Sendhil Mullainathan Thinks Messing Around Is...

It was only in his late twenties that America’s favorite brainiac began to seriously embrace his love of trivia. Now he holds the “Greatest of All Time” title on Jeopardy! Steve Levitt digs into how he trained for the show, what it means to have a "geographic memory," and why we ...  Show more

The dean of Yale’s School of Management grew up in a small village in Guyana. During his unlikely journey, he has researched video-gaming habits, communicable disease, and why so many African-Americans haven’t had the kind of success he’s had. Steve Levitt talks to Charles about ...  Show more

You wouldn’t think you could win a Nobel Prize for showing that humans tend to make irrational decisions. But that’s what Richard Thaler has done. In an interview from 2018, the founder of behavioral economics describes his unlikely route to success; his reputation for being l ...

Daniel Kahneman left his mark on academia (and the real world) in countless ways. A group of his friends and colleagues recently gathered in Chicago to reflect on this legacy — and we were there, with microphones.

We revisit an episode from 2016 that asks: Has our culture’s obsession with innovation led us to neglect the fact that things also need to be taken care of? 

We think of them as intellectual enclaves and the surest route to a better life. But U.S. colleges also operate like firms, trying to differentiate their products to win market share and prestige points. In the first episode of a special series originally published in 2022, we ...