How to Get the Best out of College? Your Questions Answered
We recently solicited your questions for Peter D. Feaver, Sue Wasiolek, and Anne Crossman, the authors of Getting the Best Out of College. Your questions ran the gamut and so…
Everyone makes mistakes. How do you learn from them? Lessons from the classroom, the Air Force, and the world’s deadliest infectious disease. Part of the series “How to Succeed at…
Owen Flanagan’s newest book details his 20-year dependence on alcohol and pills — and outlines his research on what addiction can tell us about the nature of consciousness….
Everyone makes mistakes. How do we learn from them? Lessons from the classroom, the Air Force, and the world’s deadliest infectious disease. (Part four of a four-part series.)…
Is it more important to help society or to help yourself? Does the self-improvement movement do any good for the world? And which podcast episode does Stephen cling to as…
Why do we use “literally” figuratively? Does conveying an “emotional truth” justify making things up? And are Angela’s kids really starving or just hungry?…
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…
People who are good at their jobs routinely get promoted into bigger jobs they’re bad at. We explain why firms keep producing incompetent managers — and why that’s unlikely to…
Hospitals compete for prime spots on the U.S. News rankings — but could those lists be doing more harm than good?…
We recently solicited your questions for Peter D. Feaver, Sue Wasiolek, and Anne Crossman, the authors of Getting the Best Out of College. Your questions ran the gamut and so…
When your co-author is your colleague and also your significant other, confusion often follows. Take this recent post by Arnold Kling on the causes of inequality, where he says: I…
Last week we solicited your questions for Tim Groseclose, a political science professor at UCLA and author of the new book, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American…
Data scientist Nate Silver gained attention for his election predictions. But even the best prognosticators get it wrong sometimes. He talks to Steve about making good decisions with data, why…
Also: Why is it smart to ignore what your podcast hosts look like?…
Economists and politicians have turned him into a mascot for free-market ideology. Some on the left say the right has badly misread him. Prepare for a very Smithy tug of…
Youth baseball — long a widely accessible American pastime — has become overrun by $10,000-per-year for-profit travel leagues. Zachary Crockett peers inside the dugout….
Youth baseball — long a widely accessible American pastime — has become overrun by $10,000-per-year, for-profit travel leagues. Zachary Crockett peers inside the dugout.
Experts and pundits are notoriously bad at forecasting, in part because they aren’t punished for bad predictions. Also, they tend to be deeply unscientific. The psychologist Philip Tetlock is finally…
…major dietary changes. A woman in Mali thought the idea of using a machine to exercise her body was hysterical. One of the conclusions Peter reached: “We” — i.e., the…
The state-by-state rollout of legalized weed has given economists a perfect natural experiment to measure its effects. Here’s what we know so far — and don’t know — about the…
College, at its best, is about learning to think. Stephen Dubner chats up three of his former professors who made the magic happen.
What’s more stressful, divorce or jail? Are you in the middle of a “lifequake”? And should we all be taking notes from Martha Stewart?
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.)…
Psychologist David Yeager thinks the conventional wisdom for how to motivate young people is all wrong. His model for helping kids cope with stress is required reading at Steve’s new…
…was feeling painfully out of shape and antsy to do some kind of exercise. But I didn’t want to go out in the rain, and the prospect of subjecting myself…
Here’s one way to fight obesity: mandatory exercise, as Beijing has commanded again, after a three-year break. “The short-term goal is to involve 60% of the workforces in Beijing by…
…school-based incentive program on children’s exercise habits. The program offers children an opportunity to win prizes if they walk or bike to school during prize periods. We use daily child-level…
…all sorts of data like my weight, my exercise, my food intake, etc. The idea being that the long-term problems of being overweight become short-term problems of my friends and…
When small businesses get bought by big investors, the name may stay the same — but customers and employees can feel the difference. (Part 2 of 2.)…
Why do we mirror other people’s accents? Does DJ Khaled get tired of winning? And also: life is good — so why aren’t you happy?…
Only a tiny number of “supertaskers” are capable of doing two things at once. The rest of us are just making ourselves miserable, and less productive. How can we put…
