Waiter, There’s a Physicist In My Soup, Part I
Our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast (you can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the link in box at right or read a transcript here) is called “Waiter, There’s a Physicist in My Soup.” It’s the first segment of a two-parter about food and food science; it’s also about why we eat what we eat, and how that may change in the future. The first episode takes a look at the “molecular gastronomy” movement, which gets a big bump in visibility next month with the publication of a mammoth cookbook called Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. Its principal author is Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft who now runs an invention company called Intellectual Ventures. Read More »
How Paul Samuelson Really Got Rich
Over at Economic Principals, David Warsh reveals little-known facts about Paul Samuelson’s acuity as an investor and his involvement in an early hedge fund called Commodities Corp.: “Long famous for the fortune that his pioneering textbook earned him after 1948, it turns out that Samuelson may have made more money as an investor than as an author. He was both smarter and richer than is generally understood: as an investor, a bigger winner, perhaps, than the more volatile John Maynard Keynes.” Read More »
Recycling Strikes Back
I’m back in Germany, the land of serious recycling. We separate much of our excess into bio, packing, paper and everything else (“all the rest, and only that,” as the instructions in our apartment state). Of course, this doesn’t include the three types of glass – white, green and brown – that are to be carried to a set of common receptacles two blocks from our apartment. Read More »
Why Income Inequality Matters
The Economist complements this week’s print issue on rising income inequality with an online forum on the subject. Daron Acemoglu explains why we care about income inequality: “First, people’s well-being may directly depend on inequality, for example, because they view a highly unequal society as unfair or because the utility loss due to low status of the have-nots may be greater than the utility gain due to the higher status of the haves. Second and more importantly, equality of opportunity may be harder to achieve in an unequal society … Third and most importantly, inequality impacts politics. Economic power tends to beget political power even in democratic and pluralistic societies.” Read More »
and 
. If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie features Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and was made by a dream team of documentary directors. Paste Magazine named it one of the 