Ask a College Student: A Freakonomics Quorum
…about smoking, sex, and career ambitions, among others — to a few current New York students. Here are their answers: Leah, 22, Senior, Anthropology, Brooklyn College Who’s paying for your…
Also: Where is the line between acronyms, initialisms and gibberish?
Humans have a built-in “negativity bias,” which means we give bad news much more power than good. Would the Covid-19 crisis be an opportune time to reverse this tendency?
How have Angie’s views on sleep changed since she wrote her Harvard application essay? Would starting high school later in the day be worth $8.6 billion? And what should you…
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz combs through mountains of information to find advice for everyday life….
It’s hard to know whether the benefits of hiring a celebrity are worth the risk. We dig into one gruesome story of an endorsement gone wrong, and find a surprising…
Boys and men are trending downward in education, employment, and mental health. Richard Reeves, author of the book Of Boys and Men, has some solutions that don’t come at the…
How do courts interpret those little icons on your phone? Zachary Crockett brings down the hammer….
…about smoking, sex, and career ambitions, among others — to a few current New York students. Here are their answers: Leah, 22, Senior, Anthropology, Brooklyn College Who’s paying for your…
…unabashedly of kinky sex and spreading their gene pool. In addition to the cost angle, some women like the option of having their children know their fathers, which many sperm…
…of RSS subscribers, via our FeedBurner feed, had jumped from about 14,000 to 42,000. Surely, I thought, this was an error. But it wasn’t. According to the FeedBurner blog, the…
…a year ago … Behind the higher prices: Feed. Rising corn and soybean prices have led to increased costs for feed. The increase is in large part because of rising…
…Alma Casales, was surprised to learn that Coca-Cola is basically sugar water. She, like many of her countrymen is drinking it morning, noon, and night, and feeding it to her…
…many blanks yet to be filled in, that coming to grips with the totality of the initiative is quite challenging. “They often feed you a maddening diet of “it depends…
…of confidence, usually associated with a financial collapse. They both feed into each other: the financial collapse feeds into the loss of confidence, and the loss of confidence feeds into…
…we asked Myhrvold, Caldeira, Wood, and others to review the first draft of our chapter and give us any and all feedback and corrections. We incorporated many of their suggestions…
…situation needs help right now. TODAY. And you can help. It’s easy to find these situations. Look in any local paper. Papers feed on pain. There’s always someone today in…
…help you for free. They are all just trying to survive. Even billionaires are trying to protect their luxury-soaked lifestyles plagued by jealousies and over-sexed libidos. You have to build…
…you’re soft-hearted don’t do it. Clean the pen, feed good feed, and tend any wounds but don’t get too close. No names, no handfed treats, and no special treatment for…
…run their lives. Egyptians clearly know how to demand change in government. We should let them decide for themselves. Reader greenoacean pointed out that fuel price hikes would feed inflation….
(Photo: Feed My Starving Children) The question of how best to deliver food aid is a controversial one. In recent years, economists like Dean Karlan and Ed Glaeser have suggested…
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…
Covid-19 has shocked our food-supply system like nothing in modern history. We examine the winners, the losers, the unintended consequences — and just how much toilet paper one household really…
Stephen Dubner’s conversation with the former N.F.L. player, union official, and all-around sports thinker, recorded for our “Hidden Side of Sports” series….
The pizza-and-gaming emporium prides itself on affordability, which means its arcade games are really cheap to play. Does that lead to kids hogging the best games — and parents starting…
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…
The “molecular gastronomy” movement — which gets a bump in visibility next month with the publication of the mammoth cookbook “Modernist Cuisine” — is all about bringing more science into…
What do a computer hacker, an Indiana farm boy, and Napoleon Bonaparte have in common? The past, present, and future of food science.
How American food so got bad — and why it’s getting so much better.
Thinking of Bitcoin as just a digital currency is like thinking about the Internet as just email. Its potential is much more exciting than that.
When you want to get rid of a nasty pest, one obvious solution comes to mind: just offer a cash reward. But be careful — because nothing backfires quite like…