Two funny parodies: The first one is in The Onion. The second is an op-ed written by Tim Carvell, a writer for the Daily Show: January 11, 2006, New York Times Op-Ed Contributor A Million Little Corrections By TIM CARVELL IT is with great sorrow, and no small amount of embarrassment, that I must confess to some inadvertent errors, omissions . . .
It’s all in the title. (Thanks again, Linda Jines.) Check out Lulu Titlescorer, a fairly addictive little website that attempts to calculate whether a book’s title will make it a best-seller.
A reader of this blog, Frank Paul Venis, was kind enough to send along this email, highlighting yet another set of inconsistencies in “A Million Little Pieces.” Frank has his own blog, called spiderstumbled.com Frank writes: I read the book in December, on my sister’s recomendation. As soon as I finished the book I was extremely dubious about many things. . . .
I blogged last month about the Foote and Goetz criticism of the work I did with John Donohue on abortion. While embarrassing because it pointed out that the wrong numbers got into one of our tables, it doesn’t offer a fundamental challenge to our original findings. When you measure abortion more carefully — in ways that we showed back in . . .
A lot of people were surprised when Oprah Winfrey called in during Larry King’s interview of James Frey to stand behind Frey in the mess about whether, or just how much, Frey fictionalized his experiences in A Million Little Pieces. Winfrey argued that while some of Frey’s details may not be the stuff of non-fiction, the overall reading experience resonated . . .
Well, probably not. But Freakonomics is among the books that Elizabeth and John Edwards (remember them?) are considering for the next book in their online book group. Here’s the link.
It’s something that a lot of people think about, but rarely does anyone come right out and accuse the National Football League of rigging its games. For a conspiracy theorist, or even just a guy holding a losing betting slip that was a winner right up ’til that bogus call with 30 seconds left that allowed the underdog to close . . .
Last weekend, in the Cincinnati Bengals’ first playoff game in 15 years, quarterback Carson Palmer was badly injured on the Bengals’ second play from scrimmage. Kimo von Oelhoffen, a lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers, tackled him low and Palmer’s knee essentially collapsed. (The Bengals went on to lose to the Steelers, a team that happens to be my favorite, but . . .
By now, just about everyone has heard about the evidence on thesmokinggun.com regarding gross fabrications in the James Frey memoir “A Million Little Pieces.” Frey’s primary defense has been to say that his criminal history is a minor part of the book and these inconsistencies do not substantively change the meaning of the story. Of course, his criminal history is . . .
If I were a Realtor, I might feel right about now that the entire free world has turned against me, having decided I’m a sharp-elbowed, greed-driven hustler trying to preserve an advantage that I don’t deserve. And I’d probably be right. In today’s New York Times is yet another chronicle of how the National Association of Realtors has used its . . .
Today’s Wall Street Journal carries this article by Charles Forelle: “Why Game Shows Have Economists Glued to Their TV’s.” It cites, among others, Thierry Post, professor of finances at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, and Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago. “There is no doubt that these are real people making real choices for high stakes, and we rarely get . . .
I still love the book “A Million Little Pieces,” but having carefully read the outstanding investigative reporting done by thesmokinggun.com, I’m pretty disgusted that someone would try to pass this book off as non-fiction when it is mostly fiction. I just watched Frey on Larry King Live tonight. His defense was not impressive. He argued that only 18 of 452 . . .
We recently received the new Italian translation of Freakonomics. It is quite beautiful, and this image does it no justice. Only the Italians would think to combine yellow, purple, orange, and green and make it look so damn good. Since our knowledge of the Italian language leaves something to be desired, we had a little fun with Babel Fish online . . .
For all the talk in recent years of how the Internet will kill off the already dwindling audience of book readers, it struck me recently that perhaps this theory will prove to be exactly wrong. One of the most common Internet memes is the reading list — a 50-book challenge or some such — in which people all over the . . .
One of the frustrations of any author is that very few books are published in large-print editions. I’m guessing the economics are quite perilous but still, it is frustrating that so many elderly and vision-impaired readers don’t have an appropriate version to read. Well, it took 9 months but Freakonomics is at last available in a large-print, paperback edition. Here’s . . .
The first round of signed bookplates, about 800 or so, have been sent out. Another 1,200 should be mailed within a week or two. Thanks for your requests and especially your patience. It turns out, however, that the reward may not be worth the wait. Here is an e-mail from one recent bookplate recipient: Thank you very much for the . . .
I have a good friend named Tim Groseclose. Loyal blog readers may remember Tim as the political science professor who lost a bet to me because he was certain that his CD player knew which songs were his favorites and overplayed them when he set it to random. I made him commit to a set of songs he considered his . . .
I don’t care what Dubner, or The Smoking Gun website say (see the blog post below), I am a huge fan of James Frey’s book anyway. I saw the book “A Million Little Pieces” by James Frey at a bookstore the other day. I had never heard of it, except that it is the Oprah Book Club pick. I figured . . .
In yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, and in accompanying blog posts here and here, we described how one of the stories in our book turned out to be a little less true than we thought. Now comes word that James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces is also more of a based-on-a-true story book than an actual work of nonfiction. The . . .
Freakonomics includes a chapter titled “How is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?” This was our effort to bring to life the rather unlively economic concept known as information asymmetry.
The hero of the Klan story was Stetson Kennedy, a lifelong human-rights agitator who is best known for having infiltrated the Klan in the 1940’s in order to expose its shadowy secrets. He wrote a book about his exploits, called The Klan Unmasked.
As it turns out, however, Stetson Kennedy’s own history is pretty shadowy. This is the subject of “Hoodwinked,” our latest “Freakonomics” column in The New York Times Magazine.
Our latest column in The New York Times Magazine is a pretty unusual one. In the past, we’ve written about child car seats, dog poop, the price of sex, the economics of voting, and monkeys learning to use money. In this column, we revisited a story we told in Freakonomics. In the chapter called “How Is the Ku Klux Klan . . .
So Levitt and I were in Las Vegas this weekend, doing some research. (Seriously.) We had a little downtime and we decided to play blackjack. It was New Year’s Eve, at Caesars Palace, about 9 p.m. We sat down at an empty table where the dealer, a nice young woman from Michigan, was very patient in teaching us the various . . .
We’ve started to get e-mails from increasingly far-flung places, asking when Freakonomics is being published in other countries and languages. So we asked for a list of the foreign publication schedule, and here’s what we got. The first group is an alphabetical list of the countries where the book has already been published or will be soon. The second group . . .
Jeff Bailey reports in the The New York Times today about how an internet site that cuts out real estate agents has grabbed 20% of the market in Madison, Wisconsin. (I think you may need a NY Times password to read the article.) For $150, this site lists your home. The article suggests that real estate agents have missed out . . .
Whatever the reason may be, Freakonomics had a very good year in 2005. It has been recognized in year-end roundups from Milwaukee to India and in publications specializing in sports, music, celebrity gossip, and, of course, economics and books. It’s been called everything from hip and sexy to dry and grating– and those were just the positive reviews. For those . . .
In today’s New York Times review of Rodney Stark’s book Victory of Reason, which asserts that historical Christianity helped the development of capitalism far more than it hindered the same, William Grimes (the reviewer) offers this tasty example: Christian theology, which Mr. Stark praises as constantly evolving, kept pace with economic developments. Thinkers like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas gave their . . .
We haven’t written much on this blog about customer satisfaction outside of this little rant about rancid chicken and, even more tangentially, this one about mood-tracking software. But here’s something worth looking into a bit more seriously. Claes Fornell, a b-school professor at Michigan and the man behind the American Customer Satisfaction Index, has co-written a new paper asserting that . . .
Big poker tournaments are a zero-sum game. The competitors pay to enter and those entry fees are returned as prize money. It is common practice for a player to be sponsored by someone else, i.e. a third party pays a player’s entry fee in return for a share of the profits earned. This is true in professional golf as well. . . .
According to this story on ESPN.com, Pat Riley is thinking about bringing in some sumo wrestlers to help improve his game. Riley’s hope is that the battering they give him will better prepare Shaq for game conditions. Let’s hope the sumo wrestlers don’t introduce Shaq to the fine art of cheating to lose. As poorly as Shaq shoots free throws, . . .
An economist at an elite university, wishing to remain anonymous, has written the following rap in honor of Levitt. S/he sent it directly to me (Dubner) to ensure that even Levitt doesn’t know who wrote it. I think you’ll agree it’s sick enough to be worthwhile. Sing it to the tune of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems.” If you’re getting rejected I . . .