Your FREAK-quently Asked Questions, Answered
This week’s Freakonomics Radio podcast is a Q&A session in which Levitt and I (mostly Levitt – he’s the smart one) respond to the questions you submitted on this blog a while back. It was a lot of fun to do, and if you don’t hate it, we’ll do it again sometime. Read More »
A Reading List for Stats Fans
Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University, offers some reading suggestions for fans of statistics (no, they are not as numerous as fans of, say, Harry Potter, but still …). Read More »
Are NFL Coaches Starting to Listen to Economists?
Are NFL coaches starting to listen to economists?
My gut feeling is that the answer to that question is almost certainly a resounding “no.” There are at least three pieces of data that hint at the possibility that economists might be making some headway. Read More »
The “Global Implications” of Coffee in Meetings
In stressful meetings, does coffee help or harm the situation? Lindsay St. Claire, Robert C. Hayward and Peter J. Rogers attempted to answer that question in a new study, which is summarized here by the BPS Research Digest: “For two men collaborating or negotiating under stressful circumstances, caffeine consumption was bad news, undermining their performance and confidence. By contrast, for pairs of women, drinking caffeine often had a beneficial effect on these same factors. The researchers can’t be sure, but they think the differential effect of caffeine on men and women may have to do with the fact that women tend to respond to stress in a collaborative, mutually protective style (known as ‘tend and befriend’) whereas men usually exhibit a fight or flight response.” 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 