"Family Values" and the Law: A Guest Post
We previously featured some compelling guest posts by the legal scholar Ethan Leib on the subject of friendship and the law. Now he is back, along with his two co-authors on a new book called Privilege or Punish: Criminal Justice and the Challenge of Family Ties. This is their first of three posts. Read More »
Would You Pay More …
… for a Sanka ashtray if Luc Sante made up a story about it? Apparently at least a few people would, as Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker found when they launched a project called Significant Objects, where they paired up creative writers with objects bought at garage sales and asked them to make up a story about the objects. Each object is for sale on eBay, where anyone can bid for it. Read More »
A SuperFreakonomics Counting Contest
The mother of all deadlines fast approaches: our new book, SuperFreakonomics, is due to be published on October 20. In the meantime, how about a little contest?
Think of it as a guess-the-number-of-jelly-beans-in-a-jar contest except in this case the jar is infinitely expandable, and the jelly beans don’t yet exist. Read More »
Shopping for Gamblers
How can Swoopo, the online auction site, rake in $2,151 selling a laptop for $35.86? Easy: set an opening price of $0.01 (almost free!), then let each new bidder top the last by only a penny, and extend the auction each time someone places a bid in the final seconds. Oh, and collect $0.60 from each player for each bid they place. The winner of the auction might walk away with a good deal, but the losers will have racked up big fees chasing their sunk costs. Read More »
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