The Ig Nobel Prizes have again turned up in a crossword puzzle, this time as an answer in the May 3, 2022 puzzle in The New York Times. The clue for one of the across words is: 14 ___ Prize (satirical scientific award since 1991) By our lazy count, this is the sixth time the Ig […]
Today the New York Times celebrates, deadpan, a fake relic of a historically influential example of pseudo-profound bullshit. Under the headline “This Is Not Arthur Laffer’s Famous Napkin,” The Times says: It is one of the iconic moments in modern economics: A young professor named Arthur Laffer sketched a curve on a bar napkin in […]
Some people achieve fame, then live so long that the fame fades and their eventual death goes largely unremarked upon. Those people are not the subjects of this new study: “Death in The New York Times: the price of fame is a faster flame,” C.R. Epstein and R.J. Epstein, QJM, epub 2013. (Thanks to kiltish […]
Dead celebrities fared better and better against other dead persons as the twentieth century progressed, suggests this study of who was celebrated and who was not: “Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Apotheosis of Celebrities in 20th Century America,” Timothy J. Bertoni [pictured here] and Patrick D. Nolan, Sociation Today, vol. 10, no. 1, Spring/Summer […]
Two of this year’s crop of Ig Nobel Prize winners are among the “noteworthy notions of 2009” celebrated in the New York Times Magazine‘s “Year in Ideas” feature. Here’s how The Times describes them: Cows With Names Make More Milk “The naming,” says Catherine Douglas, the Newcastle University animal behaviorist behind the research, “reflects the […]