September 13, 2007, 12:47 pm
Here is the latest installment of Jessica Hagy’s “Indexed” series. (You can find her past Freakonomics posts here, and her website here.) This one is called “Milestones & Blips.” Personally, I think she will have a hard time ever surpassing the the bottom card in this series.
Milestones & Blips
MilestonesSeptember 13, 2007, 10:30 am
In the video player in the right-hand column of our home page, you’ll find Part 2 of Levitt’s discussion of the research behind the abortion/crime link. (You can find Part 1 in the video player as well; here’s the blog post that accompanied it.) In this installment, he discusses the collage of evidence that convinced him and John Donohue of the link between legalized abortion and a lower crime rate.
September 13, 2007, 9:43 am
Political scandals are a bit like the weather: there’s always something brewing. But of all the congressmen and senators whose careers have fallen apart in recent years, few have done so as spectacularly as Randall “Duke” Cunningham, the Republican congressman from California who in 2006 was sentenced to eight years and four months in prison after F.B.I. investigators discovered that he had accepted over $2 million in bribes, the largest amount in U.S. Congressional history.
Seth Hettena, an A.P. reporter who covered the scandal, has now written a book about Cunningham, Feasting on the Spoils. Hettena agreed to answer our questions about the book and the long, gloried history of government corruption.
Q: What was the structure of Cunningham’s bribery scheme? How much, and in what form, did he receive payoffs? How did he hide (or fail to hide) the money?
A: Like many criminal enterprises, Cunningham’s bribery started small and grew over time. According to federal prosecutors, the bribes date back to the mid-1990s, when a defense contractor named Brent Wilkes paid for Cunningham’s meals and limousine rides in Washington, lent the congressman a 14-foot motorboat, and gave him quarterly payments of $500 worth of “maintenance money.” In return, Cunningham vowed to “fight like hell” for the defense contractor, who made millions of dollars from funds that Cunningham had earmarked for him.
Things kicked into high gear after the attacks of Sept. 11, Read more …
"If Lord Kelvin had said in the Middle Ages that man cannot fly, he would have been correct because his goons would have made it so. We are in grave danger of letting the nay-sayers gain precedence again."
If you happen to be in Sioux City, Iowa at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 16, be sure to catch Dubner's turn as the featured speaker for the 2007 Morningside College Peter Waitt Lecture. Admission is free -- though, unfortunately, no schwag will be provided.
Stephen J. Dubner is an author and journalist who lives in New York City.
Steven D. Levitt is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago.
Their book Freakonomics has sold 3 million copies worldwide. This blog, begun in 2005, is meant to keep the conversation going. Melissa Lafsky is the site editor.
Dubner and Levitt look into the unintended consequences of Jane Fonda’s 1979 film The China Syndrome — i.e., how the anti-nuke movie may be partly to blame for global warming.
If you love Lucinda Williams, as I do, and want more of her songs than presently exist, you would do well to get Carrie Rodriguez's Seven Angels on a Bicycle. There are a lot of similarities between Rodriguez and Williams, but Rodriguez plainly has her own wild thing going on. "50's French Movie," e.g., has a fantastically nasty groove. (SJD)
Mad Men is an amazingly rich new TV series on AMC, created by Sopranos writer/producer Matthew Weiner. Although it's set among advertising men in 1960, it isn't really about advertising any more than The Sopranos was about garbage collection. Great, nuanced writing, splendid acting, and so much smoking and drinking that you get a hangover just from watching. (SJD)
If you happen to need a haircut in Cambridge, Mass., try The Hair Connection. You will definitely get a great cut, and perhaps even find a spouse. (SDL)
September 13, 2007, 9:02 am
