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Episode 206

Ten Years of Freakonomics

Dubner and Levitt are live onstage at the 92nd Street Y in New York to celebrate their new book “When to Rob a Bank” — and a decade of working…

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Episode 23

Is It Wrong to Crave Praise?

Also: Should everyone have their own trauma score?…

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Episode 217

Are You Ready for a Glorious Sunset? (Replay)

The gist: we spend billions on end-of-life healthcare that doesn’t do much good. So what if a patient could forego the standard treatment and get a cash rebate instead?

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Episode 201

How Do We Know What Really Works in Healthcare?

A lot of the conventional wisdom in medicine is nothing more than hunch or wishful thinking. A new breed of data detectives is hoping to change that.


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Episode 613

Dying Is Easy. Retail Is Hard.

Macy’s wants to recapture its glorious past. The author of the Wimpy Kid books wants to rebuild his dilapidated hometown. We just want to listen in. (Part two of a…

The Nanny Nation

…from dawn until dusk on lonely homesteads to build a better life for themselves and their children. The distance between survival and total failure was small, and families behaved accordingly…




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Episode 476

What Are the Police for, Anyway?

The U.S. is an outlier when it comes to policing, as evidenced by more than 1,000 fatal shootings by police each year. But we’re an outlier in other ways too:…


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Episode 590

Can $55 Billion End the Opioid Epidemic?

Thanks to legal settlements with drug makers and distributors, states have plenty of money to boost prevention and treatment. Will it work? (Part two of a two-part series.)…


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Episode 405

Policymaking Is Not a Science (Yet) (Replay)

Why do so many promising solutions — in education, medicine, criminal justice, etc. — fail to scale up into great policy? And can a new breed of “implementation scientists” crack…

The Economic Value of Popularity

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…



Anybody Need a Best Friend?

This guy is offering to be your best friend, for a price, via eBay. He lives in New York City and calls himself Rent-a-Pal: “The lucky Winning Bidder and RENTAPAL…



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Episode 173

How Important Is Your Choice of Words?

What happens when three psychologists walk into a magic show? What’s Angela’s problem with the word “talent”? And why does LeBron James refer to himself in the third person?…

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Episode 588

Confessions of a Black Conservative

The economist and social critic Glenn Loury has led a remarkably turbulent life, both professionally and personally. In a new memoir, he has chosen to reveal just about everything. Why?…

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Episode 23

Confessions of a Black Conservative

The economist and social critic Glenn Loury has led a remarkably turbulent life, both professionally and personally. In a new memoir, he has chosen to reveal just about everything. Why?…

Friend Turnover

…604 people about their friends and again seven years later, and found that only 48 percent of people’s original friends were still part of their network after that time period….



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Episode 128

Are Our Tools Becoming Part of Us?

Google researcher Blaise Agüera y Arcas spends his work days developing artificial intelligence models and his free time conducting surveys for fun. He tells Steve how he designed an algorithm…

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EXTRA

Mr. Feynman Takes a Trip — But Doesn’t Fall

A wide-open conversation with three women who guided Richard Feynman through some big adventures at the Esalen Institute. (Part of our Feynman series.)…

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Episode 209

Why Do We Settle?

Why does the U.S. use Fahrenheit when Celsius is better? Would you quit your job if a coin flip told you to? And how do you get an entire country…

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EXTRA

Here’s Why You’re Not an Elite Athlete (Update)

There are a lot of factors that go into greatness, many of which are not obvious. As the Olympics come to a close, we revisit a 2018 episode in which…

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Episode 32

Which Gets You Further: Talent or Effort?

Also: Where is the line between acronyms, initialisms and gibberish?

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Episode 351

Here’s Why You’re Not an Elite Athlete

There are a lot of factors that go into greatness, many of which are not obvious. A variety of Olympic and professional athletes tell us how they made it and…

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Episode 525

In Search of the Real Adam Smith

How did an affable 18th-century “moral philosopher” become the patron saint of cutthroat capitalism? Does “the invisible hand” mean what everyone thinks it does? We travel to Smith’s hometown in…

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Episode 575

The Curious Mr. Feynman

From the Manhattan Project to the Challenger investigation, the physicist Richard Feynman loved to shoot down what he called “lousy ideas.” Today, the world is awash in lousy ideas —…

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Episode 157

The Deadliest Disease in Human History

John Green returns to the show to talk about tuberculosis — a disease that kills more than a million people a year. Steve has an idea for a new way…

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Episode 61

Was Austan Goolsbee’s First Visit to the Oval Office Almost His Last?

The former chairman of the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisors tells Steve how improv comedy was a better training ground for teaching than a Ph.D. from M.I.T., and why…

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Episode 573

Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)

Probably not — the incentives are too strong. But a few reformers are trying. We check in on their progress, in an update to an episode originally published last year….