Music of the Great Recession
What happens when you match two guitar-playing economics students and a deep recession? Recession Sessions, an entire album of economics-themed songs by Ryan Stotland and Kyle Thompson-Westra, a.k.a. The Bull and the Bear. The two met at Tufts and now make music in the “financial folk” genre, with songs including “Central Banker’s Dilemma” and “Main Street Venting Blues.” Here are a few lines from “Dear Fiscal, Love Monetary”:
Read More »We’ll always be the heads of our nation
Can’t you see the way we killed stagflation
I never ever thought that I’d have this much fun
As when I watched you bring the rate down to one
The Neuroscience Behind Sexual Desire: Bring Your Questions for Authors of A Billion Wicked Thoughts
The first researcher to systematically investigate human sexual desire was the Indiana University sociologist Alfred Kinsey, more than 60 years ago. Kinsey spent years surveying people’s sexual habits, interviewing thousands of middle-class Americans in the 1940s and ’50s. But what if all that information had been publicly available? What if you could access the secret sexual behaviors of more than 100 million men and women from around the world?
Today, thanks to the internet, you can.
In what is claimed to be the largest experiment ever, two neuroscience PhDs from Boston University, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, analyzed a billion web searches, a million web sites, a million erotic videos, millions of personal ads, thousands of digital romance novels, and combined it all with cutting-edge neuroscience. Read More »
The Bad Man’s View: Home Robbery as Opportunity
One of the occupational hazards of teaching law is that I often take what Oliver Wendell Holmes called a “bad man’s view” of human motivation (my beloved spouse just told me this is the understatement of the century). Holmes, in his paradigm shifting “The Paths of the Law,” said :
If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.
I find that this cynical tool for legal prediction – which parallels a presumption of narrow economic self-interest – often guides the way I interpret actions and events. 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 