For newspapers, the day after Christmas is generally a very slow news day. The good news about this is that it means more room for feature articles. In today’s N.Y. Times, there are a bunch of good ones: 1. The slight uptick in homicides in New York City this year is partially due to “reclassified” homicides — deaths linked to . . .
Ségolene Royal, the Socialist Party’s nominee for president of France, is gathering momentum not by downplaying her feminine side (as Hillary Clinton apparently feels compelled to do) but by emphasizing it, portraying herself “as the mother-protector of the nation.” Here’s how one French union leader assesses Royal: “A woman is more sensitive than a man, much more interested in the . . .
Laura Levine is a friend of mine who these days is known for her primitive-sophisticated illustrations but who used to shoot a lot of great photos of musicians. Here’s her photo of James Brown, taken in NYC in 1984, posted here on the day of his death.
My wife Jeannette outdid herself on our holiday card this year: I cannot say enough good things about the photographer who took these pictures. Check out her website winkforkids.com. We have tried endlessly to get good pictures of all four kids together, rarely with any success at all. She swooped in and in a few hours got dozens of pictures . . .
Adoption of Chinese orphans by Americans has skyrocketed in popularity over the last two decades. I’m part of that trend, with two daughters adopted from China. Although by most calculations there is no shortage of baby girls in orphanages in China, in the last few years the Chinese government agency that is responsible for matching American applicants to Chinese babies . . .
Last week, I noted that the Wall Street Journal‘s best-seller chart listed Jimmy Carter’s current book as simply “Palestine,” while other charts listed it as “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid,” while Amazon.com listed it as “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” and I wondered why the WSJ chose to omit the word “Apartheid.” In today’s printed version of the WSJ‘s list, there’s been . . .
I wrote the other day that my undergrad alma mater, Appalachian State University, just won its second consecutive football championship. Today, A.S.U. won something else: a year-end award from Yahoo’s “The 9” webcast. Their achievement? The best university recruitment video ever. (Hint: Not!) As an alum, I had the great honor of accepting this dubious achievement award for A.S.U. You . . .
So Tom DeLay has started a blog — although if you take note of the footlines, you’ll see that most of the entries are written by other contributors. Still, DeLay seems to agree with Time magazine, which recently gave its person-of-the-year award to “you” — i.e., all of us who are using the Web to shape modern life and discourse . . .
Walking around the Lincoln Center neighborhood recently, I noticed some eye-catching signage: a wrap-around billboard touting NBC’s Today Show as the No. 1 talk show in America. This was very noteworthy, but not necessarily for the reason you might think. The most obvious reason for this billboard is for NBC to proclaim that: You see, America, even though we lost . . .
I posted last week about the controversy surrounding Jimmy Carter’s latest book, which is called either Palestine or Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, depending on where you look. Carter has now responded to various criticisms in a Q&A with Eleanor Clift of Newsweek. (Hat tip: Shakeel Mahate)
Holy cow, people. We love you and everything — really, we do. But what’s happening with the demand for signed bookplates? When we first offered to send a free bookplate to anyone who asked, we were surprised that any people would want them at all. In the beginning, there were a few hundred requests a week. You would input your . . .
Carmelo Anthony, the young star of the Denver Nuggets, was severely punished for throwing a punch in a brawl at the end of a recent Knicks-Nuggets game. His 15 game suspension will cost him $640,000 in salary. (I’d link to the brawl, but the NBA demanded that youtube.com remove all clips of the incident.) With Anthony having already been punished . . .
Six months ago I blogged about how the media reported the crime statistics released by the FBI at that time. All the headlines screamed that a new crime wave was upon us. The facts were that reported violent crime had increased 2.5% and reported property crime fell 1.6%. But that wasn’t very exciting, I guess. The fact that the most . . .
A while back, we passed along the news when Google launched its Book Search site. Now, in the interest of equal time, here is Microsoft’s beta version of its own Book Search service. A friend of mine who worked on the project sent this note: After many sleep-deprived weeks, my group at Microsoft has recently launched a beta version of . . .
I recently stumbled across the website for the Book Industry Study Group, which describes itself as “the industry’s leading trade association for policy, standards and research.” Its membership is made of up “publishers, manufacturers, suppliers, wholesalers, retailers, librarians and others engaged in the business of print and electronic media.” The site’s front page features a recent publication, Used Book Sales, . . .
Pretty regularly, we hear from readers who tell us they’ve come across a free (i.e, pirated) downloadable version of Freakonomics, either in PDF or audio form. This guy wrote to say that he wanted to give us a few bucks for our trouble. For a variety of reasons, most of them stemming from the desire to not mistake a molehill . . .
A few months ago, I was invited to give the convocation address at my undergraduate alma mater, Appalachian State University. The previous December, A.S.U. had won the NCAA Division I-AA national football championship, and I cannot tell you how many people swore to me that A.S.U. would repeat this year. Sure, sure, sure, I thought. Winning any kind of championship . . .
The Jewish festival of Hanukkah, meant to commemorate a long-ago miracle, begins tonight at sundown. What is the miracle being celebrated? Not, as you might think, the Maccabees’ very unlikely military victories against the mighty Syrian-Greek army. While that used to be the miracle that Hanukkah was built around, many years ago and for a relatively short time, it was . . .
Alex Tabarrok over at Marginal Revolution points out that Diane Coyle has listed Freakonomics as one of the most overrated books of the year. The list appeared in a British magazine called Prospect. Here’s what Coyle had to say about Freakonomics: “Economics as freak show. Depressingly, this seems to be the only way to gain a wider audience for the . . .
I posted here yesterday about the controversy over Jimmy Carter’s new book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. I thought about, but did not comment upon, the book’s title. Rendered as it is, without any punctuation, it is an odd title. My eye very much wants to put a colon after “Palestine” and/or a comma after “Peace.” But it is what it . . .
Add the following study to the long list of ones I don’t believe. The article claims that astrological signs are better predictors of accidents than age or postal code. We’ve reported on bizarre patterns in outcomes related to month of birth before (like overrepresentation of certain birth months in the NHL or World Cup), but those patterns were readily related . . .
Jimmy Carter’s new book about Israel is provoking criticism on two fronts. The first issue is that he’s accusing Israel of practicing “apartheid” against the Palestinians, a charge that is hardly new but which doesn’t usually come from a former U.S. president. (Carter’s position is hardly subtle; the book’s title is Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.) This has prompted criticism from . . .
Roland Fryer is a very enterprising young economist at Harvard whose early work, much of it in collaboration with Steve Levitt, is featured in Freakonomics. Roland’s creativity is not limited to academic economics. A while back, he told me his idea for opening a bar in Cambridge where an electronic tote board would list the prices of the beers and . . .
A reader named Gerard Mulligan was good enough to let us know that a 1983 novel he was reading, Scenes From Later Life by William Cooper, contains a passage that, if the section from Freakonomics about real-estate agents were ever made into a film, could practically serve as the script. (If the film were British, that is.) Check out the . . .
… you might want to look at Darren Rovell’s new blog on CNBC.com. I know Darren a little bit and he is a killer reporter. He used to be at ESPN and recently made the jump to CNBC. He also wrote a pretty good book about Gatorade.
The provincial government of Ontario has passed a law whereby a teenager loses his license if he drops out of school. Pretty clever. Dropping out would probably only be about 1/3 as appealing if you couldn’t drive. There are very narrow provisions in the law — not many kids would really lose their licenses, and they’d get them back when . . .
Martin Nodell, creator of the Green Lantern comic-book superhero, has died at 91. Nodell used “Mart Dellon” as his nom-de-comic. Nodell, like just about every other creator of the golden era superheroes, was Jewish. And a lot of those superheroes had Jewish shadings. Here’s what I wrote on the subject in my book Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper: Superman, Batman, the . . .
You people may be more powerful than you know, at least in terms of viral web behavior. A couple weeks ago, I posted here about a funny video on YouTube that shows a large white poodle bouncing (or “stotting,” as I was informed by a commenter) through Washington Square Park in NYC. The poodle is owned, and being walked, by . . .
Here’s a holiday story that is sure to warm the coldest heart. On this website of Dallas call girls (Warning: adult content), an escort named Kayla has rallied her friends to put together a special raffle. As she explains in the note below, the winner of the raffle ($50 per entry, or 3 for $100) gets a session with not . . .
The National Academy of Sciences produced a report on women in science a few months back. The basic conclusion of the report is that there is no cognitive, hormonal, or evolutionary explanation for why women are underrepresented in science. Instead, the report suggests that women face discrimination every step along the way towards becoming scientists and engineers. I have no . . .