I wouldn't have guessed, but this is a must read.

Simpsons bit where a lifeguard says "Excuse me, Americans!" Homer ask, "How did you know?" It's revealed that Homer is wearing a shirt with Uncle Sam taking a bit out of the world with the words "Try and Stop Us"

How it feels being on this app today

🤘🤘

When legal sports betting surges, so do Americans' financial problems As online betting has grown in popularity, a new report from the New York Federal Reserve builds on the troubling link between legal sports wagering and financial health.

As online betting has grown in popularity, a new report from the New York Federal Reserve builds on the troubling link between legal sports wagering and financial health. n.pr/4tqWJuL

And one final chart shows that so far AI tools haven’t led to an explosion of submissions to several of the top 5 economics journals.

found something rather baffling when researching my column this week…

I wanted to see if there was any evidence that AI tools were helping economists to make their research more readable. So I analysed the text of NBER working paper abstracts…

How adopting an automated review monitoring system allows restaurants to translate consumer feedback into operational quality improvements, from Guangyu Cao, Shenghao He, and Ginger Zhe Jin www.nber.org/papers/w34934

Gas prices are set to go vertical It's not exactly a bold prediction to suggest this will be bad for Trump's political standing.

The prediction markets have a very different view of nearterm gasoline prices than the futures market. I haven't done the full calculation with options prices, but it looks like there is probably an arbitrage opportunity.
www.natesilver.net/p/gas-prices...
www.wsj.com/market-data/...

Excellent article on branding and design, told through the history of the Swiss/luxury watch industry:

paulgraham.com/brandage.html

Some good coverage of my working paper on housing filtering in The Atlantic today.

The paper itself, The Downmarket Impact of New Multifamily Housing: Evidence from a Honolulu Condo Tower, is available here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

I'm listening to WWOZ New Orleans' live streaming radio. Tune in to WWOZ now:http://www.wwoz.org/listen/player/ Listen live online to WWOZ: volunteer-powered, listener-supported community radio in New Orleans.

This is your annual reminder that if you aren't listening to the world's greatest radio station WWOZ on this Mardi Gras day, you are doing it wrong.

www.wwoz.org/listen/player/

Trump administration drops its appeal of court order blocking $1.2-billion UCLA settlement The Trump administration dropped its appeal of a major higher education case in which a federal judge blocked its $1.2-billion settlement proposal to UCLA over alleged civil rights violations. But it will continue to fight the ruling on the matter in a lower court.

Trump administration drops its appeal of court order blocking $1.2-billion UCLA settlement

Very cool how productive everyone is getting with new AI tools, I think, as I listen to Brownsville Girl for the fourth time in a row.

Has financial literacy been declining or are smartphones changing the way we answer surveys? I was on Marketplace yesterday to talk about how smartphones are making it more challenging to gauge knowledge on surveys. Longer thread coming soon!

Check out our full study here:
lnkd.in/guiqHmKW

As States Permitted Online Sports Gambling, Citizens’ Personal Financial Health Suffered - UCLA Anderson Review Half a trillion dollars wagered — and counting

As States Permitted Online Sports Gambling, Citizens’ Personal Financial Health Suffered

anderson-review.ucla.edu/as-states-pe...

What’s the Matter With Texas A&M? Five presidents in five years. Firings of “woke” professors. Crackdowns on Plato. Inside state leaders’ efforts to remake a great university.

Tour de force on just exactly what has gone on at Texas A&M for so many years from Chris Hooks in @texasmonthly.bsky.social:

www.texasmonthly.com/news-politic...

Honestly, tons of academics who I greatly respect don't realy understand AI including - what it does, how it's evolving, how it's affecting research.

That's bad.

This year's Empirical Management Conference is at Stanford, May 27-29!

Send us your best papers! Details and submission form here:
worldmanagementsurvey.org/emc2026/

JOIN US!! It's fun, I promise!

@raffasadun.bsky.social @johnvanreenen.bsky.social @renatalemos.bsky.social @nickbloom.bsky.social

Despite the negative framing in this article, this sounds like a very promising set of moves by the EU Commission on reforming some harmful and failed digital regulations.

An amateur codebreaker may have just solved the Black Dahlia and Zodiac killings Two retired LAPD homicide detectives say that both notorious cases are solved -- with a single culprit -- thanks to the work of a novice sleuth.

Our train conductor just broke in over the PA system to announce this news live, in four languages. www.latimes.com/california/s...

Buyer Beware: Star Ratings Actually Steer Us Away From the Best Shopping Deals When reviewers consider prices while rating products, there’s a tendency to downgrade the highest-quality yet pricier items.

Star ratings are hard to ignore. Even when we’re looking for quality, our brains steer us toward cheaper stuff online. Christopher Mims explains why.

Interesting reporting from @bencasselman.bsky.social, suggests Instacart is performing (or allowing) quite extensive personalized price discrimination.

Acts done out of love, Nietzsche once said, stand beyond good and evil. If this is what art amounts to, we should be grateful to Alice Munro for reminding us to be properly frightened of it.

muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

In honor of #GivingTuesday, my wife & I are matching donations (up to $20K) to the ASFOP Teega Wende Orphanage in 🇧🇫Burkina Faso🇧🇫, which supports over 200 orphans and we have supported for over a decade. 1/2

I don't know if Texas deserves to be in the playoffs, but I do know what all the other playoff teams are hoping for.

Some news: I will be spending this entire 2025-26 academic year located in Paris, visiting the local universities and participating in the research community here.

If you work in Paris or are just passing though in the next year, please reach out, I'd be happy to meet up! PhD students especially!

This is an interesting set of academic research papers about the increasingly key debate of when AI should be used to label data (an expensive task we use humans for)

Yang et al show that AI answers are quite different than human, but Briggs finds it may be because AI is better than human RAs!

I think Southwest Airlines should revert its website to what they had in 1995

Yes it is.