In 2003, a young American woman in London studying for her PhD. ran into money trouble. To support herself while writing her thesis, she joined an escort service. Under the assumed name Belle de Jour, she started to blog her experiences. That blog led to a series of successful, jaunty memoirs beginn ... Read more

A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into an economics lab. Which one is most likely to increase contributions to the public good? ... Read the full post ... Read more

"What makes hate tick? How can we stop it?" These are the questions that Jim Mohr, director of Gonzaga University's Institute for Action Against Hate, asks himself every day as he develops a new field of study around hate. Mohr believes that despite all the devastating examples of hate in the world, ... Read more

When blog reader Kyle contacted us with his story of how thinking "freakonomically" first netted - then lost - him significant amounts of incremental income, we had what we'd call an "aha moment," if Oprah hadn't apparently patented that phrase. Here's Kyle's story - and if you have a tale of "appl ... Read more

It's well-established that domestic violence is bad for the children directly exposed to it (and possibly their classmates as well) but experts still debate the drivers of family violence. Economists have traditionally characterized violence as a signal to outside parties or as part of an incentive ... Read more

Each week, I've been inviting readers to submit quotations for which they want me to try to trace the origin, using The Yale Book of Quotations and my own research. Here is the latest round: ... Read the full post ... Read more

Nathan Myhrvold is the Intellectual Ventures chieftain we wrote about in SuperFreakonomics; I.V. has plans to thwart, inter alia, hurricanes, malaria, and global warming. (He has also written for this blog occasionally.) Now he has let The N.Y. Times into his kitchen. It is not like any other kitche ... Read more

Four of the 26 students in my Economics of Life class proposed delaying submitting their draft term project reports by one week. I emailed the whole class and gave them one day to let me know if they disapproved of this postponement. The question was how heavily to weight the negatives -- those who ... Read more

Newsweek is running an online retrospective of the new millennium's first decade. My favorite section to date is the "Overblown Fears" list. Here they are, in order: 1. Y2K 2. Shoe Bombs 3. Vaccines Cause Autism 4. Immigrants 5. Bloggers 6. SARS, Mad Cow, Bird Flu 7. Web Predators 8. Teen Oral Sex ... Read more

If you missed Levitt and Dubner on their U.K. SuperFreakonomics tour, a podcast of their lecture at the London School of Economics is now online. So are their interviews with Reuters TV, Channel 4, and Telegraph TV, as is the BBC's piece on how SuperFreakonomics fits into the David Cameron book club ... Read more