For the record, I do not hate Wikipedia, as I tried to make clear here. As a showcase of communal knowledge, it is astonishingly interesting and useful. But it is also, alas, a showcase of communal knowledge, which can lead to complications.
There are other issues too. Back in July, Stacy Shiff published a really interesting [...]

This morning’s quiz was almost aggressively simple: name the new non-fiction book that was so mesmerizing that I nearly missed my lunch date. Your answers were, as always, pretty sensible: The Audacity of Hope, Infidel, Wikinomics, Survival of the Sickest, Blind Side, Pistol, The Race Beat, US Guys, Oil on the Brain, Size Matters, [...]

Redfin is a discount real estate brokerage in Seattle that has put together some interesting data analysis from their first year in business.
Their numbers suggest that clients who use their discount brokerage firm pay a lower percent of the list price than the typical home buyer in Seattle (99.329% of the listing price with [...]

I had a lunch meeting in midtown Manhattan the other day, scheduled for 1:00 p.m. When I got out of the subway at Columbus Circle, I realized that I had about 20 minutes to kill. So I went into a Borders bookstore. I picked up a book on the front table, a new non-fiction book, [...]

We received an interesting e-mail not long ago from a gentleman asking if there had been much empirical work done on grief and mourning. His wife had died and he found that he recovered quite readily, but that many others in his situation were severely affected by their grief, to the point that they couldn’t [...]

The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry recently published a paper on the relationship between smoking and post-traumatic stress disorder. This newspaper report on the article starts out okay:“Post-trauma mental health disturbances such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are associated with increased smoking, either by starting to smoke or an increase of tobacco use,” write Dr [...]

Until today, I would have been hard-pressed to answer that one. In today’s New York Times “Inside the List” column they give the answer: Freakonomics and the Dalai Lama’s book “The Art of Happiness” are among the books to stay for the longest period of time on the New York Times bestseller list [...]

Late notice, but: tonight I’ll be appearing on a two-hour John Stossel 20/20 special called “Scared Stiff: Worry in America” (9-11 p.m. EST). I loved the theme of the show when first approached and, when I started to think through what Freakonomics material would be worth talking about, I realized that nearly everything we’ve written [...]

About twice a year I go on a health kick that lasts a few weeks. Typically this involves going for one-mile runs two or three times, doing as many push-ups as I can (about eight) every night, increasing the fiber in my diet, ramping up my carrot juice consumption, and taking whatever health pill [...]

This is new territory as far as I can tell: Planned Parenthood is selling a wireless phone plan so that supporters can contribute directly to the organization with every phone call. This may be even more effective than Pledge-a-Picket. Here’s the Planned Parenthood e-mail pitching the idea:

 
 
Dear Planned Parenthood® Supporter:Is it just us, or [...]

At least in New Yorker cartoons. Because, as explained here, “the tacit assumption … is that the child is not of Polish origin.”

Anyone with even an ounce of Anglophile in them has to appreciate the news out of the U.K. this morning:
1. The U.K. bookmaking shop William Hill is so sure that countrywoman Helen Mirren will win the Oscar for best actress that it has closed its book on Mirren bets, paying out nearly $100,000 in winnings [...]

What happens when officials decide to ban tobacco inside a prison? Exactly what happens when you ban drugs in the outside world.
Here is Gary Becker’s take on the war on drugs, written for a general audience on the Becker-Posner blog.
Roland Fryer, Paul Heaton, Kevin Murphy, and I have written an academic article on the [...]

Barry Bonds’s baseball career, and his life in general, have been equal parts accomplishment and tumult. I won’t rehearse the details here, since anybody who cares at all is already familiar with them. The most interesting question to me is: Now what? It seems quite likely that if Bonds really wants to break Hank Aaron’s [...]

It is stunning to me how the threat of climate change has moved so swiftly from a big, simmering news story to a gigantic, omnipresent news story. One question I hear a lot, however, is this: Does big business care about climate change as much as everyone else?
Judging from the pages of the Wall Street [...]