A few days ago, we blogged about a college kid who got kicked out of class for citing Freakonomics. Now comes even worse news — from a reader who claims that he was asked to leave the premises of a job for simply owning the book. I’m somewhat skeptical of the verity of this story; [...]

I guess there won’t be a sequel to Moneyball written about Paul DePodesta and the Los Angeles Dodgers. After a 71-91 season,
DePodesta was abruptly fired this week.
Diehard readers of this blog know that I have been a longtime skeptic of the stories in Moneyball (see, for example, here, here, and here). There is, [...]

Everywhere I go, people are asking me what I think of the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke.
I know Bernanke pretty well because he was Chairman of the Princeton Economics department at a time when I was very seriously thinking of moving there, but ended up turning down offers on multiple occasions (which [...]

J. Eric Oliver has a new book called Fat Politics. I had lunch with the author (he is a professor in the Political Science department at the University of Chicago) about six months ago and was thoroughly entertained by the stories he told from this book. He let me read an early draft [...]

In the chapter of Freakonomics called “What Makes a Perfect Parent?”, we analyze the data from the U.S. Dept. of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, and argue that many things that modern parents do to make their kids “smarter” (i.e. culture cramming), doesn’t have any effect on early childhood test scores. Apparently we’re not the [...]

Three of the current top non-fiction books in the U.S. are written by men who were born and/or raised in the Twin Cities: Tom Friedman, Al Franken, and our own Steve Levitt. My guess is that these were the only three guys who didn’t spend their entire childhoods playing hockey. The area’s most famous author [...]

Someone asked to see the rest of the Levitt clan.

(Click the photo for a larger version.)
From left to right: Sophie (1), Nicholas (2), Olivia (5), and Amanda (5).
Sophie’s name, for the record, was taken from the list of Freakonomics-approved names in Chapter 6 of the book.

This week, Paul Greenberg wrote in the New York Times Magazine about how worldwide demand for Chilean sea bass (the fish formerly known as the Patagonian toothfish) has created huge supply pressures. If you care about such things, you might want to take a look at this brief BBC article about a study that [...]

A few days ago, we asked whether blogging is perhaps dangerous to professors seeking tenure. Here is proof that citing Freakonomics can be dangerous to your academic health as well. A reader sent in this e-mail the other day, which we now reprint in full — minus the young man’s name and college, for obvious [...]

Hello Freakonomics freaks!
Allow me to formally introduce myself. I am “the mysterious Rachel,” the Rachel formerly known as “the excellent Rachel,” and the Freakonomics assistant currently fielding your bookplate requests.
I’m just writing to let you know that they are a-comin’. You responded to the Steph/vens offer with a fervor we never could have imagined, and [...]

My son Andrew died six years ago today. He had just turned one.
He was born just as the leaves were turning. He died just as the leaves were turning.
We played a song from the musical Rent at his memorial service. It always makes us think of him. It goes, in part, [...]

The playwright August Wilson died a few weeks ago. He was a powerful and unique writer, and a powerfully unique man. Five years ago, I had the chance to interview him for a book I was writing, Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper. I was interested in Wilson because Confessions was about my childhood infatuation with Franco [...]

Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote in the first Quill Book
Awards. As promised, the oh-so-glamorous Oscars of the book world will
be broadcast on select NBC stations on Saturday, October 22nd. The
show is on at 7pm in all locations, and is only an hour, so it’s hard
to know if the awarding of Best [...]

A recent story on the AP wire:
OKLAHOMA CITY — A man got a prison term longer than prosecutors and defense attorneys had agreed to because of Larry Bird.
The lawyers reached a plea agreement Tuesday for a 30-year term for a man accused of shooting with an intent to kill and robbery. But Eric James Torpy [...]

We have changed platforms for our blog, so if you have this page bookmarked — and have been wondering where the heck we’ve been — you should change your bookmark to this page. We haven’t been writing much there, either; but we’re getting caught up, and eventually we’ll move the archives there as well. One [...]