From a reader named Kevin O’Toole comes a bleg that needs input from people with experience in the realms of running, races, and maybe Olympic competition. (We tussled with Olympic medal counts here; and Justin Wolfers harnessed your collective wisdom when he ran the Stockholm Marathon.) Here’s Kevin’s story:
For the past few years, I’ve had [...]

A business exec told me that he thinks of consulting firms a bit like Charlie Sheen thinks about prostitutes. When I asked him to explain, he said that when Sheen was being sentenced for using a prostitute, the judge asked him why a man like him would have to pay for sex. And Sheen reportedly [...]

New York magazine, riffing on Drew Barrymore’s starring role in the film adaptation of He’s Just Not That Into You, suggests 10 other self-help books that should be Barrymore vehicles, including Freakonomics:
Drew Barrymore stars as a free-spirited Northwestern economics grad student who ventures into the Cabrini Green projects on the south side of Chicago to [...]

Over the past few months, the press has deluged Americans with weepy stories about people who are in danger of losing their houses because their sub-prime mortgages now exceed the value of their houses, which the recession and the popping of housing bubbles have caused to drop.
I am sympathetic; and I, and other [...]

We at U.C.L.A. hear from reporters a lot, and they are often looking for a few quotes to help write a familiar script. In it, Los Angeles is cast in the role of the nation’s transportation dystopia: a sprawling, smog-choked, auto-obsessed spaghetti bowl of freeways which meander from one bland suburban destination to the next. The heroes of the picture are cities like San Francisco, or especially New York, which are said to have created vastly more livable urban forms based on density and mass transit.

A reader named Joel Margolese of Andover, Mass., while on holiday vacation in Boca Raton, Fla., wrote the following:

Doing the annual pilgrimage to South Florida this holiday season, we’ve all been struck by how
everywhere seems to be more crowded than usual. Parks, beaches, even stores are jammed. We could barely find a parking space at our favorite park, which is usually empty.

Three weeks ago, I invited readers to submit quotations for which they wanted me to try to trace the origins, using The Yale Book of Quotations and more recent research by me. Dozens responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a couple per week.
Mark C asks:
I’d love to see a [...]

The gloves are definitely coming off. This piece by Chicago economist John Cochrane and another by Chicago’s Eugene Fama get under the skin of Brad DeLong and lead Paul Krugman to denounce Cochrane and Fama as barbarians.

Despite NBC banning sexually explicit ad content from the Super Bowl broadcast, Comcast customers in parts of Tuscon were exposed to about 30 seconds of a pornographic film which interrupted Comcast’s Super Bowl coverage on Sunday.
According to The Huffington Post, Comcast suspects the work of hackers.
The company is paying each of its affected [...]

Simon Rogers moved to New York from London when he was 28 to begin his modeling career. About two years ago, he created UglyNY, a talent and modeling agency affiliated with Ugly in London, which is run by a friend. You’ll see photos of his clients throughout the rest of this post.

As Rogers once told The New York Times, UglyNY serves the market for “great-looking people, people who’ve really been hit with the ugly stick, and everything in between.” UglyNY’s recent clients include Clairol, Walmart, and Vanity Fair. Demand for “real people,” Rogers says, is growing — in part because of the influences of reality TV, MySpace, etc. Plus they are often cheaper.

In Freakonomics we poke fun at “experts” — folks who go around speaking with great authority about topics they don’t actually know that much about.
I can be criticized for a lot of things since Freakonomics came out, but one thing that I have been pretty good at is not masquerading as an expert on topics [...]

An article in The Economist reports that “the lipstick index,” the theory that women buy more lipstick in tough economic times, is probably not valid.
A better index might instead be hairstyles. As The Independent reports, Japanese researchers found that women tend to have longer hairstyles when the economy is doing well, and shorter styles [...]

NPR reported last month that, for the first time in five years, the U.S. Army had more than met its recruiting goals.
This happens every time unemployment rises, and it should be absolutely no surprise. People choose military service after high school partly out of a desire to serve the country; but there is strong evidence [...]

My colleague Luigi Zingales has some words of wisdom for the incoming Treasury secretary.

So today is a two-fer: both Tom Daschle and Nancy Killefer will not be joining the Obama administration, as planned, as Health and Human Services secretary and chief performance officer, respectively. They were both undone by failure to pay taxes.