The Toronto Globe and Mail reports that Canada’s do-not-call registry is being sold for next to nothing to international scammers who are barraging these households with phone calls, but are largely beyond the reach of Canadian law.
In a plot twist worthy of Lost, it turns out that TV commercials aren’t obnoxious interruptions after all. They’re helpful interruptions, which increase your enjoyment of TV by periodically reminding you how much you’d rather be watching your favorite show.
The Recording Industry Association of America (R.I.A.A.) has quietly ended its campaign to sue illicit digital music sharing into oblivion, the Wall Street Journal reports.
From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: The 15 highest-rated television shows in the local market in 2008 were Steelers games, according to N.F.L. and Nielsen Media Research. The only reason there weren’t 16 games is because the September 14 game at Cleveland was not rated because of Hurricane Ike. Once again, the Steelers led the league with the highest television ratings in . . .
We usually hear about these declines in isolation. But taken together, they seem to suggest that cultural pursuits across the board are on the decline. Indeed, if nobody seems out buying books, movies and music, what are they doing with their leisure time instead?
Apparently: going to the library.
Last week I did something that felt very 1990’s: I purchased a compact disc. The CD wasn’t for me; it was a Christmas present.
As I wrapped the CD, I pondered the silliness of the whole enterprise. After all, the recipient — like most of us these days — listens almost exclusively to MP3 files. In fact, I’m not even sure if he has a CD player beyond his laptop, which he will use to convert his disc-shaped gift into a more useful set of MP3 files.
Do you remember the following quote from Barack Obama? “I am like a Rorschach test,” Mr. Obama noted at one point during the campaign. “Even if people find me disappointing ultimately, they might gain something.” That’s not quite what I think of as a Rorschach test. This is what I think of as a Rorschach test: From Caffeinated Politics Robin . . .
Photo: Michael (mx5tx) Every time the subject of guns comes up, whether on this blog or elsewhere (see here, here, and here for a few examples), the resultant discussion is predictably passionate. I am guessing that passionate gun discussions are taking place all over the country today with the news that an 8-year-old boy accidentally shot and killed himself over . . .
Photo: Joe Shlabotnik The other day I had a company come and remove two air conditioners from my office in order to clean them, store them for the winter, and return them in the spring. It wasn’t cheap: $269 for the first one and $249 for the second. But I like air conditioning, and I figured it was worthwhile to . . .
Bruce Silverglade at Gleason’s Gym, Brooklyn, NY Sports fan or not, chances are you’ve heard of Sugar Ray Robinson, George Foreman, and Rocky Marciano. But unless you follow boxing, you probably haven’t heard of Antonio Margarito, who recently beat Miguel Cotto to become a three-time welterweight champion. This disparity may explain why boxing isn’t as popular as other U.S. sports . . .
The answer: in prisons, where CDs are routinely banned because they can be shattered and the shards refined into shivs. MP3 players are unavailable in most prisons, as are, one imagines, turntables. California-based entrepreneur Bob Paris got the idea five years ago to sell cassettes by mail to the 2.3 million people locked up in federal, state, or local prisons . . .
In 2004, a bunch of newspapers (including the New York Times) instituted a new policy requiring that articles, when possible, should explain the reasons why the paper granted a source anonymity. The new policy has created a great empirical opportunity — because in practice the required reason is given after the phrase: “[source] was granted anonymity because … “. The . . .
I was sitting in the student union at the University of Chicago last week when a student came by putting “Free Mumia” leaflets on the tables. I have never paid much attention to the Mumia Abu-Jamal case. On the one hand, I know enough about police, the criminal justice system, and racism to believe that an innocent black man could . . .
Dubner recently questioned whether there’s much (or anything) to be learned from stock market news. A paper by University of Michigan political science professor Arthur Lupia and his students points to a major reason stock stories lack substance: “Point blindness,” or what happens when news reports and citizens don’t realize that the value of a stock index point changes frequently. . . .
The playwright David Mamet, writing in the Village Voice, declared that he had renounced his unabashed liberal world view for a more conservative one, due primarily to the influence of economists like Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. Mamet found: … that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic . . .
There is nothing in the world that can prepare someone for what my co-author Sudhir Venkatesh (Freakonomics guest poster and author of Gang Leader For A Day) has on tap tonight: being a guest on the Colbert Report. I speak from experience. There is nothing I wanted to do less than go on Colbert, but Dee Dee DeBartlo, the dear . . .
This is a few months old, but still well worth a listen: an NPR interview with Lia Scholl of Star Light Ministries, an outfit in Springfield, Va., that counsels exotic dancers. Here, from Star Light’s Web site, is its mission statement: Most exotic dancers are young women who come from varied socio-economic backgrounds. Their education levels vary — some have . . .
Why are there so many fake memoirs in the world? The latest is Margaret Seltzer‘s Love and Consequences. (I would link to its Amazon page but, alas, it no longer has an Amazon page.) If you had written a memoir that was, say, 60 percent true, would you try to present it as a memoir or as a novel? If . . .
We’ve written in the past about the (presumed) worthlessness of book blurbs. But I just came across one blurb that I think might be an exception. The book in question is Why Blacks Fear “America’s Mayor”: Reporting Police Brutality and Black Activist Politics Under Rudy Giuliani. You may recall that this was the book Al Sharpton was reading on a . . .
Media employees have plenty to complain about these days — layoffs, dropping revenue, and of course, accusations of bias. But now there’s a place for frustrated journalists to vent: AngryJournalist.com. It’s an anonymous message board with no dates, locations, or any identifiers save a number. Here’s a recent post: I’m angry because after a Sunday when I wrote the A1 . . .
That was the question I found myself asking while reading through the Times sports section in recent days. I understand that we are sort of between seasons here. The Super Bowl is over, baseball has yet to begin, the N.B.A. is slogging through its long wintry slog, and the N.H.L. — well, I’m afraid I just don’t pay attention, as . . .
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 . . .
We’ve blogged about obesity at length here at Freakonomics. The health economist Eric Finkelstein has been studying the subject for years, and, along with co-author Laurie Zuckerman, has just published a book, The Fattening of America, which analyzes the causes and consequences of obesity in the U.S. Finkelstein agreed to answer our questions about the book. Q: You state that . . .
We’ve written in the past about the very thin line that separates an acceptable expression of racial or ethnic bias from an unacceptable one — for instance, the tumult over Andy Rooney writing that “today’s baseball stars are all guys named Rodriguez to me.” As we wrote in Freakonomics, evidence from the TV show Weakest Link suggested that bias against . . .
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)
As of this writing, the CBS News program 60 Minutes is scheduled to run a segment on Sun., Feb. 10 (7 p.m. EST), on the fate of the penny: should it be abolished or not? I was interviewed on the subject, so if the piece isn’t preempted and if I don’t end up on the cutting room floor, you can . . .
These days, many Americans — including Mike Bloomberg and Chuck Schumer — fear the answer to that question will soon be “no,” if it isn’t already; London is poised to take over. An article [gated] in today’s Wall Street Journal about the credit crunch’s effect on the U.K. economy offers this sobering fact: The financial sector accounts for more than . . .
Coming into this very long, harried, and intensely reordered presidential primary season, there was a lot of talk about how poorly the nominating process serves the electorate. The common argument seemed to be that the acceleration and clustering of states’ primaries would create a chaos from which no electoral good would come. I’d like to suggest an opposing view: this . . .
Apparently, all information on the Web does not want to be free: the Wall Street Journal will not, as has been widely speculated, tear down its paywall entirely. Here’s what new WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch told his paper at Davos: “We are going to greatly expand and improve the free part of the Wall Street Journal online, but there will . . .
Just as blog comments are often more interesting than blog posts, I have long thought that some of the best stories in newspapers and magazines are published in the letters-to-the-editor section. The Dec. 3, 2007, edition of BusinessWeek contains one of the most fascinating letters I’ve ever seen. (Click here and then scroll down to “Big MAC and the Chicago . . .