1. The global trade in meteorites. 2. Offshoring pregnancy and birth to India, and helping workers relocate. 3. The chess player who outsmarted JPMorgan. 4. What happens when a company tries truly tr...
A solicitor in Leicester has helped Irish clients escape more than €1bn (£798m) of debt by taking advantage of a booming trade in “bankruptcy tourism”. Data seen by the Guardian reveal St...
The model by Mr. Delpla and Mr. von Weizsäcker , for instance, would let countries put some of their debt — equal to no more than 60 percent of gross domestic product — into so-called blue bonds issu...
Competitors are said to pump air to deliberately inflate the udders before sealing the teats with superglue to stop the air or milk leaking out. The procedure gives the cattle the appearance of havin...
Is it possible that April and May have worsened the trend? There is more here.
Short video from blogger Sinostand of a bike ride in China with interesting material on religion, real estate bubbles and living standards. Hat tip Walter Russell Mead’s blog via Daniel Lippman.
The article is here, or try this link, and it is scary. Here is perhaps the worst bit: Aside from its wealth, the single defining feature of über-Washington is its youth. Most of the people who have ...
That is the title of my latest column, here is one excerpt: We thus face the danger that the euro, the world’s No. 2 reserve currency, could implode. Such an event wouldn’t be just another depreciati...
Paul Krugman draws our attention to the following chart (via Portes): Maybe that really is worrisome. Still, if I look at the longer run chart — which is on p.14 from this pdf — sorry it ...
1. Good website about GMOs. 2. Are CEOs who served in the military more trustworthy? 3. The culture that is India. 4. Prologue to the new Taleb book (pdf). 5. On the imperfections of Dietrich Fischer...
With the eurozone falling apart, and growth in China, India, and Brazil slowing down, which countries remain undervalued? I have a few — and I stress that word few — selections: 1. Philip...
This piece is by me, in The Washington Post. Here is one bit: The key is to hit these restaurants in the “sweet spot” of their cycle of rise and fall. At any point in time Washington probably has fiv...
Nonetheless this story, from the BBC, caught my eye: South Korea says it will increase customs inspections targeting capsules containing powdered human flesh. The Korea Customs Service said it had fo...
1. What word use tells us about blogger personality types. 2. David Leonhardt reviews the new Michael Lind book. 3. Survivorship bias in art price indices. 4. Arnold Kling reviews Edward Conard. 5. H...
From a Rand Paul press release: Today the U.S. Senate voted to pass the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act (S.3187), which included language inserted by Sen. Rand Paul. This langu...
If the California initiative passes, “we will be on our way to getting GE-tainted foods out of our nation’s food supply for good,” Ronnie Cummins, director of the Organic Consumers Association, wrote...
A sex shop in Munich’s main railway station has got special permission to sell condoms, porn DVDs and sexy skin lotion on Sundays after three local judges ruled they were legitimate travel supp...
Last month the International Monetary Fund warned that eurozone banks were likely to embark on massive deleveraging over the following 18 months, to the tune of $2.6tn. Here is more, from Gillian Tet...
This is from Elias Canetti’s memoir, volume three, The Play of the Eyes: When friends had told him that someone had praised The Man Without Qualities to the skies and would be overjoyed to meet...
1. Are used TVs being overpriced? 2. The science of love in the 1920s, from Hugo Gernsback. 3. The dark side of Irving Fisher. 4. New sensory organ discovered in whales. 5. Freakonomics interview on ...
In Modern Principles Tyler and I explain that price floors create wasteful increases in quality. The classic story is the Civil Aeronautics Board’s regulation of airline prices between 1938 and...
Rahul, a loyal MR reader, asks: You seem a very productive person and travel quite a bit too. Are you very cell-phone savvy and does it impact your productivity? Any apps you love or use a lot? (Do y...
With the city’s trapping program a failure, some residents are getting a bigger monkey, a langur, to urinate around their homes. The acrid smell of the urine scares the smaller rhesus monkeys away fo...
You will find it here (pdf).
This is about Washington, D.C.: …hard data always trump anecdotal information, and that emerged from Inrix, which determined that the worst of the worst — the time you least want to be behind t...
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1. Via Chris F. Masse, new solutions to Greek problems, using iPads, and this is coming soon to your Mac, maybe it can patch up Spain. 2. Does self-deception inhibit laughter? 3. Are chimp personalit...
Those results come two weeks to the day after Keith Judd, a convicted felon incarcerated in Texas, won 41 percent of the vote against Obama in the West Virginia primary. There is more here.
Getting lawmakers in the seat of a self-driving Prius has become Google’s M.O., according to Matthew Newton, editor of DriverlessCarHQ.com, a site dedicated to covering autonomous cars. “Google has b...
Noah Smith writes: In Japan, there is no big private equity industry, because it is very difficult to do a leveraged buyout of a company. The Japanese government allows companies to defend themselves...
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