The Jewish Daily Forward is reporting that more and more non-Jews are calling in the mohel, or ritual circumciser, to have their sons circumcised. The reasons for this include a desire for cleanliness (mohels operate outside of hospitals) and adding a bit of spiritual pizazz, even if the pizazz comes from outside a family’s own [...]

According to the S&P/Case-Shiller index of housing prices, home prices have fallen by about 6 percent in the United States on average over the last twelve months. By my rough calculations, that means that home owners have lost about $720 billion in wealth as a consequence. That is about $2,400 for every person in America, [...]

In recent days, we’ve introduced a pair of regular guest bloggers, Ian Ayres and Sudhir Venkatesh. We are happy and proud to now introduce a third, a terrific addition and no stranger to readers of this blog: Justin Wolfers, an economist at Wharton and a great explorer of everything from racial bias in N.B.A. refereeing [...]

We use our eyes to see, so it seems logical to conjecture that if you didn’t have eyes, you couldn’t see. What I love about science is that these sorts of limiting beliefs routinely get blasted out of the water.
A fascinating series of experiments points out that we see with our brains, not our eyes. [...]

I have blogged repeatedly about the propensity of the media to distort official crime reports to make it appear as if things are getting inexorably worse. (You can see past examples here, here, and here.) Crime has more or less been treading water in the United States over the last few years, although you would [...]

A financial markets outlook for 2008.
The newest trend in Romanian business: eBay scams. (Earlier)
What would Earth look like to aliens?
Want to keep your Web surfing, e-mail and IMs private? Here’s how.

That’s the assertion made by James Heckman and Paul LaFontaine in a new working paper called “The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels.”
Here is their abstract:
This paper uses multiple data sources and a unified methodology to estimate the trends and levels of the U.S. high school graduation rate. Correcting for important biases [...]

Please say hello to a new guest blogger, Sudhir Venkatesh, a professor of sociology and African-American studies at Columbia. You may remember him as the grad student who embedded himself with a Chicago crack gang, which we wrote about in “Freakonomics,” and you may also remember this blog Q&A. On Jan. 10, Venkatesh will publish [...]

A friend of mine went through Naval Officer Candidate School a while back, and I recently stumbled upon an old e-mail he’d sent me that included the following:
It has been eight weeks, and my training class is about to become the “senior class on deck,” which means that we are responsible for running the junior [...]

The art and practice of political data mining. (Hat tip: Chris Masse)
CalTech scientist works to develop more efficient, less costly fuel cell. (Earlier)
Spam made up 90% of e-mails delivered to big companies in November. (Earlier)
LeverageCard.com offers increased options for gift card recipients. (Earlier)

The Harvard economist (and blogger) Greg Mankiw has written an excellent primer on the Federal Reserve’s power to influence the economy, making much of the the fact that the Fed is politically independent and can therefore afford to ignore public sentiment more than politicians can.
His piece got me thinking about what a lot of people [...]

Here’s the latest guest post from Yale economist and law professor Ian Ayres. Here are Ayres’s past posts and here is a recent discussion of standardized tests.
A recent article in the Times trumpeted the results of a report that had just been released by the Educational Testing Service (E.T.S.).
The E.T.S. researchers used four variables [...]

This is the time of year when a lot of people give to charity, in part because of the holidays and in part because of year-end tax considerations.
Below you will find a few loosely connected observations about charity and then, at the end, some questions for all of you. It is probably not fair that [...]

For the last few years I’ve been trying to convince businesses to run experiments in order to learn how to do things better. Why is it that experimentation is the gold standard in science, but rarely exploited in corporations? My own hunch is that the main reason is what economists call “path dependence” — in [...]

E.P.A. denies states’ requests to set their own emissions standards. (Earlier)
Study indicates that insured cancer patients have better chance of survival.
The one place where the Patriots lose: the point spread.
Sellers offered extra incentives to buy in stagnating home market.