“Football Freakonomics”: Tebow Timing
…October 30, 2011. (Photo: One of the arguments both for and against Tim Tebow as a viable, long-term NFL starter is the idea that he should simply not be doing…
Also: What’s a food you love that seems disgusting to everyone else?…
If you’re frustrated with your family, should you cut ties with them? Who’s more likely to break with relatives over politics, liberals or conservatives? And what would it take for…
How many bottles of wine are regifted? What’s wrong with giving cash? And should Angela give her husband a subscription to the Sausage of the Month Club?
How many bottles of wine are regifted? What’s wrong with giving cash? And should Angela give her husband a subscription to the Sausage of the Month Club?…
The U.S. immigration system is a massively complicated machine, with a lot of worn-out parts. How to fix it? Step one: Get hold of some actual facts and evidence. (We…
For decades, the great fear was overpopulation. Now it’s the opposite. How did this happen — and what’s being done about it? (Part one of a three-part series, “Cradle to…
Dubner and Levitt talk about fixing the post office, putting cameras in the classroom, and wearing hats.
Global demand for beef, chicken, and pork continues to rise. So do concerns about environmental and other costs. Will reconciling these two forces be possible — or, even better, Impossible™?
Uri Simonsohn is a behavioral science professor who wants to improve standards in his field — so he’s made a sideline of investigating fraudulent academic research. He tells Steve Levitt,…
If we could reboot the planet and create new systems and institutions from scratch, would they be any better than what we’ve blundered our way into through trial and error?…
It happens to just about everyone, whether you’re going for Olympic gold or giving a wedding toast. We hear from psychologists, economists, and the golfer who some say committed the…
Do economic sanctions work? Are big democracies any good at spreading democracy? What is the root cause of terrorism? It turns out that data analysis can help answer all these…
A conversation with former Major League Baseball player and current E.S.P.N. analyst Mark Teixeira, recorded for the Freakonomics Radio series “The Hidden Side of Sports.”…
Is it better to be an egocentric navigator or an allocentric navigator? Was the New York City Department of Education wrong to ban ChatGPT? And did Mike get ripped off…
He’s a Harvard physician and economist who just started a third job: host of the new podcast Freakonomics, M.D. He’s also Steve’s former student. The two discuss why medicine should…
For all the speculation about the future, A.I. tools can be useful right now. Adam Davidson discovers what they can help us do, how we can get the most from…
…October 30, 2011. (Photo: One of the arguments both for and against Tim Tebow as a viable, long-term NFL starter is the idea that he should simply not be doing…
Economists and politicians have turned him into a mascot for free-market ideology. Some on the left say the right has badly misread him. Prepare for a very Smithy tug of…
…his or her heirs. But, with a scheduled resumption of the tax in 2011, such heirs would have surrendered more than $40 million if their parent had the temerity to…
…Oklahoma. The median value was $4.66/mile. In comparison, the standard federal reimbursement rate for fixed and variable costs of operating an automobile in 2011 was $0.51/mile. From 1997 to 2011,…
Some of the biggest names in behavioral science stand accused of faking their results. Last year, an astonishing 10,000 research papers were retracted. We talk to whistleblowers, reformers, and a…
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…
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…
…a blueprint of mathematical time. For example, I launch into a leap on the first count (or beat), float through the second and third counts, and land noiselessly on the…
…expression, “It”s not the vote that counts, it’s who counts the votes.” I’ve often heard it attributed to Stalin, but I’m not sure if I believe that. The YBQ has…
…score to 2064. I also tried searching only on surnames, and received roughly similar rankings (although the counts of Smith, Summers and Friedman were grossly inflated by?eponymous?authors). This exercise suggests…
…then things began to get out of hand. Readers Digest picked it up in ’62 and paid me five bucks. And when the Navy published ‘Farwell’s Rules of the Road,’…
…on six counts of securities fraud. The Chicago Maroon reports that undergraduate students in the University of Chicago’s economics department can take a class with Tourre this spring: With spring…
We tend to think of medicine as a science, but for most of human history it has been scientific-ish at best. In the first episode of a three-part series, we…
