Daniel Akst

Once upon a time the characteristic foot disorder of the well-to-do was gout, induced by an excess of rich foods. Lots of famous people have had it, especially writers, including Milton, Samuel Johnson and Henry James. Nowadays I don't know a sole--er, that is, soul--with gout, even though I know lots of affluent people and a good many writers (two different groups obviously, that barely overlap). No, these days, judging from my own admittedly biased sampling, the… More »

Last year at Thanksgiving we bought a turkey from a local farm and it cost $58. I couldn't help noticing, around the same time, that our local supermarkets were offering a comparably-sized bird for $8. The local turkey tasted quite good, but I've enjoyed many a Thanksgiving with the store-bought variety, and it seemed to me not just painful but profligate to spend all that additional money in this way. So this year we're going to buy the supermarket turkey and find… More »

From today's Wall Street Journal:In 1967, 50% of American men had been arrested. Since then, arrests made in connection with domestic violence and illegal drugs have pushed the number to 60%, estimates Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University. The annual number of arrests for possession of marijuana more than tripled to 1.8 million from 1980 to 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.These numbers are remarkable. Having never been… More »

I've blogged in this space before about the many ways in which modern life promotes bigness--in business, government, finance, health care and so forth. Here's another: the New York Times is reporting that a new federal law requiring safety testing of toys, adopted in response to an influx of unsafe toys from overseas, may be a threat to artisanal toy-makers who use maple, beeswax and other wholesome stuff. It seems they can't afford the testing. We've seen… More »

Recently my wife and I got iPhones. There's a lot to say about them, but most of it has been said, so I'll spare you. What I find most interesting and surprising, after about a week of ownership, is what spectacular reading devices they've turned out to be. In fact I find it easier to read a newspaper on my iPhone than I do on paper, probably because of the low-light problems associated with presbyopia. The iPhone screen resolution is just dazzling, and anyone… More »

From John Cassidy's forthcoming book, How Markets Fail: "In China between 1981 and 2005, according to a recent study by researchers at the World Bank, the poverty rate fell from 84 percent to 22 percent, a drop of almost two thirds. By the end of the period more than 600 million Chinese had been lifted out of poverty." More »

This striking paragraph is from the excellent Calculatedrisk blog, which is filled with useful data and insight:. . .this is a reminder that new high rise condos are not included in the new home inventory report from the Census Bureau, and are also not included in the existing home sales report from the NAR (unless they are listed). These uncounted units are concentrated in Miami, Las Vegas, San Diego and other large cities - but as these articles show, there are… More »

Today I went to see a very capable podiatrist who really had no idea that he had ever seen me before. His office has only paper records, ships them off-site after three years and gets rid of them after five, at least according to what they told me. So I whipped out my ancient, steam-powered Treo 650, performed a global search that took perhaps two seconds, and said: "February 20, 2003 at 2 pm." Voila, electronic medical records. More »

A new Harvard study estimates that lack of health insurance kills about 45,000 Americans annually, which is 2.5 times as many as the previous best estimate commonly cited in the health care debate. This is a big difference (27,000 additional lives). But it still pales in comparison with the more than one million Americans who die annually by their own hands--which they use to light cigarettes, lift forks and convey too many alcoholic beverages to their lips. That… More »

Ok, I exaggerate. It's a headline! Still, it's stunning to read that the headmaster of a fancy Massachusetts prep school is giving away the 20,000 books in the library and converting the joint into a "learning center" containing giant flat-screen TVs and a $12,000 cappuccino machine. Read it and weep here.Actually this may not be quite as bad as it looks. Students will be equipped with Kindles and the like. If anything the real news here may be that the headmaster… More »

Here is one of those stories guaranteed to convert a few more readers to libertarianism. New York's seedy Off Track Betting parlors, part of a state-operated system intended to raise money for public purposes while taking business from illegal book-making operations, actually lose money. So here we have the government spending taxpayer dough to enable and encourage people to do something that is almost certainly harmful. Not to worry, no doubt the state funds… More »

The Boston Globe reports on financial troubles at WGBH, the nationally important public broadcaster up there, which just two years ago celebrated the opening of its expensive new headquarters. Why should anyone care outside of Boston? Because it's a great example of what invariably seems to happen when a company builds itself fancy new offices. Just look at the New York Times, with its Renzo Piano tower on Eighth Avenue. As soon as these places are done--sometimes… More »

Mike Winerip has a fine, sad story in the New York Times about a 58-year-old man who went from a highly paid executive position to 18 months of unemployment. Of course billions of people (in war-zones, hospices, etc.) are worse off. But what I found interesting about the piece is that this man's life seems to encapsulate everything that is best and worst in American life. On the one hand, he enjoyed a level of freedom and affluence that would have been unimaginable… More »

For years Hollywood has peddled crappy, simplistic movies about a heroic little person standing up to greedy corporations, unfeeling bureaucrats and other such stock villains. So it's hard not to feel there's some kind of poetic justice in the attacks leveled at the Motion Picture and Television Fund (and it's many rich and famous trustees) over plans to close the organization's venerable home for the aged. You can read all about it here. The problem is that the… More »

Bedbugs are getting more and more attention lately, which makes me wonder if anyone is ever going to test my pet theory about this -- that the growth of the problem is related to the ability of the Internet to bring together buyers and sellers of used stuff. Craigslist would seem to offer the ideal natural experiment. Some enterprising economics grad students needs to look at the dates on which Craigslist established itself in various locales, and then see if there… More »

For awhile now I've been dragging my feet on the task of upgrading our family's cell-phone service. It's the usual story: we want iPhones but we also want Verizon. There are four of us so it costs too much. And in general I have the idea that the cell-phone companies are gouging through their control of the regulatory environment.Having just returned from Europe, I find the shortcomings in American cell service particularly stark. If you too have a sense of being… More »

The Associated Press has a fascinating story about an unrepentant man who says he sold a kidney for $20,000, saving the life of a guy on Long Island who allegedly posed as his cousin. Legal questions aside, I can't imagine what's wrong with any of this. I hope black market kidneys will be available if I ever need one. Better yet, I hope we abolish the black market by establishing a sensible, regulated marketplace so that people needn't become criminals to save… More »

Yesterday my friend Chris and I drove into the Alps from Vienna, and during the trip I asked him a question that's been puzzling me. Why, given their horrific history during the 20th century, aren't Europeans more wary of the power of the state? After the horrors of WW I, the rise of European fascism, the Nazis, the Second World War, the protracted disaster of Communism etc., it would seem to me that something like paranoia would be the mildest sensible response… More »

I've been in London for about a week, assuaging my time-zone difficulties, late at night, with the Yanks and Red Sox on ESPN America. Given the upheaval going on in the newspaper business in the States, it's been interesting to read the papers here, because I think they give some sense of where we're going with ours. There are a lot of them, sort of, but they seem largely national rather than local, and beneath their surface vitality the quality of reporting and… More »

Journalists love anniversaries, but I'm surprised that hardly anyone has noticed a significant one: this month is the centennial of Freud's first and only visit to America. Sigmund Freud hated America. He couldn't stand being called "Sigmund" by his informal hosts. He believed that Americans had channeled their sexuality into an unhealthy obsession with money. And he seethed at his own need for the dollars that we had in such unseemly abundance. "Is it not sad,"… More »