About six months ago I was at a big conference. I was scheduled to present at 2 PM to an audience of 500 or 1,000 people. Another speaker was on from 1 to 2 PM. I told the organizer I would be back by 1:45 PM, leaving plenty of time before I had to hit the stage. At 1:30 I . . .
As a creative response to last night’s State of the Union Address, the N.Y. Times OpEd page today prints the lyrics to a recent Randy Newman song, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country.” If you are thinking of satire along the lines of Newman’s “Short People,” you are mostly wrong. The lyrics are mostly in earnest, with Newman . . .
In Freakonomics, we wrote about how Sudhir Venkatesh, at the time a graduate student in sociology, stumbled across a crack gang who promptly held him hostage until they determined he wasn’t a cop or a rival gangster. Well, if you like that kind of story then you’ll probably love a new book called The Birthday Party, a memoir by a . . .
We’ve written in the past about the discomfort (or worse) that people feel when it comes to paying donors for organs, even though doing so would likely be an enormous boon for those suffering right now on organ donation waiting lists. From CNN.com, here is an article discussing a proposal to pay women who donate eggs for stem cell research. . . .
The most interesting article in last Sunday’s New York Times magazine, in my opinion, was a fascinating window into race in America on the back page of the magazine called “Pick One” written by David Matthews. My friend and co-author Roland Fryer continues to think hard about these issues also.
It’s true: one week from today, it will be Milton Friedman Day, “a day of national celebration and remembrance of Friedman’s life and his influence on American society and economic systems.” It will feature, among many other things, a day of web-based discussion hosted by The Economist; debates and discussion at various universities; and a national PBS broadcast of The . . .
Robert Dodge has written a biography of Thomas Schelling, which is available now. I just found out about it and ordered it, so I have not read it yet. I have read the delightful preface written by Richard Zeckhauser, a long-time colleague of Schelling at Harvard, which exactly captures my interactions with Schelling. Schelling is a Nobel prize winner in . . .
Yesterday, Dubner was part of a Google event entitled “Un-bound: Advancing Book Publishing in a Digital World.” Rebecca Lieb provides a fascinating write-up of the day’s events. I was particularly struck by the comment made by Cory Doctorow, “Why don’t people care enough about literature to steal it?” In a world in which illegal downloading of music is endemic, copyright . . .
This story sounds too weird to be true, and yet I have a feeling it is true. It concerns knitting. It seems that knitting has become an increasingly popular hobby among a large slice of middle- and upper-class American women. We here at Freakonomics are not unfamiliar with this phenomenon: Levitt’s sister runs Yarnzilla, an online and brick-and-mortar knitting emporium; . . .
I guess Levitt and I should talk a bit more often. Less than half an hour ago, I posted here about Consumer Reports retracting a study on infant car seats. Eight minutes later, Levitt did the same.
It’s for Art Buchwald, who died today. Here’s his obituary in the N.Y. Times; click on the “video feature” link, and you’ll see a brief video obituary, with Buchwald himself delivering an opening line that, in a newspapers-moving-to-the-web way, ranks right up there with Alexander Bell’s famous “Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you.” Here’s what . . .
A while back Dubner blogged about how Consumer Reports had demanded a recall of a number of rear-facing child seats because they performed so poorly in their tests. Now Consumer Reports has a recall of their own. Apparently they may have done some of the tests wrong. We will have to wait and see what their revised study finds. A . . .
We blogged here recently about Connsumer Reports study declaring that most infant car seats failed miserably in side-impact crash tests. Now comes word that Consumer Reports is retracting the study, an acknowledgment that the study’s methodology was flawed. According to this MSNBC report, the study was meant to test the seats in 38-mph crashes, whereas the actual speed of the . . .
Due to a busy day today, the best I can do here is link to a few noteworthy articles in this morning’s N.Y. Times: … a report by Denise Grady on a small but significant drop in cancer deaths, an article that includes a concise but very good rollup of the state of cancer in general. (Here, in a paragraph . . .
Richard Branson’s new Virgin America airline, that is. The U.S. Dept. of Transportation has rejected Virgin America’s application to fly domestically, on the basis of its foreign ownership. So Virgin is taking is plight straight to the people, with a tantalizing website replete with petition.
I am scheduled to appear on Good Morning America tomorrow (Thurs., Jan. 18), sometime between 8:00 and 8:30 a.m. E.T., to talk about this stuff. Later in the day, I get to sit on an author’s panel at a conference that Google is holding on the digital future of book publishing.
Most people who need to have an MRI aren’t thrilled about it. It’s not a very pleasant experience, and it generally means that something’s wrong with you. A few years ago, however, I was clamoring to get my brain inside an fMRI machine (the “f” stands for “functional”; an fMRI is capable of measuring neural activity). I was about 18 . . .
This place claims to have invented the hamburger. This one claims to have invented the Bloody Mary, or at least introduced it to Americans. And this guy claims to have dropped nine pounds by playing the Wii for a half hour every day for 6 weeks. (He also broke his girlfriend’s laptop in the process.)
John Burns is a brilliant reporter and writer at the N.Y. Times, currently reporting from Iraq. Today he’s got the lead front-page article headlined “Second Hanging Also Went Awry, Iraq Tape Shows … One of 2 Men Decapitated.” The man in question is Saddam Hussein’s half-brother. The second paragraph begins like this: “An official video played to a small group . . .
Benjamin Hoffman has an article in today’s N.Y. Times about an investment banker named Gary Boren whom the Dallas Mavericks use as their free-throw guru. He films the players’ free-throw attempts, breaks down their mechanics, and then teaches them to improve. “Since he joined the Mavericks [in 1999],” Hoffman writes, “they have finished in the top six in the league . . .
There’s an article in today’s N.Y. Times about how many women buy luxury items with cash instead of a credit card so their boyfriends or husbands won’t find out and hassle them. “His tastes aren’t as expensive as mine, and he doesn’t understand the need to have so many pricey things,” says one woman who is paying cash for a . . .
There is a large-print version of Freakonomics, an audio version, a board game in the making, and maybe even a documentary film. So why not a broadway musical? In tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review, Henry Alford takes a first crack at some ideas for the stage version of Freakonomics. Honestly, though, I think Dubner (who in his rock ‘n’ . . .
When I was a child and didn’t eat my dinner, my mother (like all mothers of her generation) would remind me that there were starving children in Africa. However, she never would take me up on my generous offer to ship the leftover food to those starving children in lieu of my having to eat it. My friend Jill Youse . . .
Maybe a good bit. Here’s what Obama said yesterday during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s hearing with Condoleezza Rice about sending more U.S. soldiers to Iraq: “And essentially the administration repeatedly has said: ‘We’re doubling down; we’re going to keep on going … because now we’ve got a lot in the pot and we can’t afford to lose what we . . .
From an article in today’s N.Y. Times about Manhattan’s eternal congestion woes: 35.1% of government workers drive to work instead of taking public transportation, second only to workers in “transportation, warehousing and utilities,” at 36.1%. Comparatively, only 15.1% of workers in the retail trade drive into the city, and 14% of finance workers. Now these numbers are not nearly as . . .
My favorite TV show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, has finally come in No. 1 in some category: Time-Shifted Primetime TV Programs, as measured by Nielsen Media Research. This means shows that are watched, typically via a DVR, after they are broadcast live. I am not sure if it includes sales via iTunes (if anyone knows, please shout), which . . .
One of the most interesting reporting experiences I ever had was attending a four-day seminar that the National Football League runs each year for its incoming rookies, trying to prepare them for life in (and after) the N.F.L. Not the football part, but the life part: handling money, staying away from bad influences, etc. It soon emerged that, for a . . .
The New York Times has an article about the most promising young economists. I was glad to see so many of my friends on the list.
Not because higher gas prices will spur people to walk or ride bicycles instead of driving. No, I’m thinking it might work like this: — Notwithstanding the recent drop, high oil prices have driven a demand for ethanol made from corn. — Accordingly, the price of corn is rising fast, with July contracts at $4/bushel, about 60 percent higher than . . .