Would a Porn Tax Hurt Sales?
A California state assemblyman has proposed dealing with the state’s huge budget shortfall by taxing pornography, including the production and sale of pornographic videos — by 25 percent. To an…
If you can make it through three years of law school, you too might end up on a billboard. Zachary Crockett makes the case.
Online companies promised to bring transparency to the mattress-buying experience. Did that work out? Zachary Crockett takes a look under the sheets….
A California state assemblyman has proposed dealing with the state’s huge budget shortfall by taxing pornography, including the production and sale of pornographic videos — by 25 percent. To an…
Over the past few months, the press has deluged Americans with weepy stories about people who are in danger of losing their houses because their sub-prime mortgages now exceed the…
Also: how did Angela do with her no-sugar challenge?…
Behind almost every character you see displayed on a page or a screen, there’s a complex — and sometimes lucrative — web of licensing deals. Zachary Crockett is just your…
Most people don’t enjoy the simple, boring act of putting money in a savings account. But we do love to play the lottery. So what if you combine the two,…
…what the various Brookings economists are up to. This morning’s edition (written by Daniel Moskowitz) was priceless: Good enough I thought worth sharing with the wider world. (Hint: Check the…
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…
Cat Bohannon’s new book puts female anatomy at the center of human evolution. She tells Steve why it takes us so long to give birth, what breast milk is really…
How final is a final offer, really? Does anonymity turn nice people into jerks? And should you tell your crush that you dreamed about marrying them?…
They can’t vote or hire lobbyists. The policies we create to help them aren’t always so helpful. Consider the car seat: parents hate it, the safety data are unconvincing, and…
Nancy and Harry Chapin’s song, “Cat’s in the Cradle,” is one of my favorites, partly because of the beat, and partly because it illustrates one of the essential trade-offs in…
The verdant lawns promise everlasting rest — but what does it mean to sign a lease for all eternity? Zachary Crockett finds out where the bodies are buried….
Are Europeans more sophisticated than Americans? What’s wrong with preferring Taylor Swift to Puccini? And is Steve Levitt “Team Edward” or “Team Jacob”?
How can you learn to love uncertainty? Is it better to cultivate acceptance or strive for change? And, after 223 episodes, what is the meaning of life?…
Why would a successful person feel the need to stick it to the little guy? Is Angela a name-dropper? And why do rappers grab their crotches?
In the final part of our series, Zachary Crockett talks to a man with a storied — and controversial — career in the body parts business….
Why do you have to pay $4 to get $40 cash at a bar? And who does it go to? Zachary Crockett checks his balance….
…the elapsed time in the first three steps would be less if she did everything and I watched. What she really meant was, “Daniel, your marginal productivity is very low!…
Should you shout your sins from the rooftops? How many skeletons are in the average person’s closet? And what has Angela been hiding?…
Freakonomics contributor Dan Hamermesh was featured on The Daily Show last night, in a piece about ugly people. Hamermesh has done extensive research on the economic disadvantages of being unattractive….
A female friend who I hadn’t seen in several months and I greeted each other yesterday with the usual hug and one-cheek kiss. If I had done this in 1970…
We reach for it twice a day — without thinking about the decades of research and engineering that went into that squeezable tube of minty goo. Zachary Crockett extracts the…
Also: why do we pad our speech with so much filler language?…
…See L. David Roper, “Gun Deaths and Political Parties.” See also “Policies to Prevent Firearms Trafficking” by Jon Vernick and Daniel Webster, published in Injury Prevention in 2007. It remains…
How does an industry built on roadside pop-ups make billions of dollars in two weeks of the year? Zachary Crockett gets pyrotechnical….
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…
