This weekend, Freakonomics received its 1,000th customer review on Amazon.com. Is this at all noteworthy?
Some of you may recall that we have previously posted here about Amazon reviews. Levitt wondered why people bother to write reviews at all. I wrote about one particular reviewer who somehow managed to always float his review to the top [...]

Last week, I posted here about how a member of the school board in suburban Chicago’s District 214 wanted to have several books removed from the schools’ reading list. Among them was Freakonomics. The board member, Leslie Pinney, objected to the various books for various reasons, including pornography, vulgarity, and in the case of Freakonomics, [...]

Reason #1: There is a huge Freakonomics poster on the wall behind the cash register in Authors Bookstore in Terminal C of the airport.
Reason #2: They have my favorite restaurant, Dairy Queen, right in the terminal.

I’m curious who is standing out in Times Square asking people if they know who I am. I am even more skeptical than Dubner regarding the methodology in his post below. Four out of ten? Forget about it.
Just for fun, how about we do an experiment. I will give $100 (or [...]

Have them play the National Economics Challenge, which sounds like Quiz Bowl with yield curves. Whatever you do, don’t send them to Times Square, where only 4 of 10 people on the street know who Steve Levitt is, but 8 of 10 know Jessica Simpson. (Honestly, I’d be shocked if as many as 4 of [...]

In Dubner’s last post, he noted that Wikipedia sometimes gets it right and sometimes misses badly.
I just visited the entry on me in Wikipedia. What is amazing to me is that if you click on “history,” the page has been altered about 50 times in the last few months. Don’t people have [...]

That’s the question sent our way by a reader (who happens to work for the Federal Trade Commission). To be exact, here’s what he wrote:
Why don’t media companies act more like sports teams in trading assets? Why don’t we ever something like this: FOX trades Arrested Development to ABC for Alias and a pilot [...]

Most people don’t like Ticketmaster very much. They have monopoly/quasi-monopoly in the market for selling event tickets. And they price accordingly.
But their latest move is one that economists will love. USA Today reports that the best seats for some concerts will start to be auctioned off, rather than sold at below market [...]

They teach you a lot of things when you study economics: about marginal cost, incentives, dynamic optimization, etc.
But up until now, the real reason for why people study economics had been a closely held secret known only to economists — kept carefully hidden away from the hoi polloi.
Well, it turns out Joey Cheek, of all [...]

There aren’t enough people like John Stossel on television: smart, curious, cantankerous, and very willing to shoot at sacred cows. I say this not because Stossel hosted the recent hour-long 20/20 program on Freakonomics, but because I’ve always admired his reporting and especially his attitude. His recent 20/20 special on education, “Stupid in America,” is [...]

That’s the question I’m asking myself today. I’ve spent the past couple of days in Washington D.C. for Book Expo America. My five-year-old son is a football fanatic, so whenever I’m in a town with an N.F.L. team, I try to bring home a souvenir for him. Today, I went to a huge souvenir store [...]

It has been said many times that awards are meaningless — unless you happen to win one. I guess that’s true. When we heard not long ago that the Webby Award for Best Copy/Writing on a website was not awarded to Freakonomics.com (yeah yeah yeah, we were happy just to be nominated) but to some [...]

There’s a fascinating article by Nicholas Wade in today’s New York Times about a new understanding of human evolution — i.e., that “the split between the human and chimpanzee lineages … may have occurred millions of years later than fossil bones suggest.” Furthermore, “A new comparison of the human and chimp genomes suggests that after [...]

What child hasn’t played around with the spelling of his or her name — wondering, e.g., how it would sound if it were spelled backward? (I admit that I signed some school papers “Evets Renbud” when I was a kid.) Well, now it seems that at least 4,457 parents last year did the work for [...]

A board member at a suburban Chicago high school is trying to wipe Freakonomics off a required-reading list, along with The Things They Carried, Beloved, and The Awakening. “One part of Freakonomics that raised her ire,” reports the Daily Herald, “hypothesizes that legalized abortion could lower the homicide rate.”