He’s a world-renowned magician who’s been performing since he was seven-years-old. But Joshua Jay is also an author, toymaker, and consultant for film and television. Steve Levitt talks to him…
Also: are the most memorable stories less likely to be true?
…Stephen Randall (responsible for all those wonderful interviews and more) likes to say, “We’re like the rich guy in a convertible who’s smoking a cigar and has his arm around…
…I won’t say how, because people tend to get angry when I discuss such details; but I don’t think it would be hard. It is possible that hidden layers of…
…off slightly). Is that amount large or small, or even reasonably likely to be correct? Who knows until it is turned into a human-sized number as spending per pupil. Combining…
…a recently married husband and wife who each bring to the marriage a child from a previous relationship. I think the writers were setting up a parallel with the episode’s…
We explore votes for English, Indonesian and … Esperanto! The search for a common language goes back millennia, but so much still gets lost in translation. Will technology finally solve…
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 did a nation of immigrants come to hate immigration? We start at the beginning, sort through the evidence, and explain why your grandfather was lying about Ellis Island. (Part…
…the ability to suffer. For some jobs, you need to look good. If you want to buy things for rich people, you can’t look like a farmer or they’ll think…
…Steps, a political-satire singing troop, have even spoofed the proliferation of TV ads promoting drugs to treat increasingly bizarre diseases, like Restless Leg Syndrome. The economic incentives are all wrong…
…your car being driven between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. It’s popular for oldsters (like me) who rarely drive during the wee morning hours. But Lior’s paper makes me think…
Playing notes on her piano, she demonstrates for Steve why whole numbers sound pleasing, why octaves are mathematically imperfect, and how math underlies musical composition. Sarah, a professor at the…
A new paper by Colgate economist Michael R. Haines uses infant and childhood mortality rates to trace inequality in the U.S. in the 20th century. Haines reaches an interesting conclusion:…
What does it mean to pursue something that everyone else thinks is nuts? And what does it take to succeed?
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…
…a child when the kid loses a tooth. Tagliamonte’s son lost his first tooth when he was nearly seven; the parents didn’t know how much to pay, so they asked…
…keep their kids in school, like this one: Oregon schools offer free cars to entice kids to class Monday, September 18, 2006 Associated Press – Idaho News PHOENIX, Ore. —…
…than before, from the biggest issues (negotiating a new Collective Bargaining Agreement) to the smaller (introducing its own line of N.F.L. merchandise in lower-end stores like Walgreens and Kroger). Atallah,…
On the football field, as in nearly every arena in life, the punishment doesn’t always fit the crime. James Harrison of the Pittsburgh Steelers has become the poster child for…
…sense to subsidize women who were going to give up babies for adoption? I think maybe it does. There are large numbers of parents who want to adopt, and a…
Everyone agrees that massive deforestation is an environmental disaster. But most of the standard solutions — scolding the Brazilians, invoking universal morality — ignore the one solution that might actually…
Photo: ceeb Inside a Los Angeles bus. In the last posts, we learned that Los Angeles is not a poster child for sprawl, that the air has gotten a lot…
I’ve been a dad now for a little less than two years, and I’m still trying to figure out how it is shaping my approach to economics. I think the…
Tania Tetlow, a former federal prosecutor and now the president of Fordham University, thinks the modern campus could use a dose of old-fashioned values….
…pizza is more expensive, and fewer children may want to eat it. Hence many school districts walk a tightrope. School districts must increase the health content of their sales while…
Security guards make malls feel safer, but what can they do when there’s trouble? Zachary Crockett observes and reports….
…Please could you expand a bit your answer? – Moggio A. Sure. So we think our book has important implications for the industries like music, film, and publishing, that have…
Kidney failure is such a catastrophic (and expensive) disease that Medicare covers treatment for anyone, regardless of age. Since Medicare reimbursement rates are fairly low, the dialysis industry had to…
The dean of Yale’s School of Management grew up in a small village in Guyana. During his unlikely journey, he has researched video-gaming habits, communicable disease, and why so many…
