A couple weeks ago, I blogged about a gadget called Skybox, which would give people at sporting events access to all kinds of data, ranging from player stats to concession prices to instant replays. Tim Hayden of Vivid Sky, the company behind Skybox, has been kind enough to invite readers of this blog to play [...]

The devotion exhibited by some Freakonomics fans is downright inspiring. And inspired. Click here to see what I’m talking about. (Make sure you scroll down one screen.)

Freakonomics, apparently. Just published in France, the book (as of this posting) was sitting in the Top 10 on Amazon.fr.

Back in high school, Dave Kansas was a teammate of mine on our state-champion quiz bowl team. We also shared starting duties at point guard on our high school basketball team, which explains why we were not state champions in basketball.
Anyway, Dave Kansas has done pretty well for himself. He was a journalist [...]

I don’t know the answer to this question, I just throw it out for blog readers to ponder.
The competition for the Nobel prize in economics is a lot less fierce than most people think. Most of the winners graduate from a prestigious Ph.D. program (and this will be increasingly true in the future, I [...]

An Italian court has found that a man who sexually abused his 14-year-old stepdaughter should receive a lighter sentence because the girl was not a virgin — and, therefore, the damage to her was not as significant as it would have been otherwise. The price of virginity is a subject that has received much attention [...]

In response to my post regarding false predictions not being properly punished, some blog readers took exception to my argument that the hysteria that surrounded Y2K was a false prophesy. Their argument is that all of the preparation leading up to Y2K averted what would have been a disaster.
That just doesn’t ring true to [...]

The February 19, 2006, Freakonomics column in the New York Times Magazine concerns NASCAR, or the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, which in a previous incarnation was known, quite fittingly, as the Stock-Car Auto Racing Society, or SCARS. This post contains bonus material.

Our new “Freakonomics” column, appearing in today’s New York Times Magazine, takes a look at NASCAR’s recent record of crashing and fatalities. Not surprisingly, the Times’s sports section is full of NASCAR articles, since today is the running of the 2006 Daytona 500 (which marks 5 years since the death of Dale Earnhardt).
One of these [...]

Dubner and I wrote a column in the NY Times that told people to bet on Seattle in the Super Bowl. The bet lost. Not more than three people mentioned this to me afterwards. Not a single angry e-mail from a stranger who lost their college tuition fund because of our column.
I’m [...]

Chris Anderson from the TED conference passes along this link to an interesting slide show of Edward Burtynsky’s photographs. Burtynsky was a 2005 TED prize winner.
Warning to Canadians: you will not like how many of the images are from Canada.

Back in September I blogged about my admiration for Kevin Murphy after he won a MacArthur Genius grant.
Here are links to two interviews with Murphy that give you a real flavor of what he is like. The first interview is in the Chicago GSB magazine. Note the size of the truck he drives [...]

A little-known fact: Steve Levitt is a pretty big NASCAR fan. As for my interest in auto racing — well, I spent five years in North Carolina, both up in the mountains (where, as lore held it, racecar drivers got their training by running moonshine down the mountain roads) and also in Winston-Salem (where the [...]

Freakonomics pieces are scheduled to run on Good Morning America and World News Tonight on Friday, February 17th. The GMA piece will run in the first hour and will be a preview of Sunday’s New York Times column about NASCAR. The WNT piece will address the Freakonomics of parenting.

So what do you do if you’re a Jewish cartoonist in Israel and the following happens:
a. A Danish newspaper commissions artists to draw editorial cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad, and said cartoons set off a furor in the Muslim world.
b. Iran responds to said furor by putting out a call for anti-Semitic cartoons about the [...]