Yes I saw the counts today on the breakfast menu in New York City.  Being a silly man, who is easily prone to violating the independence of irrelevant alternatives,...

This stimulating New Yorker essay (right now gated, but worth buying the issue for) focuses on where creative moments come from.  Excerpt:Many stimulants, like...

For this splendid audience, I considered six scenarios for how the long-run might drastically differ from the world we see before our eyes: 1. A return to Malthus,...

Hardly anyone wants to endorse means-testing but almost everyone is for it.  Of course Medicaid, food stamps, HUD housing assistance, and many other programs are...

Most of the town of Baarle-Hertog is in Belgium but some spots are in the Netherlands, sprinkled into the Belgian majority like chocolate chips, not divided neatly by a...

atechny (n.) A lack of skill; a lack of knowledge of art. Reading through the dictionary, I am struck again and again by the fact that many words that describe common...

A few readers have written me or asked in the comments why I am not so crazy about HSAs.  From the past, read here and here, and here, or here is an index of...

Yesterday, I was supposed to be on Street Signs with Erin Burnett to talk about the effect of the Iraq war on the state of the economy.  Sadly, they canceled me at...

I have been tagged.  They're probably all songs by Gilbert O'Sullivan but if you wish to diversify, well...should I feel guilty about Split Enz "I Hope I...

1. Mr. Tambourine Man: The Life and Legacy of the Byrds' Gene Clark, by John Einarson.  I loved this book though partly for idiosyncratic reasons.  Failed...

...the empirical analysis finds that cars that were acquired used required no more maintenance expenditures than those that were acquired new of a similar age.Here is the...

Last week Congress cut benefits to Medicare recipients and liberal pundits applauded.  Indeed, Paul Krugman said this was "Kennedy's Big Day" and "the...

1. America's hot new restaurant 2. Incentives work, n = 1 3. The Milky Way; it loads a little slowly but it's worth it 4. Markets in everything: death tourism

It could be a fantasy football draft in any office in America — only these trades are real. This is the office of Traffic, a Brazilian company leading a new, and...

Let's first quote Mark Thoma's response to my column; it is indirectly a good summary of what I argue:I believe the political argument that giving everyone a stake in the...

Zimbabwean bank notes.  They're selling above face value in many cases.  The 50 billion note [sic] is going for about $12. I thank David Welton for the...

Via Mark Thoma, the highly intelligent Tim Duy offers an explanation.  Here's one small bit:The impact of the consumer slowdown is partially offshored, a point which...

[T]he statement "All models are wrong, but some are useful" is itself a model (of an epistemological system, with many competing models) and thus is...

...it's been a revelation and confirmation of an intuition: in some ways, gay men may benefit from marriage more than any other group.That's Andrew Sullivan, responding...

Josh writes to me:This might not be normal, but last night I started wondering why beer prices are not listed on menus, while wine prices are.  My next thought was...