The FREAK-est Links
How is baseball signaling like financial markets? Steve Pinker to speak in New Jersey. (Earlier) Airlines offering better meals, albeit for a price. (Earlier) Chinese cremator leaves corpses half burned…
He’s been U.S. Treasury Secretary, a chief economist for the Obama White House and the World Bank, and president of Harvard. He’s one of the most brilliant economists of his…
Some of the biggest names in behavioral science stand accused of faking their results. Last year, an astonishing 10,000 research papers were retracted. In a series originally published in early…
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.)…
How is baseball signaling like financial markets? Steve Pinker to speak in New Jersey. (Earlier) Airlines offering better meals, albeit for a price. (Earlier) Chinese cremator leaves corpses half burned…
…for either of us will decrease as time goes on, since both the “Steven” and “Stephen” spellings of the name peaked decades ago (“Steven” at No. 11, “Stephen” at No….
Spontaneous order is everywhere if you know where to look for it.
…it was new CEO Tim Cook‘s first chance at replacing Steve Jobs as product pitchman. It seems he did just fine. The new iPhone is loaded with cool new features…
We asked you to nominate the worst sins of the modern age. Which one do Stephen and Angela think belongs on the list? And which does Angie struggle with the…
…with the economist Steve Levitt. This is a whole new bag, and here’s why. A non-fiction writer like me, trained equally in journalism and literature, is constrained by what his…
Would you steal Halloween candy? Should people be required to identify themselves online? And why did Angela go trick-or-treating in a trash bag?
…of 9:00 p.m. EDT on April 9, it was #15 on Amazon.) Its authors are happily mystified. This spike seems attributable to a very nice interview of Steve Levitt by…
Trying to go rustic by baking, brewing, and knitting at home can be terribly inefficient. And that’s a wonderful thing.
You know the saying: a winner never quits and a quitter never wins. To which Freakonomics Radio says … Are you sure?…
What “Sleep No More” and the Stanford Prison Experiment tell us about who we really are.
In many ways, the gender gap is closing. In others, not so much. And that’s not always a bad thing.
…it. Many of the most significant and enduring innovations rest on tweaking. As Malcolm Gladwell has argued, the late Steve Jobs of Apple—an icon of our innovation economy if there…
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…
Excel expert gives away free copies of his books online. (Earlier) Mayor Bloomberg targeted by identity thieves. (Earlier) The Rubik’s Cube World Championships — the next Rock, Paper Scissors? Steve…
The endless pursuit of G.D.P., argues the economist Kate Raworth, shortchanges too many people and also trashes the planet. Economic theory, she says, “needs to be rewritten” — and Raworth…
Aisle upon aisle of fresh produce, cheap meat, and sugary cereal — a delicious embodiment of free-market capitalism, right? Not quite. The supermarket was in fact the endpoint of the…
Are highly effective people quicker to share credit? What does poverty do to your brain? And how did Stephen’s mother teach him about opportunity costs? Plus: an announcement about the…
Steve Levitt has spent decades as an academic economist, “studying strange phenomena and human behavior in weird circumstances.” Now he’s turning his curiosity to something new: interviewing some of the…
Steve Levitt is such a big deal in Chicago that he has been asked to donate an original haiku (!) for a fund-raiser on Wed., Sept. 14. So he went…
The next chapter in the adventures of Dubner and Levitt has begun. Listen to a preview of what’s to come for the fall season of Freakonomics Radio….
Politicians tell voters exactly what they want to hear, even when it makes no sense. Which is pretty much all the time.
Also: What’s the best way to handle rejection?…
…Steve Crossland that Levitt mentioned in his discussion. Haider’s study leaves at least one question unanswered. While the data may in fact be correct, it doesn’t seem to account for…
…a graduate student in 1992, I marveled when then-Governor Clinton spun a potential candidacy-killing story and outmaneuvered 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft during an interview about Clinton’s alleged affair with…
