…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…
…suicides. So what’s the net effect of social networking? We gathered a group of wise people who spend their days thinking about this issue — Martin Baily, Danah Boyd, Steve…
A fun game to watch yesterday, with the Giants winning 17-14 over the Pats. More to the point, a clear victory for Steve Levitt, whose advice to punters was to…
…of all sorts of things that you’d like to put Steve Jobs to work on: San Francisco-based journalist Amy Tenderich, who has Type 1 diabetes, runs the Diabetes Mine blog,…
…Cialdini (author of the landmark book Influence: Science and Practice), and his co-authors, Noah Goldstein and Steve Martin, agree. But in their new book, Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to…
…Obama will announce this week two blockbuster appointments to senior positions at the Department of Treasury. Sure to raise eyebrows will be the appointment of University of Chicago economist Steve…
…(I’m a big fan of both Tina Fey and Steve Carell, but, like many critics, I was underwhelmed by the movie. The extended dancing scene was a particular misstep.) Aside…
(iStockphoto) Two weeks ago, Steve Sexton wrote about the bankruptcy of Evergreen Solar in Massachusetts. Today it’s California’s Solyndra that’s shutting down. From the Washington Post: The unexpected announcement raised…
Photo: Adam Pieniazek We’ve written a lot about University of Chicago economist Kevin Murphy. He teaches at the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory, where Steve Levitt is the director….
…wealth tax or an estate tax that was contingent on some measure of wealth inequality. But given the current political environment, an income-contingent wealth tax is bridge too far. Steve…
…of campaign spending, all else constant. That’s basically the approach taken by Steve Levitt in his seminal study of repeat meetings of the same Congressional candidates over time. Levitt finds…
…A. Danger Powers, working paper. Steven D. Levitt and Matthew Gentzkow, “Measuring the Impact of TV’s Introduction on Crime,” working paper. Steven D. Levitt, “The Effect of Prison Population Size…
…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…
…will look bad in the playoffs and your fans will be unhappy. I should add, this was very much the argument Steve Walters (economist at Loyala University and consultant to…
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…
…linguist has become a very public intellectual. But the self-declared “polite Canadian” has managed to enrage people on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Steve Levitt tries to understand why….
Also: are the most memorable stories less likely to be true?
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…
How pharma greed, government subsidies, and a push to make pain the “fifth vital sign” kicked off a crisis that costs $80 billion a year and has killed hundreds of…
John Mackey, the C.E.O. of Whole Foods, has learned the perils of speaking his mind. But he still says what he thinks about everything from “conscious leadership” to the behavioral…
She was the sixteenth employee at Google — a company once based in her garage — and now she’s the C.E.O. of its best-known subsidiary, YouTube. But despite being one…
A conversation with the Shark Tank star, entrepreneur, and Dallas Mavericks owner recorded for the Freakonomics Radio series “The Hidden Side of Sports.”…
After eight years and more than 300 episodes, it was time to either 1) quit, or 2) make the show bigger and better. We voted for number 2. Here’s a…
…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…
…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…
…and margarine that landed in the Supreme Court. Our panelists are: Steve Levitt, my Freakonomics friend and co-author, who didn’t quite fit-in with sports teams. Bridget Gainer, Cook County commissioner,…
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…
In this busy time of year, we could all use some tips on how to get more done in less time. First, however, a warning: there’s a big difference between…
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…
How a pain-in-the-neck girl from rural Virginia came to run the most powerful university in the world.
