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The True Value of Rajon Rondo After going dry for 86 seasons, the Boston Red Sox have won two World Series in the past four years. This hot stretch began [...]

The trouble with negative externalities Americans drive too much. This isn't a political or moral argument; it's an economic one. How so? Because there are all sorts of costs associated [...]

The 'Soccer Boy' Effect Brian Mullaney's epiphany occurred back in 1994 in Vietnam. He was traveling as a board member with Operation Smile, a charity that performed cleft-repair surgery on [...]

The Case of the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker One year from today, a new president moves into the White House. This president will be eager to carry out any number of plans [...]

Bariatric Surgery Deborah Kattler Kupetz is a Los Angeles businesswoman and mother of three who tries to watch her weight. That's why she recently bought two lifelike plastic models of [...]

Nuclear Energy If you were asked to name the biggest global-warming villains of the past 30 years, here's one name that probably wouldn't spring to mind: Jane Fonda. But should [...]

The Cash-Back Mortgage Imagine for a moment that you are looking to buy a first home for yourself, your spouse and your 1-year-old darling. Now imagine that you are doing [...]

The $140 Homemade Scarf During the late 19th century, piano manufacturing was one of New York City's largest industries. Every right-minded American family, it seemed, wanted to fill its home [...]

Counting the Cost of a 'Chargeback' Steven Peisner stabbed excitedly at his computer keyboard, trolling through a chat room where identity fraudsters buy and sell names, addresses, Social Security numbers [...]

Best Buys $16 Million Windfall What do a gym membership, a bottle of prescription pills and a holiday gift card have in common? Each of them is a thing that [...]

The famous old quip about the weather -- everyone talks about it but nobody does anything about it -- is not as true as it once was. Alarmed by the [...]

The Petri-Dish Screen Saver Leon Bender is a 68-year-old urologist in Los Angeles. Last year, during a South Seas cruise with his wife, Bender noticed something interesting: passengers who went [...]

Weighing the Repugnance Factor How's this for a repugnant situation? Take someone you love, perhaps your spouse or your sibling, and find a stranger who will accept a really big [...]

Mr. Szilagyi's Billion-Dollar Idea This is the time of year when American citizens inevitably think about the Internal Revenue Service and, also inevitably, about how deeply they hate it. But [...]

The Boston-Minneapolis Hypothesis It is hard to think of an occupation that garners less goodwill these days than the real-estate agent. More often than not, agents are portrayed as hustlers [...]

Calculating a Driver's Risk Five years ago this weekend, Dale Earnhardt crashed into a wall during the final lap of the Daytona 500 and was instantly killed. One of the [...]

Information Asymmetries Our book ''Freakonomics'' includes a chapter titled ''How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?'' This chapter was our effort to bring to life [...]

Analyzing a Sex Survey What is a price? Unless you're an economist, you probably think of a price as simply the amount you pay for a given thing -- the [...]

A Swiss Turnout-Boosting Experiment Within the economics departments at certain universities, there is a famous but probably apocryphal story about two world-class economists who run into each other at the [...]

The DNA of Dog Dirt Twenty-five hundred tons. That's how much manure was produced every day by the 200,000 horses that moved people and goods around New York City in [...]

The Accidental Diet Seth Roberts is a 52-year-old psychology professor at the University of California at Berkeley. If you knew Roberts 25 years ago, you might remember him as a [...]

Developing a Crack Index If you rely on the news media for your information, you probably think that crack cocaine is a thing of the past. If you rely on [...]

A Car-Seat Crash Test On a recent Monday morning, nearly 20 police officers gathered in Clarkstown, N.Y., for a four-day seminar. They had assembled to fight one of modernity's great [...]

Keith Chen's Monkey Research Adam Smith, the founder of classical economics, was certain that humankind's knack for monetary exchange belonged to humankind alone. ''Nobody ever saw a dog make a [...]

Once upon a time, Paul F. dreamed big dreams. While studying agricultural economics at Cornell, he wanted to end world hunger. Instead, after doctoral work at M.I.T., he wound up [...]

Imagine for a moment that a terrible, unforeseen threat to humankind had suddenly arisen, one so grave that it endangered the very future of the planet. Two teams of respected [...]