look like? National Geographic finds out. Six-word stories: in several genres. For those who thought books like Freakonomics were too scattered — a list of single-subject nonfiction.
Last week we solicited your questions for Stanford Law School Professor (and open-source hero, and anti-corruption leader) Lawrence Lessig. (Past Q&A’s can be found here.)
You asked good questions about copyright, corruption, and other topics, and Lessig responded with equally thoughtful answers, including such tasty pieces of advice as:
I met a guy who has done a fantastic job of building up a department of economics at a major university. He is an impressive administrator, who clearly has both an absolute advantage and a comparative advantage at academic administration. I said that he will surely become a dean, then probably a university president, and would do a great job . . .
Dartmouth’s Eric Zitzewitz is one of my favorite co-authors, and a whiz at tracking financial markets. And when he mentioned to me last week that a close look at the options markets told an interesting tale of fear, I asked him to share his observations. Here goes. Quantifying the Nightmare Scenarios By Eric Zitzewitz A Guest Post There’s no shortage . . .
I was drinking Tropicana orange juice this morning. They’ve got a clever marketing campaign. If you go to their website and type in the code on the Tropicana carton, they will set aside 100 square feet of Rain Forest to preserve on your behalf.
Just one, as we learned a few weeks ago in Congressional Quarterly, which reported that Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Michigan Republican and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, regularly Twittered details of his congressional delegation’s visit to Iraq, details that were supposed to be kept secret. With Twittering politicians on the rise, should we be worried about more national-security threats? . . .
Eric Morris has been busting L.A. transportation myths lately with his Fact and Fiction posts. For yet another unusual view of Los Angeles, check out this beautiful set of photos in Good magazine by Mathieu Young, who set out on a 20-mile walk across the city, taking photos of everyone he met along the way. A few examples: Mathieu Young . . .
As the stock market continues to search for a bottom, it’s worth another look back at how we got here. Back in September, University of Chicago professors Douglas W. Diamond and Anil K. Kashyap explained for our readers the trouble with Lehman Brothers and A.I.G. Lehman’s trouble began with the collapse of the housing bubble. But where did that come . . .
Since the first trucks began carrying freight in the early 1900’s, the U.S. trucking industry has had an influence on politics, food prices, and even music.
This blog’s host, The New York Times, has a set of guidelines for blog commenting, available here as an FAQ, that are worth glancing at now and again. Everyone who moderates comments on this blog tries to be as inclusive as possible. But when your comment fails to show up, the odds are that it crossed one of those guidelines. . . .
As a writer, I enjoy listening to people speak and, when they’re in the middle of a particularly interesting sentence, I try to imagine how I’d like to see it finished.
Usually I am disappointed. But with some select people, the payoff is far greater than I could have imagined. They have something to say that’s remarkably insightful or unexpected or even just articulate in a way that takes your breath away.
Following up on yesterday’s post about quantifying political speech, Dartmouth’s Michael Herron — who is a first-rate political scientist and data hound — points out that Obama was the first president to speak about “data” in his inaugural address, and only the second to mention “statistics.”
Six 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. Dozens responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a couple per week. Jeffrey asked: How about “It is better to be thought a . . .
Laura Goldman is a money manager who claims to have figured out back in the 1990’s, in the space of about 45 minutes, that Bernie Madoff was a fraud. In this Fox Business interview, she discusses (very entertainingly) her encounters with Madoff. At the time, Goldman worked for Paine Webber (remember them?): He was buying stocks and also trading options . . .
When President Obama told Congress this week that his stimulus package wasn’t about helping banks but about helping people, he could have been talking about a former sound designer in Hollywood named Bob. Bob is bankrupt. He went bust in September, and this month he began a blog chronicling his own economic recovery. The U.S. might be too big to . . .
A resident of Austin was complaining on a local TV station about continuing energy surcharges — on prices of airplane tickets, electricity, and other things — at a time when oil prices have tumbled. Presumably, instead of raising nominal prices, companies imposed surcharges last year to convince customers that the increases were temporary; but with the average variable cost of . . .