How to Become a Superhero (Or…Why I Would Never Donate to a Major Charity)
…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…
…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…
…family. But they don’t have to feed your family. You do. Once you care what others think, you’ve lost. Then you’ve just set up the same boundaries for yourself that…
…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…
Researchers are trying to figure out who gets bored — and why — and what it means for ourselves and the economy. But maybe there’s an upside to boredom?
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.
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…
Also: why do we hoard? (Rebroadcast From Ep. 28)…
Ecologist Suzanne Simard studies the relationships between trees in a forest: they talk to each other, punish each other, and depend on each other. What can we learn from them?
Need help accessing your private RSS feeds? Simply add them to your favorite podcast app via your Account Page. 1 Go to https://freakonomics.com/content. If you are not automatically recognized, enter…
Physicist Helen Czerski loves to explain how the world works. She talks with Steve about studying bubbles, setting off explosives, and how ocean waves have changed the course of history….
When a zoo needs an elephant, or finds itself with three surplus penguins, it doesn’t buy or sell the animals — it asks around. Zachary Crockett rattles the cages….
When the computer scientist Ben Zhao learned that artists were having their work stolen by A.I. models, he invented a tool to thwart the machines. He also knows how to…
Even with a new rat czar, an arsenal of poisons, and a fleet of new garbage trucks, it won’t be easy — because, at root, the enemy is us. (Part…
To most people, the rat is vile and villainous. But not to everyone! We hear from a scientist who befriended rats and another who worked with them in the lab…
In the final episode of our whale series, we learn about fecal plumes, shipping noise, and why Moby-Dick is still worth reading. (Part 3 of “Everything You Never Knew About…
The Freakonomics blog is now available on the New York Times‘s mobile site, which offers a full (yes, full) text feed of each day’s newspaper stories and blog posts in…
Morgan Reynolds was chief economist for the Department of Labor in the first term of the George W. Bush administration. He was in the economics department at Texas A&M (now…
Educators and economists tell us all the reasons college enrollment has been dropping, especially for men, and how to stop the bleeding. (Part 3 of our series from 2022, “Freakonomics…
Thanks to articles in the Wall Street Journal and the Economist, a working paper by Chris Foote and Chris Goetz that is sharply critical of John Donohue and me has…
We think of them as intellectual enclaves and the surest route to a better life. But U.S. colleges also operate like firms, trying to differentiate their products to win market…
…following message, from economist Shoshana Grossbard, is easily among the best. She teaches at San Diego State and is the founding editor of the Review of Economics of the Household….
…raises another question of interest to me and perhaps about seven other economists: who among the list of notable economists was the best athlete in their prime? I have an…
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…
…does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules. The CEA’s chairman is Alan Krueger, an economist whose work may be familiar to readers of this…
Just a few decades ago, more than 90 percent of 30-year-olds earned more than their parents had earned at the same age. Now it’s only about 50 percent. What happened…
The pandemic may be winding down, but that doesn’t mean we’ll return to full-time commuting and packed office buildings. The greatest accidental experiment in the history of labor has lessons…
Every year, Americans short the I.R.S. nearly half a trillion dollars. Most ideas to increase compliance are more stick than carrot — scary letters, audits, and penalties. But what if…
