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He is the editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Once a paper is allocated the assigned editor typically reads the paper within 1 day and decides whether to send the paper out to referees or to “desk reject” it. Since we receive over 1,400 submissions and only publish around 40 to 44 papers a year, we need to be tough in the initial screening and only send a paper out to referees if it has great promise to be a significant contribution. This past year we desk rejected 62 percent of the new submissions (which still means that over 500 were sent to referees). I am the “softy” among QJE editors desk rejecting “only” 47 percent of new submissions vs. 70 percent by my co-editors. I also try to provide authors with some brief feedback on their papers and the rationale for the decision even in the case of desk rejections.
The full interview is here. Thanks to Econjeff for the pointer.
I write all the time about strategic behavior in athletic competitions. A racer who is behind can be expected to ease off and conserve on effort since effort is less likely to pay off at the margin. Hence so will the racer who is ahead, etc. There is evidence that professional golfers exhibit such strategic behavior, this is the Tiger Woods effect.
We may wonder whether other animals are as strategically sophisticated as we are. There have been experiments in which monkeys play simple games of strategy against one another, but since we are not even sure humans can figure those out, that doesn’t seem to be the best place to start looking.
I would like to compare how humans and other animals behave in a pure physical contest like a race. Suppose the animals are conditioned to believe that they will get a reward if and only if they win a race. Will they run at maximum speed throughout regardless of their position along the way? Of course “maximum speed” is hard to define, but a simple test is whether the animal’s speed at a given point in the race is independent of whether they are ahead or behind and by how much.
And if the animals learn that one of them is especially fast, do they ease off when racing against her? Do the animals exhibit a tiger Woods effect?
There are of course horse-racing data. That’s not ideal because the jockey is human. Still there’s something we can learn from horse racing. The jockey does not internalize 100% of the cost of the horse’s effort. Thus there should be less strategic behavior in horse racing than in races between humans or between jockey-less animals. Dog racing? Does that actually exist?
And what if a dog races against a human, what happens then?
(Regular readers of this blog will know that I consider that to be a good thing.)
A father wants to encourage his daughter to take on a challenging new piece for the piano. Both father and daughter agree that it would be worth the effort if she could be expected to succeed but the daughter is pessimistic about her abilities. The father isn’t sure either but, having taught her older sister to play that piece, he knows a little more than the daughter about the difficulties involved and he is optimistic. How can he encourage her?
He has a problem because she sees through his cheap talk. She knows that he wants her to give it a try and so she knows that he would say whatever it would take to boost her confidence, even if he was really just as pessimistic as she.
However, things are different if she has reference-dependent utility. In particular suppose that, perhaps because of the way she has been raised, once her own expectations have been lifted she would stubbornly persist, even in the face of failure, for fear of falling below those expectations. (Indeed this might be why she was reluctant to take on the challenge at the beginning.)
Paradoxically, this behavioral quirk solves the father’s credibility problem. Because the last thing he wants is for his daughter to drive herself to tears in a futile attempt to learn a too-difficult piece. Now if he really thinks she’s not good enough, he won’t want to create any illusions. He wouldn’t even suggest it. So when he does suggest it and he does encourage her, she knows that he really believes in her. And he should know, so she tries.
That’s the idea in the job market paper of Edoardo Grillo from Princeton.
Doctors sometimes resist prescribing costly diagnostic procedures, saying that the result of the test would be unlikely to affect the course of treatment. But what we know about placebo effects for medicine should have implications also for the value of information, even when it leads to no objective health benefits.
I have a theory of how placebos work. The idea is that our bodies, either through conscious choices that we make or simply through physiological changes, must make an investment in order to get healthy. Being sick is like being, perhaps temporarily, below the threshold where the body senses that the necessary investment is worth it. A placebo tricks the body into thinking that we are going to get at least marginally more healthy and that pushes above the threshold triggering the investment which makes us healthy.
The same idea can justify providing information that has no instrumental value. Suppose you have an injury and are considering having an MRI to determine how serious it is. Your doctor says that surgery is rarely worthwhile and so even if the MRI shows a serious injury it won’t affect how you are treated.
But you want to know. For one thing the information can affect how you personally manage the injury. That’s instrumental value that your doctor doesn’t take into account.
But even if there were nothing you could consciously do based on the test result, there may be a valuable placebo reason to have the MRI. If you find out that the injury is mild, the psychological effect of knowing that you are healthy (or at least healthier than you previously thought) can be self-reinforcing.
The downside of course is that when you find out that the injury is serious you get an anti-placebo effect. So the question is whether you are better off on average when you become better informed about your true health status.
If the placebo effect works because the belief triggers a biological response then this is formally equivalent to a standard model of decision-making under uncertainty. Whenever a decision-maker will optimally condition his decision on the realization of information, then the expected value of learning that information is positive.
Comedians are loath to follow a better act. But musicians not so much. Definitely not academics. Why?
- Comedy is more vertically differentiated. It’s really funny, just a little funny, or not funny. The subject matter adds another dimension but that’s not so important for the ultimate impact. Music is more horizontally differentiated. So the opening act can be really good at what they do, but you can still please the audience if you’re not quite as good but do something different. On this score academics are more like musicians.
- Laughs are physical. You only have so many of those to give in a night. Wheras good music has the effect of putting you in a mental state that makes you more receptive to even more music. Here academic talks are more like comedy. The audience gets taxed.
- Headlining musicians always degrade the quality of the opening act by giving them less stage space and limited lighting and other effects. In large conferences academics do the same thing by distinguishing the “plenary” talks from the rest. (Get this: in Istanbul this summer I am giving a semi-plenary talk.) There is no obvious way to do this for comedy.
- Music is played by groups, comedians are always solo. Somehow the head-to-head comparison is less exact for groups. Solo singers are probably more reluctant to follow better singers than groups are when following other groups. Academics get to blame their backstage co-authors.
If you buy something online using PayPal and upon delivery it turns out to be not what was advertised, PayPal might refund your payment and require you to destroy the item:
I sold an old French violin to a buyer in Canada, and the buyer disputed the label.
This is not uncommon. In the violin market, labels often mean little and there is often disagreement over them. Some of the most expensive violins in the world have disputed labels, but they are works of art nonetheless.
Rather than have the violin returned to me, PayPal made the buyer DESTROY the violinin order to get his money back. They somehow deemed the violin as “counterfeit” even though there is no such thing in the violin world.
PayPal required the buyer to photograph the remains to prove it was destroyed. (How else can you prove to PayPal that the item wasn’t worth the money?) Glengarry glide: Eitan Hochster.
Alex Madrigal endorses this game:
“Don’t Be A Di*k During Meals With Friends.”
The first person to crack and look at their phone picks up the check.
Our (initial) purpose of the game was to get everyone off the phones free from twitter/fb/texting and to encourage conversations.
Rules:
1) The game starts after everyone has ordered.
2) Everybody places their phone on the table face down.
3) The first person to flip over their phone loses the game.
4) Loser of the game pays for the bill.
5) If the bill comes before anyone has flipped over their phone everybody is declared a winner and pays for their own meal.
The problem with this implementation is that once one person cracks, she’s paying for the meal regardless of what happens next and so all the incentive power is gone. It’ll be a twitter/fb/texting free-for-all.
A more sophisticated approach is to make the last person who uses their phone pay for the meal. Its subtle: no matter how many people have used their phone already, everybody else has maximal incentives not to be the next one. Because by backward induction they will be the last one and instead of a free meal they will pay for everyone.
But even that has its problems because the first guy has no incentives left. So you could do something like this: At the beginning everyone is paying their own meal. The first one to use their phone has to pay also for the meal of one other person. The next person who uses their phone, including possibly if the first guy does it again, has to pay for all the meals that the previous guy had to pay for plus one more.
It would take a lot of mistakes to run out of incentives with that scheme but even if you do you can start paying for the people in the table next to you.
Barretina bump: Courtney Conklin Knapp
Some topics evolve by occasional big news events interspersed by long periods of little or no news. The public reacts dramatically to the big news events and seems to ignore the slow news.
For example, a terrorist attack is followed by general paranoia and a tightening of security. But no matter how much time passes without another attack, there never seems to be a restoration of the old equilibrium. News is like a ratchet with each big reaction building directly upon the last, and the periods in-between only setting the stage for the next.
The usual way to interpret this is an over-reaction to the salient information brought by big news events, and a failure to respond to the subtle information conveyed by a lack of big news. We notice when the dog barks but we don’t notice when it doesn’t.
But even a perfectly rational and sophisticated public exhibits a news ratchet. That’s because there is a difference between big news and small news in the way it galvanizes the public. Large changes in policy require a coordinated movement by a correspondingly large enough segment of the population motivated to make the change. Individuals are so motivated only if they know that they are part of a large enough group. Big events create that knowledge.
During the slow news periods all of these individuals are learning that those measures are less and less necessary. But that learning takes place privately and in silence. Never will enough time pass that everyone can confidently conclude that everyone else has confidently concluded that …. that everyone has figured this out. So there will never be the same momentum to undo the initial reaction as there was to inflame it.
It pays $72,000 per year and comes with only two requirements, one is flexible and one is not:
At first glance, Robert Kirshner took the e-mail message for a scam. An astronomer at King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was offering him a contract for an adjunct professorship that would pay $72,000 a year. Kirshner, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, would be expected to supervise a research group at KAU and spend a week or two a year on KAU’s campus, but that requirement was flexible, the person making the offer wrote in the e-mail. What Kirshner would be required to do, however, was add King Abdulaziz University as a second affiliation to his name on the Institute for Scientific Information’s (ISI’s) list of highly cited researchers.
As you read on, ask yourself whether a chaired professorship endowed by King Abdulaziz would survive the various criticisms. I thank Ryan McDevitt for the pointer.
I hadn’t watched American football in many years but around Christmas time I watched a little bit with my son who is getting old enough to pay attention to it. What struck me was how many pointless rules there are in football. I asked myself which of the many pointless rules is the most pointless. Some candidate
1.Holding
2. Illegal motion
These two are basically rules that establish a conventional way to play the game. If you dropped these rules you would still have a game that makes sense but aesthetically you could argue the game is less attractive. Players grabbing each others uniforms, offensive players running around before the snap. It’s a matter of taste but the deadweight loss is the subjective element of enforcement. Bottom line: artificial rules but not totally pointless.
3. Intentional grounding. This rule has a point but its a stupid point. The quarterback can’t throw the ball just anywhere, he has to throw it near somebody who could legally catch it. Or he can throw it out of bounds, it seems. But if he can’t do any of those he has to get mowed down by a charging defender.
But here’s the most pointless rule I could come up with:
4. Ineligible Receiver Downfield. There are only certain players on the offense who are designated as eligible to catch a pass. If anybody else catches a pass then it doesn’t count. Now that by itself is pretty artificial. Those players, and their counterparts on the defense are basically added to the game just to offset one another. You could remove them from both sides and it would be a wash. But even more pointless: an ineligible player is not allowed to advance down the field when a pass is thrown, even if it is thrown to somebody else. These rules essentially provide job security for giant, immobile humanoids whose only function is to stand in the way of somebody else. They take away the possibility of having a team of 10 perfectly substitutable athletes plus a quarterback. I can’t see how that would not be a more interesting game.
Is there any more pointless rule than that?
(Regular readers of this blog will know I consider that a good thing.)
Why did Apple enter an exclusive partnership with AT&T? Michael Sinkinson has a nice theoretical model that shows how vertical exclusivity can soften competition. A smartphone requires an accompanying wireless service in order to be useful. While smartphones are differentiated goods, wireless service is pretty homogenous. The market for wireless service is therefore perfectly competitive while the market for smartphones is oligopolistic.
Suppose smartphone manufacturers allow their phones to operate on any wireless network. Then service plans for the iPhone and for the Blackberry would be priced perfectly competitively, at the marginal cost of providing service. That means that the total price of an iPhone bundled with wireless service will be equal to the wholesale price that Apple charges the wireless providers. In other words, Apple’s price increases are passed on dollar-for-dollar to the consumer.
At an equilibrium Apple raises its price for the iPhone up to the point where the revenues from additional price increases are offset by reduced sales (due to higher prices.) Blackberry does the same.
Now, suppose that Apple goes exclusive with AT&T. That makes AT&T the monopoly retail supplier of the iPhone. They will act like a monopoly and raise prices. AT&T views Apple’s wholesale price as an input cost and we know from basic price theory that increases in input costs are passed on less than dollar-for-dollar to consumers. The strategic effect for Apple is that now when Apple increases the wholesale price of the iPhone, sales fall off by less than they did in the non-exclusive arrangement. It’s as if the demand curve has gotten steeper. Relative to the non-exclusive arrangement Apple raises prices, and in fact as a response Blackberry also raises prices which has a secondary benefit for Apple.
Of course some of these new profits go to the retailer, AT&T. No problem. Forseeing all of this Apple and AT&T agreed to a large up-front transfer from AT&T to Apple equal to that amount.
Fracking. Water is pumped into mines at high pressure to fracture the rock and release natural gas. There is some controversy associated with how the water is disposed of when the fracking is done. In Ohio the water is deposited in deep waste-water wells which happen to be near tectonic fault lines. Probably not coincidentally there have been many earthquakes nearby over the past year. These earthquakes have been small, the largest being about a 4.0 on New Year’s Eve.
The controversy is whether the waste water disposal is causing the earthquakes and whether this externality is properly accounted for in the fracking calculus. Bear in find that it’s not the fracking itself that causes the earthquakes.
An earthquake is a release of pressure. The theory here is that the water in the deep wells lubricates the fault line and allows the release of the pressure built up along fault lines. Fracking, and the associated disposal, adds only negligibly to the total pressure built up over time. That pressure is caused by the geological processes in the Earth. That is, the total quantity of earthquakes over the lifetime of the Earth is a constant, independent of fracking.
What fracking does is re-allocate that supply of earthquakes toward the present, and possibly toward specific locations. If the disutiliy of earthquakes was linear in the timing and quantity of earthquakes, there would be no aggregate welfare effects.
But probably that disutility is convex. Many small earthquakes are preferred to one large one. The disposal of water in deep wells releases pressure sooner and avoids the buildup that would cause a large earthquake. Under this theory the externality from fracking is positive.
They should start fracking in California.
I have known Larry since the time I was on the junior job market and he was winding down a spectacular term as chairman of the BU economics department, having built a top-ten department out of nothing. Eight years later I spent a year as a faculty member at BU and again Larry was chairman. Everybody who has spent any time with Larry in a professional capacity agrees that he is a natural-born leader. He just has this quality that draws people from all sides to his. And he knows how to make an organization work. On top of all that he is great economist with world-leading expertise on the topics that would be most important for a President right now to know. I honestly can’t think of anybody I know personally who would make a better President than Larry. I might even vote for him.
Here’s his campaign web page. Via Tyler Cowen on Twitter.
An n-candidate election in which the electorate views n-1 of the candidates as equivalent alternatives to the nth. But they need to solve the coordination problem of which one to vote for. A prediction market allows speculators to drive up the price of any one of them, convincing the voters that he is the focal point and winning, or conversely to jam the signal by equalizing their share prices while at the same time going long on the nth. Of course the voters know this, but they may not know that all of the voters know (etc) this.
How informative can prediction markets be in such a scenario? I think Justin Wolfers might be interested in the answer.
See Rajiv Sethi for related thoughts.
For those of you coming to Chicago this weekend, here is Elie Tamer’s Chicago restaurant map . Elie is your kind of foodie: very good taste, unswayed by hype. And he has been to every restaurant in the greater Chicago area, so he knows what’s good. The center of mass is slightly North of the conference cetner but there are many options close by. I asked him for some recent recommendations and he wrote to me:
all good places, but less my style:
in that area there. recently been to: Ria and balsan (in the elysian hotel… really nice and $$$), girl and the goat, publican, purple pig… all good but very flashy….for out of towners, mexican here is amazing and they can try xoco(lunch sandwich)/frontera/topo there next to the AEA on clark and salpicon in old town,and mercat a la planxa (spanish inspired on south michigan) also if people are interested in steak, there are a ton there (gibsons on rush (you might run into the kardashians here it is so hip) and gene and georgettis on franklin are two examples) and of course avec is always good -really good.
I would echo his Mexican recommendations. They mostly tilt toward the high end, but you can’t go wrong. Another addition is Big Star Tacos, which Emir Kamenica recently turned me on to. Topolobampo is the best of course but good luck getting a reservation. There is the bar/cafe attached called Frontera Grill which does not take reservations but my urgent insider advice is not to go there. Especially not Saturday night around 8.
Update: Xoco/Frontera/Topo all closed through Jan 9.
Someone you know is making a scene on a plane. They don’t see you. Yet. As of now they think they are making a scene only in front of total strangers who they will never see again. It might be awkward if they knew you were a witness. Should you avert your eyes in hopes they won’t see you seeing them?
If they are really making a scene it is highly unlikely that you didn’t notice. So if eventually he does see you and sees that you are looking the other way he is still going to know that you saw him. So in fact it’s not really possible to pretend.
Moreover if he sees that you were trying to pretend then he will infer that you think that he was behaving inappropriately and that is why you averted your eyes. Given that he’s going to know you saw him you’d rather him think that you think that he was in fact in the right. Then there will be no awkwardness afterward.
However, there is the flip side to consider. If you do make eye contact there will be higher order knowledge that you saw him. How he feels about that depends on whether he thinks his behavior is inappropriate. If he does then he’s going to assume you do too. Once you realize you can’t avoid leaving the impression that you knew he was behaving inappropriately, and the unavoidable mutual knowledge of that fact, the best you can do is avoid the higher-order knowledge by looking the other way.
So it all boils down to a simple rule of thumb: If you think that he knows he is behaving inappropriately then you should look away. You are going to create discomfort either way, but less if you minimize the higher-orders of knowledge. But if you think that he thinks that in fact he has good reason to be making a scene then, even if you know better and see that he is actually way out of line, you must make eye contact to avoid him inferring that you are being judgmental.
Unless you can’t fake it. But whatever you do, don’t blog about it.
From a science fiction writer, who should know.
So, yeah: In a film with impossibly large spiders, talking trees, rings freighted with corrupting evil, Uruks birthed from mud (not to mention legions of ghost warriors and battle elephants larger than tanks), are we really going to complain about insufficiently dense lava? Because if you’re going to demand that be accurate in a physical sense, I want to know why you’re giving the rest of that stuff a pass. If you’re going to complain that the snowman flies, you should also be able to explain why it’s okay to have it eat hot soup.
Read on for the Flying Snowman theory.
Suppose our minds have a hot state and a cool state. In the cool state we are rational and make calculated tradeoffs between immediate rewards and payoffs that require investment of time and effort. But when the hot state takes over we abandon deliberation and just react on instinct.
The hot state is there because there are circumstances where the stakes are too high and our calculations too slow or imperfect. You are being attacked, the food in front of you smells funky, that bridge looks unstable. No matter how confident your cool head might be, the hot state grabs the wheel and forces you to do the safe thing.
Suppose all of that is true. What does that mean when a situation looks borderline and you see that instincts haven’t taken over? Your cool, calculating head rationally infers that this must be a safer situation than it would otherwise appear. And you are therefore inclined to take more risks.
But then the hot state better step in on those borderline situations to stop you from taking those excessive risks. Except that now the borderline has moved a little bit toward the safe end. Now when the hot state doesn’t take over it means its even more safe, etc.
And of course there is the mirror image of this problem where the hot state takes over to make sure you take an urgent risk. A potential mate is in front of you but the encounter has questionable implications for the future. Physical attraction receives a multiplier. If it is not overwhelming then all of the warning signs are magnified.
Now at the end of 2011, as Tea-Party forces in the House of Representative finally bow to conventional economic wisdom, it may be time for economics professors to toss out some new radical ideas about public finance. OK, let me try.
We have heard a lot of radical arguments for reducing taxation and reducing government debt, as the alleged keys to strong economic growth. Actually, however, taxes tend to be a greater percentage of GDP in richer nations. A reasonable hypothesis is that governments in poor nations may tax less and spend less because they have less fiscal capacity to control waste and corruption in the management of public funds. Such nations that cannot manage public funds effectively then suffer from a lack of public infrastructure, which in turn may be a basic cause of their poverty. That is, the greater wealth of rich nations may depend on their governments’ fiscal capacity to provide essential public goods with less waste than poor nations. A good reliable system for managing public finances is one of the essential pillars of prosperity, as described in a new book by Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson.
The ultimate basis for all controls on public spending is of course political. The strength of public financial management in America is ultimately based on democratic accountability of our political leaders for what they do with our taxes. Democracy may not be perfect, but it is better than any other system for deterring corrupt misuse of public funds.
From this perspective, we can argue instead that the key to reviving long-term economic growth may be found in reforms to further improve political controls on public finance in our nation.
When voters are swayed by promises of lower taxes and lower deficits without loss of public services, it is clear that our system of democratic fiscal oversight has some room for improvement. As the prosperity of our nation depends on the good judgment of a majority of voters, so voters depend on each others’ ability to understand questions of public finance. That is, voters’ comprehension of public budgets is itself a public good. We need a system to make sure that voters can understand our public budgets, and it is worth investing public money to develop such understanding.
So my radical proposal has two parts. First, our federal, state, and local governments should publish their annual budgets online in a form that any high-school graduate can understand. Second, our public high schools should be required to teach students how to read government budgets.
I know that this may sound impractically idealistic. But I can recommend at least one good textbook: Dall Forsythe’s Memos to the Governor. Written by a former budget director of New York state, this short book offers a good introduction to the standard tricks that have been used to make public spending more obscure.
Public officials, however well-intentioned, are under constant pressure to provide more public services for less money and so may feel regularly tempted to simulate such superior productivity by incurring new public debts that are not fully reported in the current year. Devices for concealing billions of dollars of new debt cannot be fully secret, however, and the readers of Forsythe’s book will be well prepared to watch for them. A better informed citizenry could prompt greater creativity in inventing new devices for concealment, of course. But a greater force for clarity and transparency may be unleashed when millions of families have high-schools students who are asking why the public-finance materials have to be so confusing.
So this is my radical proposal: Before demanding lower taxes or lower deficits, we voters should demand to be better informed about our public financial system. Then our ability to demand better use of public funds can become a stronger pillar for future growth and prosperity.
I’ve mentioned Navarro Vineyards in the blog. I’m a member of their wine club – they only sell direct so you cannot find their wine in stores. Wine Review Online has an interesting interview with a second generation winemaker, Sarah Cahn Bennett, the daughter of the original owners. For instance, a picture of what it might be like to grown up in idyllic but rural Anderson Valley:
I decided to get my undergraduate degree from Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, because after graduating from Anderson Valley High School with only 17 others, I wasn’t ready for large schools and life outside the Anderson Valley. After getting my BS in business administration, I applied for the MS program in viticulture and enology at UC Davis. I got my MS in 2005
From Inside Higher Ed:
In 2011, the association listed 2,836 positions, down only 6 jobs from 2010. The 2011 figures represent a 21 percent increase from the 2009 total, when the impact of the U.S. financial downturn was most evident on hiring in economics. A report by the association suggested that the total this year probably represents an increase in openings even over the 2,881 jobs reported in 2008 because many of those searches were called off after the economy nosedived in the fall of that year.
Via Lones Smith.
Chris Ziegler, retweeted by Tyler Cowen
imagine sitting down at a desk while 250 people line up and tell you, one by one, that kim jong-il has died. that’s twitter.
To which I reply: imagine logging into Twitter and 250 people line up to tell you that Kim Jon-Il has died, and they can do it using as many characters as they want, and believe me these guys can use a lot of characters, and not only that but after they are done telling you, they are standing there in front of you and you have to have conversation with them and then find some polite way to say get out of here, i need to get some work done. That’s working in an office.
Imagine you discover a lost manuscript. You read it and it has a profound effect on you. You want as many people as possible to discover it and be affected as you were.
Publishers tell you that there is no market for re-discovered literature. But a big publisher is required for the book to have the scale of distribution it deserves.
After a while you see the solution. This is a lost manuscript and nobody would know if you were to put your own name on it, market it as something brand new and get all the buzz that would come from the reviews and best seller lists.
Would you do it? Would you condemn someone who did?
When you shop for a gift, your recipient observes only what you bought, and not what alternatives you considered.
Why would price matter more to givers than receivers? Dr. Flynn and his Stanford colleague, Gabrielle Adams, attribute it to the “egocentric bias” of givers who focus on their own experience in shopping. When they economize by giving a book, they compare it with the bracelet that they passed up.
But the recipients have a different frame of reference. They don’t know anything about the bracelet, so they’re not using it for comparison. The salient alternative in their minds may be the possibility of no gift at all, in which case the book looks wonderfully thoughtful.
Click through for an excellent article on giving, touching on the potlatch, the gift registry, and re-gifting.
Michelin has come out with its new Chicago guide, including its lowest level award, the Bib Gourmand. As last year, a list that includes both Ann Sather, a pancake place, and Frontera Grill, a Mecca (according to me!) is incongruous. This makes me distrust all their other city guides.Are they just making the stuff up for gullible tourists? Are they trying to make you buy the guide just to se their rationalization for having Ann Sather in their guide? I decided to give the Bib Gourmand section a chance and went to Yolo in Skokie just a few miles from Evanston.
The first bit of good news: they have a kids menu. The second: they seem to specialize in moles. The third: the food is good! Finally, it is BYOB, helping to keep down the expense. I’m going again. But is it Frontera Grill? No! Is it one of the best restaurants in Chicago? Nope. Should it be on a “good local restaurant” guide? Definitely yes.
I’m not buying any Michelin guides for Chicago or anywhere else.
A device that blurs photos of you in compromising situations.
In an ad promoting the brand and the new “utility,” provocatively dressed women dance with abandon in a club while the surrounding men (who look distinctly married in some cases) stand at attention, ready to pounce. Meanwhile a screencrawl informs the viewer that in 2011, technological advances and social networks can now turn a night out into… hell. Next, an interloper with a camera snaps a series of pictures illuminating the negative consequences of being caught on film in such a setting. As luck would have it, though, the patrons of this club are protected by Photoblocker, and the resulting snapshots are flooded with white light.
Click the link for the details, including a promotional video.
How did British PM David Cameron steel himself for the historic all-nighter last week in Brussels?
Cameron, it is said, used his tried-and-tested “full-bladder technique” to achieve maximum focus and clarity of thought throughout the gruelling nine-hour session in Brussels. During the formal dinner and subsequent horse-trading into the early hours, the prime minister remained intentionally “desperate for a pee”.
Showing a healthy disdain for ivory-tower types who claim the opposite:
Australian and American researchers examined the “effect of acute increase in urge to void on cognitive function in healthy adults”. After making eight “healthy young adults” drink two litres of water over two hours, the researchers asked them to complete a series of tasks to test their cognitive performance. They concluded from the results that an “extreme urge to void [urinate] is associated with impaired cognition”.
Cheap Talk 