The World’s Most Expensive Photograph
A photograph of a river, some grass, and sky was auctioned at Christie’s in New York last week for a record-setting $4,338,500 to an unknown buyer. “Rhein II,” created in 1999 by German artist Andreas Gursky, beat out Cindy Sherman‘s previous photo auction record of $3.89 million in May, 2011.
We can’t repost an image of it, copyright and what not; though you can see it in the link above. But “Rhein II” measures 6 feet by 11 feet. The picture is one in a series of six photographs – the other five live in museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern. Read More »
What’s Unique About “Kine”?
If you like words even a little bit, you should take advantage of Anu Garg‘s wordsmith.org. It is an idiosyncratic exploration of how language works; his “word a day” e-mail is particularly fun.
The “word a day” theme this week is “words with unusual arrangements of letters.” The first word in this series was “verisimilitude,” which Garg notes has perfectly alternating consonants and vowels. (Not bad, Anu, but my son’s name is even better, as it has perfect consonant-vowel symmetry while using only a single vowel: Solomon. An even longer example is Tunku Varadarajan‘s last name.)
“Verisimilitude” was followed by “syzygy” (“one could hyperpolysyllabically contrive a longer word having four Ys, but syzygy nicely lines up three of them organically in just six letters,” Garg notes) and “yob” (the rare word created by spelling a different word backward).
But today’s word is my favorite. It’s “kine.” Before you click this link, or look the word up elsewhere, try to guess what is unique about it. A slight hint: the answer is related to the topic of this post and, marginally, this one one too. The answer is below. Read More »
High IQ in Children Linked to Drug Use Later in Life
A new British study has found that people who scored well on IQ tests as children are more likely to be drug users as adults, especially women. Authors James White and G. David Batty published their study online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, and looked at data from almost 8,000 people over several decades to test what habits and qualities are tied to drug use.
The results suggest that men with high IQ scores at 5 years-old are 50 percent more likely to use drugs by the age of 30 than those with low IQ scores. High IQ scoring women at 5 years-old are twice as likely to use drugs than their low IQ counterparts. Read More »
Unnatural Turkeys: Full Transcript
This is the full transcript for the Freakonomics Radio Marketplace podcast, “Unnatural Turkeys.”
Kai Ryssdal: Time now for a little Freakonomics Radio. It’s that moment every two weeks where we talk to Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and the blog of the same name. It’s about the hidden side of everything. Dubner, welcome back.
Stephen Dubner: Hey Kai, thanks. I’ve got a little Thanksgiving quiz for you. Are you up for that?
Ryssdal: No, I don’t do quizzes. It’s my show. All right, what?
Dubner: Well, I’m going to force you to.
Ryssdal: All right.
Dubner: All right, here we go. Americans will probably eat about 40 million turkeys this month. Now, I hope this doesn’t kill your appetite, but what percentage of those 40 million birds do you think were the product of artificial insemination? 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 