Freakonomics Radio

The Sorrows of Young Werther was written mostly as a series of fictional letters by a young dilettante artist named Werther.

He travels to the countryside, falls in love with a girl who's already engaged, despairs, and then borrows two pistols from her fianc.

They are loaded. The clock strikes twelve. I say amen. Charlotte, Charlotte. Farewell, farewell. Sorry to spoil the ending.

Many people who read the book killed themselves by the same method, and sometimes they even killed themselves with the book open to the page where he was described as killing himself.

All the way back to 1774 when this novel came out. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

For those of you who have never read it, I had never read it. The Sorrows of Young Werther was written mostly as a series of fictional letters by a young dilettante artist named Werther.

They are loaded. The clock strikes twelve. I say amen. Charlotte, Charlotte. Farewell, farewell. Sorry to spoil the ending.

All right. So we're going to have to go all the way back to 1774 when this novel came out. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

For those of you who have never read it, I had never read it. The Sorrows of Young Werther was written mostly as a series of fictional letters by a young dilettante artist named Werther.

They are loaded. The clock strikes twelve. I say amen. Charlotte, Charlotte. Farewell, farewell. Sorry to spoil the ending.

She even wrote a book called The Last Gift of Time, Life Beyond 60.

She even wrote a book called The Last Gift of Time, Life Beyond 60.

She even wrote a book called The Last Gift of Time, Life Beyond 60.

Last year he published a cookbook called Modernist Cuisine.

Six volumes, 2400 pages, 3500 color photographs, 1600 recipes.

Modernist Cuisine retails for $625 but you can get it cheaper on Amazon.

It was produced by a team of three dozen people, chefs, writers, editors, photographers.

In it you'll find all sorts of recipes as well as entire chapters on microbiology for cooks, the physics of food and water and a chapter on foams.

Well, I love chicken feet as it turns out. In my new cookbook we have a fantastic recipe for puffed chicken feet.

Like they need more puffing? Do you mean do you blow air in like a peaking duck?

What you do is you cook them sous vide first which makes them sort of soft. You pull the bones out. Ah. Then you dehydrate them a little bit. Then you deep fry them.

And if you've ever had chicharrones or fried pork rinds, it puffs up amazingly. Well, you do that with the chicken feet but it's got this great chicken flavor and they also look like these weird twisted puffed sort of little gloves.

He's now written a book called The Heart And The Fist, The Education of a Humanitarian, The Making of a Navy SEAL.

My name is Saloma Miller-Furlong. I am the author of a new memoir called Why I Left the Amish.

And what is your book called, Emma? Runaway Amish Girl.

I ended up writing a book called Parentonomics, An Economist Dad's Parenting Experiences.

I ended up writing a book called Parentonomics, An Economist Dad's Parenting Experiences.

He is a legal scholar at American University and the author of a book called Advancing the Ball, Race, Reformation and the Quest for Equal Coaching Opportunity in the NFL.

In early twenty twenty four, the influential social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who teaches at New York University, joined this argument with a book called The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness.

In early twenty twenty four, the influential social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who teaches at New York University, joined this argument with a book called The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness.

Everyone has a theory about what causes it. There is only one explanation. There is no other theory that can make sense of a synchronized global collapse in mental health.

Other than the fact that in 2010, the great majority kids had a flip phone, no high speed Internet, no unlimited data, no Instagram. And by 2015, we all have a smartphone, high speed Internet, unlimited data, Instagram, front facing camera.

So we had a list of 82 books that had been pre-rated as extremely tempting and difficult to put down once you get engaged. So these are books like The Da Vinci Code and The Hunger Games.

No, Harry Potter was way better than Twilight.

If I tallied up the number of books I read over a 20year period before I started this podcast, maybe I read 30 books in 20 years. ... they were almost all young adult fiction because mostly I just read the books that my kids were reading, like Harry Potter and the Twilight series.

I have. I haven't read it.

She came from an Orthodox Jewish family and she was always the blonde outlier.

She was very, very, very, very proud of her family's Orthodox history and ancestry.

And so for her, it was jarring because she had no idea that her father was not her biological father.

Let me tell you what it's like to find out you were wrong, just plain wrong about who you are and where you come from.

I have. I haven't read it. She came from an Orthodox Jewish family and she was always the blonde outlier.

Let me tell you what it's like to find out you were wrong, just plain wrong about who you are and where you come from.

To look in the mirror one day and see a stranger staring back at you. That's what happened to me.

A family secret was kept from me for my entire life. And in the middle of the night I sometimes ask myself this question. Who am I?

Who am I now that I know the truth?

Esther recently published a book called How To Raise Successful People.

So my sense of reading you overall, particularly reading your new book Age of Revolutions, is a sense of sadness and surprise that the world finds itself today in a state of peril.

This one, Age of Revolutions is subtitled progress and backlash from 1600 to the present.

It's all interesting and well written and insightful but it is the present that I wanted to speak about with Zakaria.

We are living through possibly the most revolutionary period in human history.

Here's what Zakaria writes about Russia Vladimir Putin has harnessed identity politics and ginguism as a response to his nation's structural decline and Zakaria says Putin has done this masterfully.

That makes me think of The Millionaire Next Door of that book. You know, that like all these immigrant parents that come in like make their kids wealthy then they blow it all by the second generation.

If you were an environmentalist in the 1960s, your main concern wasn't climate change. It was overpopulation.

And listeners who were old enough might remember the book, The Population Bomb, the fear that the world was going to start to death because there were too many people.

There was a warning on the cover. While you are reading these words, it said, four people will have died from starvation, most of them children.

And I thought, oh, my gosh. In the edition I read, which is the first edition, said there would be massive famines in the 1970s. Basically, it said we were in deep, deep trouble.

Environmentalists were saying humankind was pushing the Earth's limits. Technologists, meanwhile, said those limits were nowhere in sight.

books like, you know, The Population Bomb and Al Gore's first book, Earth in the Balance, Limits to Growth, all these great environmental classics all stem directly from his work.

And that's why we called the finished film The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.

It's all about the joy of discovery and how you can find things out if you're willing to think about them in different ways.

That is the title of the definitive Feynman biography published in 1992 by James Glick.

He was an old fashioned sexist.