FREAK Shots: The Mystery of the Banana Stand
A reader named William Kearney describes the following mystery, which puzzles him every day. Read More »
Teach for America’s Youth Is Being Served
Teach for America (TFA) recently announced it is receiving $100 million from four philanthropists to start its first endowment. The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, one of the “Big Three” Education philanthropists, pledged the first $25 million, which encouraged matching donations from three others. “A few years ago we embraced the priority of making Teach For America an enduring American institution that can thrive as long as the problem we’re working to address persists,” said Wendy Kopp, the founder of TFA. “I think it’s only appropriate in our country – which aspires to be a place of equal opportunity – that we have an institution which is about our future leaders making good on that promise.” Read More »
Contest: What Do the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers Have in Common?
I mean beside the fact they’re both playing in the Super Bowl this Sunday, or that they’ve both won a bunch of NFL championships, or that they’ve both reached the Super Bowl in recent years as a No. 6 seed. There may be lots of other commonalities I’m not thinking of, but whoever is first to give the answer I am thinking of will get his/her choice of Freakonomics swag, which now includes the just-released Freakonomics movie DVD and a movie poster. Read More »
Mobile Banking Takes Off in Kenya
A new paper by William Jack and Tavneet Suri looks at M-PESA, a mobile-money transfer service in Kenya. Mobile banking has become particularly popular in the developing world, where safe, reliable banking has historically been limited, and often available only to the wealthy. The authors conclude that M-PESA has been wildly successful in Kenya: “We estimate that M-PESA had reached nearly 40 percent of the adult population after a little more than 2 years of operation, and that now, approaching only the fourth anniversary of its launch, is used by more than two-thirds of households.” Read More »
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. 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 