When a quarterback throws a costly interception or when a pitcher gives up a big home run, the play-by-play announcer inevitably says the player wishes “he could have that one back.” If there were a play-by-play announcer for newspaper writing (besides The Wire, I mean), he might say the same thing about this piece by Laura Berman in the Chicago . . .
Michael Shermer, a noted skeptic who writes a monthly column for Scientific American, is visiting the University of Chicago campus tonight to talk about his new book, The Mind of the Market. I’m halfway through the book, which explores how evolution has shaped the way people interact with the modern economy. It is extremely interesting, and I will write more . . .
Please say hello to a new guest blogger, Sudhir Venkatesh, a professor of sociology and African-American studies at Columbia. You may remember him as the grad student who embedded himself with a Chicago crack gang, which we wrote about in “Freakonomics,” and you may also remember this blog Q&A. On Jan. 10, Venkatesh will publish a memoir about his research, . . .
Peter Landesman has written a fascinating article for L.A. Weekly on street gangs. The events he details are chilling. I can’t say I agree with some of the broader claims of the piece, however. Landesman argues that the gang problem is worse than it has ever been, and that gang violence hasn’t dropped the way other crimes have. A quick . . .
Whenever I see a poker tournament on TV or wander through a casino, I am always struck by a particular absence: there seem to be very few Indian-Americans playing poker. Considering that there are so many Indians of poker age in this country who thrive in finance, computer science, engineering, and other fields that incorporate math, probability, risk, etc. — . . .
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 . . .
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 . . .
Sudhir Venkatesh, the amazing sociologist who was my co-author on the gangs research that we write about in Freakonomics, has a great new documentary. It will be showing on WTTW, Chicago’s PBS affiliate at Thursday, Nov. 17th, 9pm Friday, Nov. 18th, 10pm. If you don’t live in Chicago, you are out of luck, at least for now. I have seen . . .
In the August 7, 2005, Freakonomics column in the New York Times Magazine, Dubner and Levitt ask a simple question: Whatever happened to crack cocaine? Crack was the scourge of the 1980’s, leading to endless misery and violence. Today, it is rarely mentioned in the news media. Does that mean that crack has vanished? This blog post supplies additional research material.