Better Off Dead: A Q&A With the Author of The Tyranny of Dead Ideas
Matt Miller It isn’t hard to think of ideas that were once considered conventional wisdom — “Women shouldn’t vote,” “People should be segregated by race” — but were eventually laid to rest. In his...
View ArticleFREAK Shots: How’s Your Riot Insurance?
Chris Markl Chris Markl Reader Chris Markl emailed us these photos of signs from Nairobi offering insurance against political violence, terrorism, and riots. If Sudhir Venkatesh is right, we probably...
View ArticleFREAK Shots: Is Google the Gift That Keeps Taking?
To get Google to open a major routing center in Lenoir, N.C., and bring with it 200 jobs and about $172 million in local investments, the state and local governments offered the company $200 million...
View ArticleSerious Fun: A Q&A With the Author of Play
Stuart Brown Whether he’s playing tennis with “a convivial group of codgers” or hanging out with his grandkids, Stuart Brown, the author of Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and...
View ArticleStraight From the Foreclosure Expert’s Mouth
Photo: Brook Pifer Brad Geisen Millions of homeowners across the country have gone through the foreclosure process (Michael Jackson just narrowly escaped), and more will likely continue to do so for a...
View ArticleFREAK Shots: Death and Foreclosure
A blog reader named Lee emailed us a photo he took on Highway 86 in Imperial, California. “It made me wonder if [the economy] is really that bad that even dead people will lose their resting places,”...
View ArticleBy a Bunch of Nobodies: A Q&A With the Author of The Wikipedia Revolution
Andrew Lih Recently, and to the embarrassment of some major publications, a university student in Ireland posted a fake quote on Wikipedia to see how many people would trust it as fact. Several...
View ArticleIt Won't Be So Bad: A Q&A With the Author of $20 Per Gallon
It’s notoriously hard to predict gas prices. Who would have thought in 2006 that we’d be paying $4 a gallon in 2008? Or, as prices peaked last year, that we’d be filling up for $2.50 a gallon this...
View ArticleResetting America: A Q&A With Author Kurt Andersen
Kurt Andersen sees the economic recession as a one-time opportunity for America to “get back on track.” In his new book, Reset, he explains how he thinks Americans can use the crisis to “reset” and...
View ArticleFREAK Shots: Nudging the Calorie Counters
We blogged about musical stairs in Stockholm that try to encourage stair-climbing rather than escalator-riding. One of the issues with this “nudge,” as Dubner wrote, is that it’s probably more fun for...
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