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OCTOBER 27, 2009, 4:05 PM

Pray for Me: I’m Going on The Daily Show Tonight

By STEVEN D. LEVITT

The first time I went on The Daily Show, nearly five years ago, I dreaded it for weeks in advance. I had a terrible fear of going on TV and had avoided it scrupulously, even in publicizing our first book. When Jon Stewart came knocking, however, it was impossible to come up with a credible reason to give the publisher as to why I couldn’t do it. I had no choice.

I survived.

Then we made the mistake of writing a second book.

Now I have to go do The Daily Show again, and tonight is the night.

I don’t fear going on TV the way I used to, although I’m still pretty bad at it.

I had even convinced myself that it couldn’t go that badly, could it? Then I made the mistake of watching this Jon Stewart interview with Jim Cramer.

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OCTOBER 27, 2009, 11:01 AM

What the Secretary of Transportation Has to Say About My Car Seat Research

By STEVEN D. LEVITT

On his blog, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood dismisses my research (see here and here) on car seats.

My favorite quote from the secretary:

“Now, if you want to slice up the data to be provocative, have at it. As a grandfather and as secretary of an agency whose number one mission is safety, I don’t have that luxury.”

Reading the Secretary’s blog post, it strikes me just how differently he is reacting to a challenge than Arne Duncan (now the Secretary of Education) did when I first told him about my work on teacher cheating when Duncan was in charge of the Chicago Public Schools. I expected Duncan to do what LaHood did: dismiss the findings, circle the wagons, etc. But Duncan surprised me. He said that all he cared about was making sure the children were learning as much as possible, and teacher cheating was getting in the way of that. He invited me into a dialogue, and we ultimately made a difference.

Here’s what LaHood might have written on his blog if the ultimate goal is really child safety:

“For a long time we’ve been relying on car seats to keep our children safe. The existing academic literature up until recently confirmed the view that car seats are very successful in that goal. But in a series of papers in peer-reviewed journals, Steven Levitt and his co-authors have challenged that view using three different data sets collected by the Department of Transportation, as well as other data sets. I’m no data expert, and I have an agency to run, so I don’t have the luxury of analyzing the data myself. But I am a grandfather and my agency’s number one mission is safety, so I’ve asked the researchers in my agency to do the following:

1. Take a close look at the data sets we collect here in my agency, which are the basis for Levitt’s work. Is it really the case that in these data there is little or no evidence that car seats outperform adult seat belts in protecting children ages 2 and up? Our benchmark for measuring the effectiveness of car seats has always been versus children who are unrestrained. Maybe we need to rethink this going forward?

2. Demand that the physicians at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who have repeatedly found that car seats work, make their data publicly available. It is my understanding that these physicians have refused to share their data with Levitt, but in the interest of getting to the truth, other researchers should have the chance to review what they have done.

3. Carry out a series of tests using crash-test dummies to determine whether adult seat belts do indeed pass all government crash-test requirements. In SuperFreakonomics, Levitt and Dubner report on their findings with a very small sample of tests; we need much more evidence on the data.

4. Try to understand why, even after 30 years, the great majority of car seats are still not properly installed. After all this time, can we really blame it on the parents, or should the blame be put elsewhere?

5. After exploring all these issues, let’s figure out the truth, and let’s use it to guide public policy.

And if Secretary LaHood has any interest in pursuing any of these avenues, I stand at the ready to offer whatever help that I can.

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OCTOBER 27, 2009, 9:44 AM

What Are People Saying About SuperFreakonomics?

By FREAKONOMICS

Here’s a sampling of the latest coverage:

Reviews

- Wall Street Journal: “Not only a book with mind-blowing ideas, innovative research, and quality investigative journalism, it’s also a story about creativity and what it takes to get the mindset to turn conventional concepts upside down.”

- The Telegraph: “Levitt and Dubner’s zeal for statistical anomalies is as undimmed as their eye for a good story.”

- BusinessWeek: “The strength of this book, as of the original, is in how it applies the time-tested tools of economics in unusual places to turn up surprising conclusions.”

- Hindustan Times: “Do read this book — even if you don’t take all its conclusions seriously.”

Features

- Portfolio took a peek inside Freakonomics, Inc.

- The St. Petersburg Times quizzed Dubner about “the book you can’t take home to mother.”

- Levitt let Newsweek in on a little secret: “If you get a college kid in a lab, you can get that student to do just about anything you want.”

- Talking to the Toronto Star, Dubner concedes that some people will see the prostitution chapter in SuperFreakonomics “as a sex story,” but that he sees it “more as a wage story — any time you can kind of explain the way wages move up and down, you’re learning a lot about society.”

- For those who missed Levitt and Dubner’s joint appearance at Symphony Space in New York, there’s this solid recap of the event.

And if you want to read an unabashed pan of the book, it’s hard to do better than this Guardian review, which says that SuperFreakonomics has “very little of the charm or the originality” of Freakonomics.

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OCTOBER 26, 2009, 3:42 PM

A SuperFreakonomics Quiz: Name This University of Chicago Alum

By STEVEN D. LEVITT

I ran into someone the other day whom I had never met and who fit the following five criteria:

1. He/she attended the University of Chicago.
2. He/she is still alive.
3. He/she is a whole lot smarter than I am.
4. He/she is a whole lot more famous than I am.
5. He/she is even more controversial/notorious than I am.

There a lot of people who satisfy many of these criteria (especially #2 and #3), but I think the set of folks who satisfy all five of these criteria is not very large.

SuperFreakonomics schwag to the first blog commenter to correctly identify this person.

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OCTOBER 26, 2009, 2:32 PM

iPhone Altruism for Potential Organ Donors

By FREAKONOMICS

Organ donation is one of the most altruistic things a person can do. And yet, as Chapter 3 of SuperFreakonomics spells out, relying on altruism for organ donations has proved to be largely unsuccessful. There are a lot of reasons people give for not signing up as organ donors. Often, they just fail to opt in because of laziness or forgetfulness. So Richard Thaler had an idea. Why not build an iPhone app to help people enlist as organ donors? That app, developed gratis, is available now. As to the question of our inherent level of altruism, which app do you predict will get more downloads over all: the one that helps people make a life-saving donation — or the one that helps them pick the right urinal?

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OCTOBER 26, 2009, 1:13 PM

Adderall Speculation

By DANIEL HAMERMESH

Students apparently consume mass quantities of the performance-enhancing drug Adderall during exam time. Normally the price is $3 for 10 mg, but it rises during exam week to at least $5.

One student reports that in his suburban Dallas hometown, drug dealers, realizing this price variation, speculated by buying up large supplies of the drug at $3 and dumping them on the market during exam time, hoping to sell at $5.

They didn’t realize that this large increase in supply would cause the price to drop below $5. Indeed, so many dealers engaged in speculation that there was a surplus at the usual equilibrium price of $3. Students were able to buy the drug for only $2 as dealers sold off their excess supply. One imagines that the dealers were less enthusiastic about speculation the next year and that the exam-week price stayed above $3. (HT: AM)

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OCTOBER 26, 2009, 10:32 AM

Looking to Blog Readers for Good Ideas to Reduce Teen Shootings

By STEVEN D. LEVITT

In the wake of the national publicity that accompanied the beating death of Chicago Public Schools student Derrion Albert, the issue of teen violence has come to the fore.

Violence toward students in the Chicago Public Schools is, however, neither new nor rare. Between September 2007 and December 2008, more than 500 Chicago Public school students were shot. Doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations, I’m guessing about 1 in 100 African-American male high school students gets shot each year in Chicago. Among the kids who have dropped out, no doubt the rate is much higher.

Back when he ran the Chicago Public Schools, current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan argued repeatedly and passionately that something needed to be done on this issue, but — and there is a lesson here — he couldn’t attract even a fraction of the attention generated by a YouTube video.

Now there appears to be the political will to try to address the problem, and I might be afforded the opportunity to play some small role in the process.

But how do we reduce the violence? The political reality is that any strategy has to reduce violence quickly. While early intervention into the lives of young children might lower future violence, more is needed in this setting. Shootings need to be reduced now.

I had a number of ideas, but after spending some time talking with a group of Black Soul gang members with the help of one of my heroes, Arloa Sutter, I’m not convinced that any of my approaches can work. The best quote of the day went to one of the older gang members: “If Li’l Wayne would rap the times table, that’s what they’d be doing.” By that he meant that the young kids follow whatever lead the hip-hop stars set. I don’t actually completely believe it, but I like the quote.

Thus, I turn to you, the blog readers. Assuming that you had access to some resources, what approach would you take to try to address this problem? Dare to be creative. Most of the obvious things have already been tried and largely failed. We desperately need fresh ideas.

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OCTOBER 26, 2009, 9:37 AM

A Very Renewable Energy Source

By FREAKONOMICS

Faced with a plague of rabbits, some wild and some abandoned pets, the city of Stockholm is pursuing a unique pest-control strategy. The city is hunting, deep-freezing, and shipping the rabbits to a heating plant in central Sweden where they’re processed for fuel. Three thousand rabbits have been culled this year. (Side question: how well do rabbits climb musical stairs?) Sweden’s Society for the Protection of Wild Rabbits objects to the policy: “Those who support the culling of rabbits surely think it’s good to use the bodies for a good cause. But it feels like they’re trying to turn the animals into an industry rather than look at the main problem.” We haven’t heard about any rabbit infestations in the U.S., but if this report is true, we foresee a “green” solution to our Lyme disease problem. (HT: FP Passport)

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OCTOBER 23, 2009, 4:05 PM

The SuperFreakonomics Global-Warming Fact Quiz

By STEVEN D. LEVITT

By the time you finish this blog post, you will understand why we differ from our critics in our conclusions.

As we write in SuperFreakonomics, there are many misconceptions about the facts surrounding global warming. Take the following true/false quiz to test your knowledge of the science, economics, and technology of global warming.

Global-warming science questions:

1. The Earth has gotten substantially warmer over the past 100 years.

TRUE / FALSE

2. Even if we were to immediately and permanently stabilize our carbon emissions at the current levels, or even cut these emissions substantially, climate models predict that Earth will continue to get warmer for decades.

TRUE / FALSE

3. When Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it spewed millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Scientists believe that the haze generated by the eruption reflected some of the Sun’s light, causing the Earth’s temperature to temporarily drop as a consequence.

TRUE / FALSE

4. Because the half-life of sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere is relatively short (on the order of one year), the cooling effects of the Mt. Pinatubo eruption faded within a few years.

TRUE / FALSE

5. Dark surfaces absorb more sunlight than light surfaces. Thus, all else equal, light surfaces cause less global warming because more of the sunlight that strikes these surfaces is reflected back into space.

TRUE / FALSE

6. Clouds, which are white or gray, are lighter in color than the oceans, which are blue.

TRUE / FALSE

The correct answer to all six of these questions, we believe, is “TRUE.” You can see our chapter on global warming (pp. 165-209) and particularly the endnotes (pp. 247-256) for citations and elaboration. It is our impression that none of the six scientific statements above is at all controversial among climate scientists. I do not believe that any of our global-warming critics would quibble with any of these facts.

And just to be perfectly clear, despite all the bluster that has surrounded our chapter on global warming, these are the six scientific facts that are critical to our analysis of geo-engineering in that chapter, a point I will expand upon below. We document many other interesting facts in the chapter, but these are the only ones that are central to our argument.

It is simply not the case that criticisms of the geo-engineering solutions that we highlight in the chapter arise because we get the scientific facts wrong, unless the critics think that any of the six statements above are false.

So let’s move on to the economic issues surrounding global warming, and let’s see if that is where we differ from the critics in our assumptions.

Global warming economics questions:

1. If the Earth’s warming leads to global catastrophe, that would be a really bad outcome.

TRUE / FALSE

2. Even when there is enormous uncertainty about the likelihood of future cataclysms, it makes sense to invest now in finding ways to avoid such cataclysms.

TRUE / FALSE

3. Economists estimate that the costs of reducing carbon emissions are likely to be upwards of $1 trillion per year.

TRUE / FALSE

The correct answer to all three of these economic questions is “TRUE.” These are the three key economic facts that are critical to the arguments in our chapter. The first question doesn’t require any further explanation. The answer to the second question has been hammered home by Martin Weitzman’s work in the area, which we cite in SuperFreakonomics, as well as a newer paper that Weitzman has written. The third fact is based on the analysis of Nicholas Stern. These cost estimates are obviously highly speculative, but the true cost of reducing carbon emissions is likely to be within two orders of magnitude of this number.

As far as I know, none of our critics would disagree with any of these three economic facts about global warming. Indeed, Paul Krugman’s attack of our chapter largely focuses on the misconception that we do not agree with fact No. 2, when clearly we do. Somehow Krugman has come to the conclusion that we are in favor of inaction, missing the main point of the chapter, which is that we think immediate and aggressive action is warranted, in the form of investment in (or implementation of) geoengineering solutions. Perhaps Krugman does not consider those steps taking action.

So if there is no disagreement on either the six key scientific facts or the three key economic facts, where is the disagreement coming from?

Perhaps it is coming from a lack of agreement over technological facts.

Global warming technological questions:

1. There exists an engineering design that provides a means of delivering enough sulfur dioxide to the stratosphere on a continuous basis to effectively cool the Earth. The estimated cost of building and implementing this technology is a few hundred million dollars.

TRUE / FALSE

2. There exists an engineering design that provides a means of increasing oceanic cloud cover by seeding such clouds with salt-water that is sprayed into the air by a fleet of solar powered dinghies. The estimated cost of building and implementing this technology is a few hundred million dollars.

TRUE / FALSE

The answer to these questions is once again “TRUE.” As we describe in SuperFreakonomics, the Seattle-based company Intellectual Ventures has designs for both a “stratoshield” (No. 1) and the cloud-seeding project (No. 2).

I don’t see how the critics could argue with the answers to those two questions. They might argue that the technology won’t work as Intellectual Ventures hopes it will, but there is no arguing with the fact that Intellectual Ventures has the blueprints to try to build these contraptions, and could have them up and working within a year or two.

With all of this as preamble, let’s get to the fundamental question we try to answer in the chapter:

If we need to cool the Earth in a hurry, what is the best way to do it?

Our answer to that question follows directly from the three sets of facts I presented above. Reducing carbon emissions is not a great way of cooling the Earth in a hurry for two key reasons: (1) even if we cut carbon emissions today, the Earth will continue warming for decades; and (2) reducing carbon emissions is expensive, with a price tag of at least $1 trillion per year. (There is a third problem with reducing carbon emissions, which is that it requires worldwide behavioral change, which will be hard to achieve. But even beyond that, carbon mitigation is not a great solution to the question posed above. There might be other significant benefits tor reducing carbon emissions — addressing ocean acidification, for instance.)

A much better approach, we conclude, is geoengineering. The scientific evidence suggests that either the stratoshield or increased oceanic clouds would have a large and immediate impact on cooling the Earth, unlike carbon-emission reductions. The cost of these solutions is trivial compared to the cost of lowering carbon emissions — literally thousands of times cheaper! Perhaps best of all, if something goes wrong and we decide we don’t like the results of the stratoshield or the oceanic clouds, we can stop the programs immediately and any effects will quickly disappear. These two geo-engineering solutions are completely reversible. Given the huge costs of global cataclysm and how cheap the solutions are, it would be crazy not to move forward with geoengineering research in order to have these solutions ready to go in case we decide we need to cool the Earth.

Why then, are our our conclusions so radically different from those of our critics? The answer:

We are answering a different question than our critics.

Our question, at noted above, is what is the cheapest, fastest way to quickly cool the Earth. Like every question we tackle in Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics, we approach the question like economists, using data and logic to conclude that the answer to that question is geo-engineering. Not coincidentally, almost every economist who has asked the same question has come to the same conclusion, including Martin Weitzman and the economists at the Copenhagen Consensus.

But that is not the question that Al Gore and the climate scientists are trying to answer. The sorts of questions they tend to ask are “What is the ‘right’ amount of carbon to emit?” or “Is it moral for this generation to put carbon into the air when future generations will pay the price?” or “What are the responsibilities of humankind to the planet?”

Unlike the question that we are asking — How can we most efficiently cool the Earth fast? — the types of questions that environmentalists are trying to answer mix together both scientific issues and moral/ethical issues. If you have any doubts about this, watch Al Gore’s movie, in which he says explicitly that reducing carbon emissions is not a political issue, but a moral issue.

That is why someone like Ken Caldeira can agree with the facts presented in our chapter, say that the chapter is written in good faith, but still disagree with the conclusion that geoengineering is the answer. It is because the question Ken Caldeira is trying to answer is not the question we are trying to answer. The same is true of our critics. But instead of just making this simple point — that we are asking different questions — the critics have either intentionally or unintentionally confused the issues by making all sorts of extraneous arguments.

I do not mean to imply that the question we answer in the book is the most important question. It may be that the questions that environmentalists are trying to ask are more important and more interesting, but that certainly does not mean that we don’t want to know the answer to our question, a question that the environmentalists don’t bother to ask very often because they are focused on their more philosophical questions.

So for all the blogosphere shouting against our chapter, I have to be honest and say that I just don’t get it. I can’t understand why any environmentalist who really cares about the Earth’s future could say with a straight face that geoengineering doesn’t deserve a seat at the table as the global-warming debate heats up.

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OCTOBER 23, 2009, 2:43 PM

Tonight, 20/20 Gets SuperFreaky

By FREAKONOMICS

Tonight, ABC’s 20/20 devotes a full hour to SuperFreakonomics. The show’s five segments can be previewed online: handwashing in hospitals, the effectiveness of car seats, how practice trumps talent, the dirty truth about altruism, and last, but very much not least, the problems with global warming.

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OCTOBER 23, 2009, 2:00 PM

Will There Be Snow in Moscow This Winter?

By STEVEN D. LEVITT

Not if the mayor of Moscow Yury Luzhkov has his way. According to Simon Shuster at TIME magazine,

For just a few million dollars, the mayor’s office will hire the Russian Air Force to spray a fine chemical mist over the clouds before they reach the capital, forcing them to dump their snow outside the city. Authorities say this will be a boon for Moscow, which is typically covered with a blanket of snow from November to March. Road crews won’t need to constantly clear the streets, and traffic — and quality of life — will undoubtedly improve.

Luzhkov’s plan raises fascinating scientific, economic, and ethical questions.

The first question is will the plan work? As we note in SuperFreakonomics, cloud-seeding has a long history, dating at least back to the late 1940’s when three General Electric employees had some success with putting silver iodide into clouds. One of those scientists was named Bernard Vonnegut. The public relations manager on the project was his little brother, Kurt, who eventually went on to write some books. Nonetheless, controlling the weather is no easy task.

From an economic perspective, the plan highlights what economists call externalities, i.e., when one party’s actions impose costs on another party without that second party’s permission. The article suggests that much of the snow that would have fallen on Moscow will instead end up in Moscow’s suburbs.

From an efficiency perspective, it probably does make sense to move snow out of very densely populated areas with a great deal of vehicle traffic. The extra snow will make life harder for snowbound suburbanites, however. One solution would be to have Moscow compensate the suburban residents for the extra snow. Alternatively, if it turned out that the costs to the suburb dwellers exceeded the benefits to the Muscovites (and if transaction/coordination costs were small enough), the suburbs could band together and pay Moscow (or maybe it would be cheaper to simply bribe Luzhkov directly) not to carry out the plan. Or maybe the Russian Air Force is skilled enough to make the snow fall in places where no one lives.

From an ethical perspective, the plan raises many of the same issues that the world will likely face as geoengineering comes to the forefront. No doubt, the idea of human intervention to influence where snow falls will strike many as repugnant. I wonder if the same set of emotions were present when rivers were being dammed or land was being reclaimed from the sea in places like the Netherlands? Or is this a uniquely modern reaction?

Certainly, repugnance over affecting local environments is context-specific. When I was growing up in Minneapolis, the local government implemented some technological solutions that dramatically reduced the number of mosquitoes in the city. Our backyard, which up until that time had been too mosquito-infested to use, became my favorite place to practice my golf game. I can’t remember anyone ever complaining about that particular application of technology, except my mother, and that was only because I ruined the grass in the backyard by taking so many divots.

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OCTOBER 23, 2009, 12:27 PM

The Quantified Life

By FREAKONOMICS

You know yourself pretty well. But what if a lot of your ideas about yourself — what makes you happy, healthy, and whole — turned out to be wrong? And how would you even find out? You’d probably start by becoming a self-tracker, piling up all kinds of data on your daily life. Then you’d analyze that data, and maybe you’d find that coffee doesn’t help you concentrate after all and that your sleep patterns aren’t correlated to your happiness. You’d almost certainly read The Quantified Life, a blog on self-tracking and self-experimentation. Seth Roberts, the self-experimenter Dubner and Levitt wrote about in 2005, makes frequent appearances.

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OCTOBER 23, 2009, 11:12 AM

Naming the Child

By STEVEN D. LEVITT

My son Andrew died exactly ten years ago today, October 23, 1999, nine days after his first birthday. No one would describe me as emotional. And yet the wound still remains remarkably raw.

Andrew’s short life isn’t a frequent conversation any more, except inside our family, because there is nothing new to talk about. When parents talk about children, it is almost always about how they are changing. Andrew, however, is forever our one-year-old.

Unfortunately for me, memories seem to fade faster than the sense of loss. For my wife, neither the memories nor the pain have faded. I know my wife’s memories remain vivid because they are beautifully captured in a recent book by Jenny Schroedel called Naming the Child: Hope-filled Reflections on Miscarriage, Stillbirth, and Infant Death. In the book, she recounts the experiences of a number of families who suffered losses like ours. Reading the book, I am amazed at all the things I have forgotten about both Andrew’s life and death.

The title of the book comes from a quote by one of the women who was interviewed who had an ectopic pregnancy: “Naming an unborn child is a powerful thing. It is a way to acknowledge to the world what God already knows. A way to say ‘life is precious — this life is precious.’”

This is not the sort of book you read for fun at the beach, but if you know someone who recently miscarried or lost a young child, I highly recommend it.

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OCTOBER 23, 2009, 10:00 AM

Pay What You Can Afford?

By FREAKONOMICS

The makers of World of Goo, a “physics-based puzzle game,” let customers pay what they wanted for the game — which normally sells at $20 — and a week after the offer, 57,000 people bought the game, bringing in over $100,000 in sales. A survey taken by some of the customers on the game’s website reveals the top two reasons customers chose to pay what they did: It’s all they felt they could afford, and they wanted to support the PWYW model. Few paid the amount they thought the game was actually worth. More analysis here.

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OCTOBER 22, 2009, 5:08 PM

Quotes Uncovered: Playing Cards With Doc and Eating at Mom’s

By FRED SHAPIRO

Quotes Uncovered

Here are more quote authors and origins Shapiro’s tracked down recently.

- Who First Talked About Skinning Cats?

- Big Government and Peculiarities

- Heaven on Earth and Third-World

A while back, I invited readers to submit quotations for which they wanted me to try to trace the origins, using The Yale Book of Quotations and more recent research by me. Hundreds of people have responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a few per week.

Casey Frank asked:

[Who said] “England and America are two countries separated by a common language”?

The Yale Book of Quotations has the following two quotes:

“England and America are two countries separated by the same language.” Attributed to George Bernard Shaw in Reader’s Digest, November 1942.

“We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.” Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost (1887).

Grant asked:

I’ve been trying to find a source for the following: “Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.” It’s often attributed to Goethe or Hugo.

The Yale Book of Quotations, which attempts to trace all famous quotations to their earliest findable sources, has this:

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” Daniel Burnham, quoted in Collier’s, July 6, 1912.

Burnham was a prominent architect.

JJG asked:

There’s an advice triad, where the third line gets altered to fit the circumstance, but the first two are:

“Never play cards with a man called Doc,
Never eat at a place called Mom’s,
and never …”

Do you know the origin?

Yes, I do. The YBQ cites it thusly:

“Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are greater than your own.” Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side (1956).

Do any readers have any other quotations whose origins they would like me to attempt to trace?

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This article was downloaded by calibre from http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/quotes-uncovered-playing-cards-with-doc-and-eating-at-moms/

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Table of Contents

Pray for Me: I'm Going on The Daily Show Tonight

What the Secretary of Transportation Has to Say About My Car Seat Research

What Are People Saying About SuperFreakonomics?

A SuperFreakonomics Quiz: Name This University of Chicago Alum

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Adderall Speculation

Looking to Blog Readers for Good Ideas to Reduce Teen Shootings

A Very Renewable Energy Source

The SuperFreakonomics Global-Warming Fact Quiz

Tonight, 20/20 Gets SuperFreaky

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The Quantified Life

Naming the Child

Pay What You Can Afford?

Quotes Uncovered: Playing Cards With Doc and Eating at Mom's