Smart Kids in Abbottabad
Kids in Abbottabad playing outside bin Laden’s compound ( AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images) Life is all about incentives, as this paragraph from a New York Times article about Bin Laden makes…
When Stephen Dubner learned that Dallas–Fort Worth will soon overtake Chicago as the third-biggest metro area in the U.S., he got on a plane to find out why. Despite getting…
The Columbia neuroscientist and psychology professor Carl Hart believes that recreational drug use, even heroin, methamphetamines, and cocaine, is an inalienable right. Can he convince Steve?…
Kids in Abbottabad playing outside bin Laden’s compound ( AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images) Life is all about incentives, as this paragraph from a New York Times article about Bin Laden makes…
…kids a minute; about 6,100 a second. Totally doable. Especially when you consider the uneven distribution of kids in the world. Santa needs to hit 22 million kids every hour….
A new paper from Eric V. Edmonds and Norbert Schady finds that cash transfer programs in developing countries may keep kids in school and out of the labor force. From…
…is mowed on time—and the kids have more spending money. I have no doubt that paying the kids is cheaper than hiring a gardener—cheaper than the market solution. Of course,…
…a runaway hit after a PDF of the book was circulated online widely. It’s fully illustrated and written like a kids’ bedtime book, except for the exasperated expressions most kids…
…the Oct. 1 issue of the journal Sleep, indicate that it’s not so much the amount of sleep kids get, but the times at which they get it that has…
Game theorist Barry Nalebuff explains how he used basic economics to build Honest Tea into a multimillion-dollar business, and shares his innovative approach to negotiation.
…But here’s the thing: it was a bipartisan effort to focus the nation’s attention on the achievement gap between low-income kids and middle class kids — which until that time…
Billionaire John Arnold is figuring out how to do as much good as he can with his wealth. It takes hard work, risk tolerance, and a lot of spending.
Richard Prum says there’s a lot that traditional evolutionary biology can’t explain. He thinks a neglected hypothesis from Charles Darwin — and insights from contemporary queer theory — hold the…
Bapu Jena talks with Albert Bourla about his unusual path to the top, developing a life-saving vaccine in record time, and the second-hardest decision he made along the way.
Jane McGonigal designed a game to help herself recover from a traumatic brain injury — and she thinks playing games can help us all lead our best lives….
How can you summon courage when you’re terrified? Is hiking more dangerous than skiing? And what is the stupidest thing that Mike has ever done?…
Patrick Smith, the author of Cockpit Confidential, answers every question we can throw at him about what really happens up in the air. Just don’t get him started on pilotless…
What happens to your reputation when you’re no longer around to defend it?
The answer is at least one. This morning I saw Barack Obama dropping off his child at nursery school. Obama is the junior senator from Illinois who exploded onto the…
…their parents, as well as kids and their teachers and kids and other kids. Now that District 214 students are free to read Freakonomics, we thought it might be nice…
Did we needlessly scare ourselves into ditching a good thing? And, with millions of cars driving around with no passengers, should we be rooting for a renaissance?
It’s hard enough to save for a house, tuition or retirement. So why are we willing to pay big fees for subpar investment returns? Enter the low-cost index fund. The…
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…
It’s hard enough to save for a house, tuition, or retirement. So why are we willing to pay big fees for subpar investment returns? Enter the low-cost index fund. The…
Academic studies are nice, and so are Nobel Prizes. But to truly prove the value of a new idea, you have to unleash it to the masses. That’s what a…
When it comes to exercising outrage, people tend to be very selective. Could it be that humans are our least favorite animal?
Sarah Stein Greenberg runs Stanford’s d.school, which teaches design as a mode of problem solving. She and Steve talk about what makes her field different from other academic disciplines, how…
In the American Dream sweepstakes, Andrew Yang was a pretty big winner. But for every winner, he came to realize, there are thousands upon thousands of losers — a “war…
A recent outbreak of illness and death has gotten everyone’s attention — including late-to-the-game regulators. But would a ban on e-cigarettes do more harm than good? We smoke out the…
A conversation with the Shark Tank star, entrepreneur, and Dallas Mavericks owner recorded for the Freakonomics Radio series “The Hidden Side of Sports.”…
Whether you’re building a business or a cathedral, execution is everything. We ask artists, scientists, and inventors how they turned ideas into reality. And we find out why it’s so…
