Thursday, August 21, 2025

The UN General Assembly issues a call for surrogacy to be outlawed

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 A growing number of families are formed by gestational surrogacy, in which a woman bears a child for another couple.  Surrogacy is legal th...
Wednesday, August 20, 2025

Market design podcast on NPR's Planet Money (with Alex Teytelboym)

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  Alex Teytelboym comments throughout a program about market design on NPR's Planet Money:   The episode focuses on the design o...
Tuesday, August 19, 2025

Resuscitation theater ("slow codes"), and Medical Aid in Dying

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 Here's an article pointing out that "slow codes" often constitute resuscitation theater, i.e. they are a way to follow bureau...
Monday, August 18, 2025

Congestion in online labor markets: too many applications

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 As online job ads make it easier to submit chatbot-assisted applications, companies are becoming overwhelmed. The WSJ has this story: How t...
Sunday, August 17, 2025

Cat food, for big cats in zoos (you could call it pet food)

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 Zoos are complicated. Here's the story from NPR: A zoo in Denmark asked patrons to donate their pets. Not as attractions, but for food ...
Saturday, August 16, 2025

A Tale of Two Statues (in Denmark and U.S.)

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 Public art is one of those things that depends in different ways on public and political support. So, in Denmark, one statue of a mermaid i...
Friday, August 15, 2025

Special issue of Economic Theory in Honor of David K. Levine

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 David K. Levine is celebrated: Introduction to the Special Issue in Honor of David K. Levine   by César Martinelli , Economic Theory.  09 ...
Thursday, August 14, 2025

Alcohol is being out-competed by nicotine (and maybe by pretty good non-alcoholic beer)

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 The WSJ has the story: Nicotine Is Hot, Beer Is Not. What Vice Stocks Say About America’s Guilty Pleasures. People are smoking less, but to...
Wednesday, August 13, 2025

Covid vaccines saved millions of lives, mostly of older people

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Here's a recent estimate of lives saved by Covid vaccines. Ioannidis JPA, Pezzullo AM, Cristiano A, Boccia S. Global Estimates of Lives...
Tuesday, August 12, 2025

Heroines of organ donation

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Last week I had the opportunity to see a screening of the movie Abundant , about non-directed organ donors, who have donated organs to stran...
Monday, August 11, 2025

Lucky by Design: The Hidden Economics You Need to Get More of What You Want, by Judd Kessler

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 Here's a great new book about how to navigate markets, by Judd Kessler, who knows his way around. Lucky by Design: The Hidden Economics...
Sunday, August 10, 2025

Visualizing single versus multi-center kidney exchange: Dr. Vivek Kute

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  Dr. Vivek Kute is the transplant nephrologist at one of the most active single-center kidney exchange programs in the world.  When he sp...
Saturday, August 9, 2025

Withdrawals from deceased donor registries

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The NYT is standing by its recent stories on deceased organ donation. In the meantime  Newsweek has this story about people who have had sec...
Friday, August 8, 2025

John Harsanyi: the story behind the Hungarian memorial coin (by Miklos Pinter)

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 Rosemarie Nagel and Miklos Pinter have sent me the following story about how Miklos helped design the game-theoretic image on the Hungaria...
Thursday, August 7, 2025

Stanford conference on extending kidney exchange

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  We'll be welcoming many of our transplantation colleagues to a conference at Stanford today.     ######### Earlier: Tuesday, February...
Wednesday, August 6, 2025

Fake science at scale, via organized paper mills (in PNAS and the NYT)

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 Here's a recent paper from PNAS, analyzing the organized activity of paper mills producing fraudulent papers. The entities enabling sci...
Tuesday, August 5, 2025

Crypto art by Scott Kominers

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Scott Kominers is interviewed about crypto art, by Lorepunk: How Harvard Professor Scott Kominers Makes PFP Puzzles Out Of Math Lorepunk ...
Monday, August 4, 2025

Brain drugs, a review (performance enhancement, side effects, and addiction)

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 From the Free Press,  tasting notes on a variety of performance enhancing drugs for concentration, finally converging on what sounds like n...
Sunday, August 3, 2025

Xenotransplantation in Humans: pig organs edge closer to being clinically kosher

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  It has long been the conventional wisdom in transplantation that xenotransplants--transplanting a kidney from a genetically modified pig ...
Saturday, August 2, 2025

Nicotine news--unintended consequences

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 Nicotine remains a big source of addiction, and (especially in connection with cigarette smoking) a major cause of premature death.  Here...
Friday, August 1, 2025

US Waitlist Registrants who Received Transplantation Abroad

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 Here's a recent article about patients waiting for a deceased-donor organ transplant in the U.S. who (instead) received one overseas (a...