…at kids. With food increasingly becoming a global issue (the topic has made several appearances on this blog), Menzel and D’Aluisio hope it will help kids (and adults) better understand…
…model a life of delayed gratification and persistence if they want their kids to embrace those values themselves. Show your kids how hard you work, how often you experience disappointments…
Also: is it better to be right or “not wrong”?…
In this special episode of Freakonomics, M.D., host Bapu Jena looks at data from birthday parties, March Madness parties, and a Freakonomics Radio holiday party to help us all manage…
Data scientist Nate Silver gained attention for his election predictions. But even the best prognosticators get it wrong sometimes. He talks to Steve about making good decisions with data, why…
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…
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…
…which in a small high school of around 500 kids is incredibly painful. External authority doesn’t really get invoked. You could certainly think about this as part of the way…
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…
(iStockphoto) A new study (PDF here) by University of Notre Dame economist Kasey Buckles and graduate student Elizabeth Munnich finds that siblings spaced more than two years apart have higher…
Andrew Cherlin has a new book coming out today called The Marriage-Go-Round. He’s a first-rate sociologist, and so I’m looking forward to reading it. But for now, he’s teasing us…
Today’s parents are spending?dramatically more time on childcare than their parents did.? What’s more, this rise has disproportionately occurred among those with the most education.? At least, that’s the conclusion…
A conversation with the Shark Tank star, entrepreneur, and Dallas Mavericks owner recorded for the Freakonomics Radio series “The Hidden Side of Sports.”…
That’s the question we asked in our latest podcast and hour-long Freakonomics Radio special “The Church of Scionology.” You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, or read the…
Thanks to legal settlements with drug makers and distributors, states have plenty of money to boost prevention and treatment. Will it work? (Part two of a two-part series.)…
Revisiting Steve’s 2021 conversation with the economist and MacArthur “genius” about how to make memories stickier, why change is undervalued, and how to find something new to say on the…
Americans are so accustomed to the standard intersection that we rarely consider how dangerous it can be — as well as costly, time-wasting, and polluting. Is it time to embrace…
Is it dangerous to live in the past? Why is Disney remaking all of its classic movies? And why does Angela get sentimental over a cup of soup and a…
(Photo: DAVID HOLT) Am in London for work and, as always, delight in reading the newspapers here. From today’s Telegraph, my favorite article: Accident and emergency departments have seen a…
We asked you to nominate the worst sins of the modern age. Which one do Stephen and Angela think belongs on the list? And which does Angie struggle with the…
…As we’ve written in the past, children who grow up in homes with a lot of books are likely to do better in school than kids from homes without books…
She used to run a behavioral unit in the Obama administration, and now has a similar role at Google. Maya and Steve talk about the power (and limits) of behavioral…
…to attract “better” kids. These are kids with strong families and good academic backgrounds. So even if the school is not at all good at adding value, it will still…
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…
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…
What matters more: meeting our own ambitions, or winning fame and glory? What’s it like to earn a gold medal at the Olympics? And why didn’t Mike’s grandfather get a…
In a conversation fresh from the Freakonomics Radio Network’s podcast laboratory, Michèle Flournoy (one of the highest-ranking women in Defense Department history) speaks with Cecil Haney (one of the U.S….
It’s not oil or water or plutonium — it’s human hours. We’ve got an idea for putting them to use, and for building a more human-centered economy. But we need…
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?
How does the profitability of family firms stack up against the rest? Has nepotism become more taboo over time? And why are 90 percent of adoptees in Japan not children…
