| Alison Flood, writing on The Guardian‘s Books Blog, asks why Freakonomics and most other books that make “serious non-fiction subjects accessible and popular” weren’t written by women. She theorizes that either women are better at storytelling (think Factory Girls and The Big Necessity) than “sell[ing] our hypothesis about the world” — or it’s just a “numbers game,” as male . . .
The first sign of middle age has hit home with my wife: she can no longer read small print up close and has to resort to the “reach,” where she extends her arm as far as she can to read books. That same fate probably soon awaits me as well, which makes me glad I am not Thai. I’ve never . . .
When the stock market plummets, where does the value of your holdings actually go? This article from Investopedia explains it well.
| The new Kindle is nice, but it’s still playing catchup to replicate the solid, solitary experience of a printed book. Seth Godin thinks that’s silly. He has some ideas to make the Kindle better by making it social. [%comments]
I’m reading a biography about Buckminster Fuller written by Lloyd Steven Sieden. Fuller had a 4-year-old daughter Alexandra who caught the 1918 flu, later got meningitis, and finally was afflicted by polio. Though frail, she managed to survive all these illnesses until the age of 4. It was the fall, and Fuller headed off from New York to Boston by . . .
We’ve said it before many times: the best feature of this blog is its readers. Case in point is a recent e-mail from one Chris Markl. It concerns philanthropy, a topic we’ve covered in various ways before on this blog: the economics of street charity; conservative vs. liberal giving; the efficiency of Smile Train; and most recently, Penn State’s THON . . .
Some things — Terminator, Elvis — were better in their original incarnations. Forbes‘s Andy Greenberg thinks the Kindle was too. The Kindle2, which came out this week, doesn’t “feel as natural for reading” as the original Kindle, Greenberg writes. Its “cold and slippery” aluminum back and smaller page-turning buttons, he says, make the Kindle2 seem “more interested in wowing customers . . .
Since the first trucks began carrying freight in the early 1900’s, the U.S. trucking industry has had an influence on politics, food prices, and even music.
A reader named Jacquilynne Schlesier writes: My book club is reading Freakonomics as our selection of the month and we’re meeting on Wednesday. It’s my selection, so I’m responsible for bringing 10 questions that’ll prompt discussion about the book. Based on the argument that broke out at our last meeting when I merely mentioned the idea behind the abortion/crime bits . . .
I was absolutely amazed when I stumbled onto a list of the bestselling books in America a few weeks ago and discovered that one author occupied the top four spots. I am guessing that this has never happened previously in United States book history, or at least not in a long, long time. Image from StephenieMeyer.com I’m guessing that these . . .
On family holiday in London, we were riding in a taxi out to the Imperial War Museum. As we passed the riverfront headquarters of MI6, a.k.a. the Secret Intelligence Service, my wife happened to be futzing with her iPhone. A list of Wi-Fi networks popped up. At the top: a network called KeepNoseOut. Coincidence? I’d like to think not. I . . .
Books on economics have become far more popular in recent years, with Freakonomics being one example. Fantasy books are also rising in popularity, with my beloved Harry Potter books leading the charge. It is perhaps not surprising that someone would try to weave these two strands of literature together. Daniel Abraham‘s novelette The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairytale of . . .
Some of us saw it as a sign of the times when Metacritic suddenly stopped compiling book reviews. For those of you unfamiliar with the site, Metacritic carries aggregate review scores for video games, TV shows, movies, and music. For a time, it was also a cheat sheet to literary taste-making. Then in 2007, CNET, Metacritic’s parent company, killed the . . .
From a reader we’ll call E.K.: I thought you might get a kick out of this photo of my kids, who are big fans of your work. The little one is 6, the older one (who already read Freakonomics) is 10. They had gotten up early Sunday morning and were hanging out reading while we (the parents) slept in. When . . .
Our resident quote bleggar Fred Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, is back with another request. If you have a bleg of your own — it needn’t have anything to do with quotations — send it along here. I would welcome suggestions of what are the most famous quotations of all time from comic books or graphic novels. . . .
This piece from Tom Ricks, the military correspondent at the Washington Post, has some excellent stories about creative anti-terrorist strategies used by the British to fight the I.R.A., including a laundromat where they run the clothes through a machine that tests for bomb residue before they dry clean the clothes. To pin down where the bomb makers live, they mail . . .
Photo: Felicity Paxton I’ve never thought much about my toilet. (Though we’ve discussed toilets on this blog here, here, and here.) It usually does its job; sometimes it needs a little help from the plunger. Rose George‘s new book The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters not only got me wildly interested in my . . .
Sean Masaki Flynn Last week, we solicited your questions for Sean Masaki Flynn, author of Economics for Dummies. In his answers below, Flynn addresses the economics of education, the relationship between aikido and economics, the importance of understanding opportunity costs, and how good shoes and nice teeth signal reproductive fitness. (Disclosure: Flynn himself had braces.) While we didn’t post Flynn’s . . .
I almost never read business books anymore. I got my fill of them years ago when I was a management consultant before I went back and got a Ph.D. Last week, however, I picked up Good to Great by Jim Collins. This book is an absolute phenomenon in the publishing world. Since it came out in 2001, it has sold . . .
I love to read books written by police officers about being police officers, and books written by criminals about being criminals. In the latter category, I highly recommend Brutal by Kevin Weeks and Phyllis Karas. Kevin Weeks was Whitey Bulger‘s right-hand man. He is loyal, loves to punch people in the face, and doesn’t mind committing the occasional murder. It . . .
When it comes to Harry Potter, I was a late adopter. For years, I chuckled at the avid readers who camped out at book stores the night before the latest book’s release. My wife is hard to buy for, so when she mentioned half-heartedly that she should read Harry Potter because all of her friends were fans, I bought her . . .
Given our fondness for all things publishing here at Freakonomics, we’ve been following the development of e-books with particular interest. In the past few weeks, it appears that the free e-book movement has officially begun. Last week, publishing monolith HarperCollins (the publisher of Freakonomics) announced that it would offer free electronic editions of a group of its books on the . . .
Professor invents book-writing machine. Are toddlers masters of data-mining? (Earlier) Study finds teenage fathers at greater risk of producing unhealthy babies. “Britney” plummets from list of most popular baby names. (Earlier)