…almost a hairline’s difference. You can hardly tell one from the other,” Sen. Daniel Inouye once said. Businesses don’t pony up massive amounts of campaign cash for ideological reasons. It’s…
…Curran Charles R. Williams Claire Lawton Corey Jordin Daniel Baier Daniel Uhl David Anthony McClellan David Yang Deborah Bancroft Elizabeth Allen Glory Fink Harsh Mall Jason Strickland Jeff Love Jonathon…
Over 40 percent of U.S. births are to unmarried mothers, and the numbers are especially high among the less-educated. Why? One argument is that the decline in good manufacturing jobs…
Psychologist Thomas Curran argues that perfectionism isn’t about high standards — it’s about never being enough. He explains how the drive to be perfect is harming education, the economy, and…
Researchers are trying to figure out who gets bored — and why — and what it means for ourselves and the economy. But maybe there’s an upside to boredom?
How do kids learn about money? What’s the big problem with education? And who made Raiders of the Lost Ark?…
He turned a small Hollywood talent agency into a massive sports-and-entertainment empire. In a freewheeling conversation, he explains how he did it and why it nearly killed him….
Read the Column » 1978 New York City Pooper Scooper Law Using Sentence Enhancements to Distinguish Between Deterrence and Incapacitation By Steven D. Levitt and Daniel Kessler…
The IMF profiles psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his contributions to behavioral economics. The article discusses Kahneman’s childhood in Nazi-occupied Paris,…
Levitt rarely interviews advocates, but the founder of the Good Food Institute is different. Once an outspoken — and sometimes outlandish — animal-rights activist, Bruce has come to believe that…
He was once the most lionized athlete on the planet, with seven straight Tour de France wins and a victory over cancer too. Then the doping charges caught up with…
…Slate “Moneybox” columnist and Pop author Daniel Gross bursts the bubble on “Chow for Charity” lunch programs at New York law firms, in which overfed summer associates can elect to…
My colleagues Jacob Hacker and Daniel Markovits have created a cool website called?www.GiveItBackForJobs.org that not only includes a useful tool to let you calculate the size of your tax cut,…
A series of academic studies suggest that the wealthy are, to put it bluntly, selfish jerks. It’s an easy narrative to swallow — but is it true? A trio of…
You wouldn’t think you could win a Nobel Prize for showing that humans tend to make irrational decisions. But that’s what Richard Thaler has done. The founder of behavioral economics…
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…
The human foot is an evolutionary masterpiece, far more functional than we give it credit for. So why do we encase it in “a coffin” (as one foot scholar calls…
Also: Do you spend more time thinking about the past, the present, or the future?
Also: is a little knowledge truly a dangerous thing?…
The left and the right blame each other for pretty much everything, including slanted media coverage. Can they both be right?
Step 1: Hire a Harvard psych professor as the pitchman. Step 2: Have him help write the script …
Also: would you take a confirmation-bias vaccine?…
How can you be lonely when so many people showed up at your birthday party? Can you fight loneliness by managing expectations? And where can you find company while enjoying…
…near the top of the non-fiction charts. (Last I saw, the only other American book on the charts was Daniel Coyle’s Lance Armstrong’s War — retitled in the U.K. as…
In a special episode of No Stupid Questions, Angela Duckworth and Mike Maughan talk about unfinished tasks, recurring arguments, and Irish goodbyes….
Are we all either secure, avoidant, or anxious? How does your relationship with your parents shape your romantic partnerships? And what is Stephen’s attachment style?
Ecologist Suzanne Simard studies the relationships between trees in a forest: they talk to each other, punish each other, and depend on each other. What can we learn from them?
Bring on the Pain! It’s not about how much something hurts — it’s how you remember the pain. This week, lessons on pain from the New York City subway, the…
