Steven Johnson Answers Your Innovation Questions
Last week, we solicited your questions for Steven Johnson, the author of Where Do Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Your questions were very good, as are his answers, which you’ll find below. (My favorite excerpt: “Governments are teeming with information that’s useful to our lives: information about services they offer, and information that they collect about society at large. But these public institutions are generally terrible at coming up with innovative ways of sharing that information and making it more relevant to people.”) Read More »
When Your House Is Burning Down, How Good Is a Public Good?
What is a public good? An article today describes a house fire in Tennessee, where the firefighters refused to extinguish the fire because the owners hadn’t paid the annual voluntary fee for fire protection. Read More »
Green Noise
Reusable grocery bags may be unsanitary but at least they’re quiet. The same cannot be said for Frito Lay’s new environmentally friendly SunChips bag. The bag is so noisy that the company, after lots of consumer backlash (including Facebook campaigns), is ditching the effort. Read More »
The Year of the … Glove?
There’s always a first. In this case, from the studios of WNYC in New York, it’s the first episode of Freakonomics Radio on American Public Media’s Marketplace. Yes, the Freakonomics podcast has been around for a few months, but now we’re on public-radio stations nationwide, exposing listeners to “the hidden side of everything.” This first Read More »
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