For the 20th anniversary of Freakonomics, Debbie Millman of Design Matters interviews Stephen Dubner about his upbringing, his writing career, and why ...

Arthur Brooks, an economist and former head of the American Enterprise Institute, believes that there is only one remedy for our political polarization: love. ...

Soccer leagues around the world use a promotion-and-relegation system to reward the best teams and punish the worst. We ask whether American sports fans would ...

The N.F.L. is a powerful cartel with imperial desires. College football is about to undergo a financial reckoning. So maybe they should team up? (Part one of a ...

In this episode we first published in 2021, the political scientist Yuen Yuen Ang argues that different forms of government create different styles of ...

In his new book “Breakneck,” Dan Wang argues that the U.S. has a lot to learn from China. He also says that “no two peoples are more alike.” We have questions. ...

A lot of jobs in the modern economy don’t pay a living wage, and some of those jobs may be wiped out by new technologies. So what’s to be done? We revisit an ...

What does it take to “play 3D chess at 250 miles an hour”? And how far will $12.5 billion of “Big, Beautiful” funding go toward modernizing the F.A.A.? (Part ...

Flying in the U.S. is still exceptionally safe, but the system relies on outdated tech and is under tremendous strain. Six experts tell us how it got this way ...

Patrick Deneen, a political philosopher at Notre Dame, says yes. He was a Democrat for years, and has now come to be seen as an “ideological guru” of the Trump ...

Bjørn Andersen has killed hundreds of minke whales. He tells us how he does it, why he does it, and what he thinks would happen if whale-hunting ever stopped. ...

In the final episode of our whale series, we learn about fecal plumes, shipping noise, and why Moby-Dick is still worth reading. (Part 3 of “Everything ...

For years, whale oil was used as lighting fuel, industrial lubricant, and the main ingredient in (yum!) margarine. Whale meat was also on a few menus. But ...

Whaling was, in the words of one scholar, “early capitalism unleashed on the high seas.” How did the U.S. come to dominate the whale market? Why did whale ...

It’s a haphazard way of paying workers, and yet it keeps expanding. With federal tax policy shifting in a pro-tip direction, we revisit an episode from 2019 to ...

They should have died out when the lightbulb was invented. Instead they’re a $10 billion industry. What does it mean that we still want tiny fires inside our ...

The former secretary of state isn’t a flamethrower, but he certainly has strong opinions. In this wide-ranging conversation with Stephen Dubner, he gives them ...

Until recently, Delaware was almost universally agreed to be the best place for companies to incorporate. Now, with Elon Musk leading a corporate stampede out ...

For years, the playwright David Adjmi was considered “polarizing and difficult.” But creating Stereophonic seems to have healed him. Stephen Dubner gets the ...

The Gulf States and China are spending billions to build stadiums and buy up teams — but what are they really buying? And can an entrepreneur from Cincinnati ...