Raise your hand if you’ve never visited Craigslist. Just as I thought: I don’t see many raised hands out there. In my opinion, Craigslist is one of the most revolutionary elements of the Internet revolution: simple, scalable, useful, powerful, and therefore omnipresent. So I am very happy to announce that Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster, the company’s founder and CEO, . . .
Of all the changes we’ve made to this blog in recent months, my favorites are the reader-generated Q&A’s (here’s a recent example) and our Freakonomics Quorums (the most recent of which was about the future of the music industry). (I also love the “Freak-TV” videos that Nick Graham is making, but they are kind of hard to view right now, . . .
Arthur Frommer Last week, we solicited your questions for travel pro Arthur Frommer. Thanks for the strong response and thoughtful questions. As for Arthur’s answers, below — well, they are IMHO fantastic. Now I see why his books are so popular. He is opinionated, colorful, informed, passionate, and a few dozen other things. We hope you enjoy. Q: As the . . .
Travel much? While we’ve written a good bit about traveling on this site, from airplane dining to nightmare vacations to chocolate-friendly hotels, we are plainly pikers compared to Arthur Frommer. He is the founder of the omnipresent Frommer’s Travel Guides as well as Budget Travel magazine. His career was accidental: after graduating from Yale Law School in the midst of . . .
Last week, we solicited your questions for John Caplan, the president of Ford Models. Amidst all the Fashion Week furor, he took the time to answer. Q: Have models truly gotten smaller over the past, let’s say, 30 years? Is it a result of demands from designers, editors, and/or advertisers, or did it start with the kinds of models that . . .
In honor of New York Fashion Week, which begins today, our new Q&A subject is John Caplan, the president of Ford Models. In the comments section below, feel free to ask him anything you like, except for personal phone numbers. (See here, here, and here for earlier reader-generated Q&A’s.) Ford is one of the largest modeling agencies in the world, . . .
Courtesy of Playboy Enterprises, Inc. Last week, we solicited your questions for Playboy editorial director Chris Napolitano. You responded with vigor. And now, so has he. This may be the longest Q&A in the history of the printed word. Unlike our previous Q&A subjects who picked five or ten of your questions to answer, Napolitano answered every last one of . . .
A one-time religion student at Columbia University, Chris Napolitano took a job at Playboy in 1988 as an editorial assistant in the fiction department. He went on to become features editor, executive editor, and in 2004 reached the top job, editorial director. (The editor-in-chief title remains reserved for founder Hugh Hefner.) In the spirit of Jim Cramer, Mark Cuban, and . . .
“Mad Money” host Jim Cramer will submit to a reader Q&A, so bring your questions.
We recently solicited your questions about street gangs for Sudhir Venkatesh, the then-grad student we wrote about in Freakonomics who is now a professor of sociology at Columbia. His answers are, IMHO, fascinating. Your questions were really good, too; thanks. Venkatesh will publish a book, Gang Leader for a Day, in early 2008. Q: Do you think the HBO series . . .
A few days ago, we solicited your questions for hedge fund manager Neil Barsky. As always, your questions were terrific, and so are Barsky’s answers, below. One thing that surprised me, however, is that nobody asked Barsky, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, what he thinks about Rupert Murdoch‘s purchase of the Journal (and the rest of Dow Jones). This . . .
Sin in the Second City, a new book by Karen Abbott, offers an in-depth look at the prostitution trade in turn-of-the-century Chicago. In particular, Abbott focuses on the Everleigh sisters, two madams who ran a high-class brothel on South Dearborn Street that earned them extraordinary wealth and international fame. Abbott agreed to answer our questions about her book. Q: Could . . .
I have a friend named Neil Barsky who used to be a journalist and now runs a hedge fund. This is not a typical progression in the journalism field. But that’s the fact. He did most of his journalism for the Wall Street Journal, principally covering real estate, and then he worked as a research analyst at Morgan Stanley, where . . .
Of all the stories we told in Freakonomics, the most popular was the section on the economics of crack cocaine. While it related a lot of particular facts about the crack trade, I believe that readers responded most vigorously to the daring and smarts of the researcher we wrote about, Sudhir Venkatesh, who went and hung out with the crack . . .
As I’ve written before, I am a big fan of the writing of Atul Gawande, a surgeon who also happens to be a wonderful writer. His current book is called Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance. Between his operating and his writing, he also found time to answer this Q&A we sent him. After you read this, go read his . . .
After two years of submitting cartoons and getting nothing but rejection, Robert Mankoff finally succeeded in selling his first cartoon to The New Yorker in the 1970’s. He went on to become one of the magazine’s premiere cartoonists and ultimately its cartoon editor. He also had the clever idea of founding The Cartoon Bank, a company meant to syndicate and . . .
Steven Landsburg is not known for having temperate opinions. An economics professor at the University of Rochester and a prolific writer, Landsburg regularly raises provocative theories in his Slate column: women choke under pressure, e.g., or miserliness is a form of generosity. He is the author of the books Armchair Economist and Fair Play, which are in some ways direct . . .
We ran Part 1 of our Q&A with Mark Cuban yesterday; here is Part 2. Thanks again to all of you for the good questions and to Mark for the great answers. Q: I loved your early bet on HD entertainment – it was spot-on. What industries do you see on the horizon that offer similarly explosive potential? A: If . . .
My guess is that Mark Cuban doesn’t sleep very much. In addition to his various entrepreneurial activities, including an attempt to start up a new pro football league, he also managed to respond to a great many of the questions you all posed on our superfreako user-generated Q&A. (The only thing missing is a question about who he wants to . . .
Last week was a busy one for the visual wizards at Google. First, the company launched Street View, which offers street-level photos of San Francisco, New York, Miami, Denver, and Las Vegas; the remarkable new service promptly drew controversy as bloggers and surprised photo subjects raised privacy concerns. Then came word that the alleged JFK bombing suspects had used images . . .
If you’ve ever looked at his blog, you know that Mark Cuban is perhaps the most accessible (and interesting) sports team owner/ media maven/ technology entrepreneur in history. So it was nice to see him stop by our blog to comment on a recent post about why N.B.A. sportswriters get to sit so near the court. Here was Cuban’s comment: . . .
A few days ago, I blogged about Nassim Nicholas Taleb‘s new book, The Black Swan, and solicited questions for a Q&A that NNT had agreed to answer. Here now is our inaugural user-generated Q&A. Many thanks to all of you for the good questions and observations, and thanks especially for NNT’s thoughtful replies. It seems fitting that we post this . . .
“Ferreting out antilogics is an exhilarating activity.” Do you agree with the above sentence? If so, you will probably enjoy the writing of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a polymathic gentleman whose new book is called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Here’s how its dust jacket succinctly describes the thesis: “A black swan is a highly improbable event . . .
Our post last week about the possibility of pilotless commercial airplanes produced a vigorous, fascinating, and civil discussion in the comments. Here’s a bit of followup for those of you who are still interested. My brother the pilot, a.k.a. Joe Dubner, wrote to tell me that “about 80% of commercial airliner takeoffs and landings are already remote-controlled” is not quite . . .
Levitt went home last weekend to visit his family in Minn./St. Paul, and look what happened: the local newspaper got hold of him for a Q&A. (Note: if Levitt were actually awarded the Clark Medal in 1994, as the paper states, he would have been only 27; the actual year was 2004.)
And, actually, it isn’t Freakonomics either. It is Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. My good friend Jimmy Golen, a sportswriter for the AP, forwarded me this interview with Joe Maddon, the new manager of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays Q: Are you doodling lineups, doodling rotations — JOE MADDON: You know what? No, not yet. We’re talking about that on the way . . .
While 2005 is an off year for Presidential and Congressional elections, Tuesday is still Election Day, and in its honor, we got to wondering: why the heck do people bother to vote? That is the subject of our latest Freakonomics column in the New York Times Magazine. As always, we’ve posted a page elsewhere on this website with ancillary information. . . .