Let’s Hear About Your Favorite Football Books
On Tuesday, we shot the latest batch of our “Football Freakonomics” videos for the NFL Network.
This project has been a blast. There are a lot of people involved on the production, research, and digital sides, and they are all high-caliber and fun to work with. Our first two batches of videos were shot in Brooklyn warehouses. But on Tuesday we stepped it up, and got to work in the New York Jets’ indoor practice field out in Florham Park, N.J. (It was an off-day for the team, although there were plenty of players around doing individual workouts.)
I also ran into my old friend Nicky Dawidoff, a wonderful writer whose previous subjects range from ballplayer-spy Moe Berg
FREAK-est Links
1. Fascinating article in Bloomberg Businessweek by Peter Coy about Germany’s half-trillion-dollar loan to the ECB.
2. “I am from the government, and I am here to help you”: Penn social policy dean Richard Gelles on The Third Lie
3. A catalog of wayward SWAT raids: Radley Balko‘s “Another Isolated Incident” posts (HT: Bill).
The Butter Chronicles: Norway Comes Up Short
Norway is in the midst of a butter shortage. Yes, butter.
There are a few explanations: low-carb diets have been popular, and the summer of 2011 wasn’t ideal for dairy. Olav Mellingsater for CNN writes:
A rainy summer reduced the quality of animal feed, decreasing milk production in Norway this year by 20 million liters (5.3 million gallons) compared with the same period last year, the cooperative said.
Stores are currently rationing butter sales, and some entrepreneurial spirits are selling butter online at 30 times the normal cost. There are also some gray market characters emerging from the crisis. CNN reports:
Read More »Authorities detained a Russian citizen Monday who they said was trying to smuggle 90 kilograms (200 pounds) of butter from Germany into Norway. Food safety authorities then warned people not to buy butter from strangers, Norway’s TV2 reported.
A Scientific Argument for Cell-Phone Ban for Drivers
You’ve probably heard by now that the NTSB has recommended that states forbid drivers to use cell phones, whether hands-free or not. Here is a good AP article by Joan Lowy about what is known and not known about phone risk. She makes the excellent point that it’s harder to argue for a ban when highway fatalities keep falling — but that a falling death rate hardly means that cell phone use isn’t dangerous. (Off-topic but not too dissimilar: Americans are losing their taste for the death penalty, theoretically because it’s sometimes applied so haphazardly — but in truth it’s a lot easier to argue against the death penalty when the murder rate has fallen as dramatically as it has.)
In the AP article, Marcel Just of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon, puts in words why phones may cause a particular risk of distraction:
“When someone is speaking your native language, you can’t will yourself to not hear and process it. It just goes in,” Just said. Even if a driver tries to ignore the words, scientists “can see activation in the auditory cortex, in the language areas (of the brain). “
This would also explain why hearing someone else’s cell-phone chatter in public is more annoying than it ought to be.
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 