So you want to help people? That’s great — but beware the law of unintended consequences. Three stories from the modern workplace.
Americans love to buy new stuff and hate to get rid of old stuff, which is why storing it all has become a $45 billion business. Zachary Crockett cleans out the garage.
What do the most creative people have in common? How open-minded are you, really? And what’s wrong with ordering eggs Benedict?
Take the Big Five inventory: freakonomics.com/bigfive
Monica Bertagnolli went from a childhood on a cattle ranch to a career as a surgeon to a top post in the Biden administration. As director of the National Institutes of Health, she’s working to improve the way we find new treatments — despite regulatory constraints and tight budgets.
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Learn MoreThe background noises you hear in film and TV — from footsteps to zombie guts — are produced in specialized studios by professionals known as Foley artists. Zachary Crockett makes some noise.
The psychologist Daniel Kahneman — a Nobel laureate and the author of Thinking, Fast and Slow — recently died at age 90. Along with his collaborator Amos Tversky, he changed how we all think about decision-making. The journalist Michael Lewis told the Kahneman-Tversky story in a 2016 book called The Undoing Project. In this episode, Lewis explains why they had such a profound influence.
Are you the same person you were a decade ago? Do we get better as we age? And is your sixth-grade class clown still funny?
People who are good at their jobs routinely get promoted into bigger jobs they’re bad at. We explain why firms keep producing incompetent managers — and why that’s unlikely to change.
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