If you are driving and kill a pedestrian, there’s a good chance you’ll barely be punished. Why?
Stephen Dubner and Steve Levitt talk about their new book and field questions about prestige, university life, and (yum yum) bacon.
Why learning to say “I don’t know” is one of the best things you can do.
When it comes to generating ideas and asking questions it can be really fruitful to have the mentality of an eight year old.
In which we argue that failure should not only be tolerated but celebrated.
Every four years, the U.S. takes a look at the World Cup and develops a slight crush. What would it take to really fall in love?
Is it really in a restaurant’s best interest to give customers free bread or chips before they even order?
Dubner and Levitt answer reader questions in this first installment of the “Think Like a Freak” Book Club.
Takeru Kobayashi revolutionized the sport of competitive eating. What can the rest of us learn from his breakthrough?
It isn’t easy to separate the guilty from the innocent, but a clever bit of game theory can help.
Educational messaging looks good on paper but kids don’t respond to it — and adults aren’t much better.
A kid’s name can tell us something about his parents — their race, social standing, even their politics. But is your name really your destiny?
It’s awkward, random, confusing — and probably discriminatory too.
A look at whether spite pays — and if it even exists.
There ain’t no such thing as a free parking spot. Somebody has to pay for it — and that somebody is everybody.
Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, EatWith, and other companies in the “sharing economy” are practically daring government regulators to shut them down. The regulators are happy to comply
Doctors, chefs, and other experts are much more likely than the rest of us to buy store-brand products. What do they know that we don’t?
What does it mean to pursue something that everyone else thinks is nuts? And what does it take to succeed?
Markets are hardly perfect, but the results can be ugly when you try to subvert them.
A team of economists has been running the numbers on the U.N.’s development goals. They have a different view of how those billions of dollars should be spent.
The science of what works — and doesn’t work — in fundraising
The Norwegian government parleys massive oil wealth into huge subsidies for electric cars. Is that carbon laundering or just pragmatic environmentalism?
A lot! “The Economics of the Undead” is a book about dating strategy, job creation, and whether there should be a legal market for blood.
Corporations around the world are consolidating like never before. If it’s good enough for companies, why not countries? Welcome to Amexico!
Even a brutal natural disaster doesn’t diminish our appetite for procreating. This surely means we’re heading toward massive overpopulation, right? Probably not.
Boris Johnson — mayor of London, biographer of Churchill, cheese-box painter and tennis-racket collector — answers our FREAK-quently Asked Questions.
We’ve all heard the depressing numbers: when compared to kids from other rich countries, U.S. students aren’t doing very well, especially in math, even though we spend more money per student than most other countries. So is the problem here as simple as adding two plus two? Is the problem here that our students aren’t getting very bright simply because … our teachers aren’t very bright?
Okay, maybe the steps aren’t so easy. But a program run out of a Toronto housing project has had great success in turning around kids who were headed for trouble.
We spend billions on our pets, and one of the fastest-growing costs is pet “aftercare.” But are those cremated remains you got back really from your pet?
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