Tonight (Oct. 7), there is another segment of “Freakonomics Friday” on ABC’s World News Tonight. Last week’s segment was an introduction to Freakonomics that also focused on the book’s cheating-teacher chapter. (It was incredibly well produced: smart and thoughtful and nuanced, which isn’t easy in 2.5 minutes; TV and ideas don’t always mix well but the ABC folks know seem to have figured how to do it.) Tonight, ABC asks this question: “How is your real estate agent like a funeral director?” Later tonight, ABC’s “20/20″ is devoting its entire hour to real estate, and will include some more Freakonomics commentary.

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest piece in the New Yorker is interesting as always. It is about Ivy League admissions.

I particularly like this quote (especially the last sentence):

The Ivy League schools justified their emphasis on character and personality, however, by arguing that they were searching for the students who would have the greatest success after college. They were looking for leaders, and leadership, the officials of the Ivy League believed, was not a simple matter of academic brilliance. “Should our goal be to select a student body with the highest possible proportions of high-ranking students, or should it be to select, within a reasonably high range of academic ability, a student body with a certain variety of talents, qualities, attitudes, and backgrounds?” Wilbur Bender asked. To him, the answer was obvious. If you let in only the brilliant, then you produced bookworms and bench scientists: you ended up as socially irrelevant as the University of Chicago (an institution Harvard officials looked upon and shuddered).