Remember how Mr. Miyagi taught The Karate Kid how to fight? Wax on/Wax off. Paint the fence. Don’t forget to breathe. A coach is the coach because he knows what the student needs to do to adv...
https://cheaptalk.org/2013/03/18/why-a-coach-should-be-ambiguous/
The case of The Oscars: BEST PICTURE “This is a preferential system. I’m putting Amour at No. 9 because I’m just pissed off at that film. Beasts of the Southern Wild is a movie that I ...
https://cheaptalk.org/2013/02/24/annals-of-manipulable-voting/
It’s hard to measure media bias in general because bias is hard to quantify. Movie reviews are one way forward, a cool idea in a new paper by DellaVigna and Kennedy. Here’s the abstract: ...
https://cheaptalk.org/2011/09/22/measuring-media-bias-using-movie-reviews/
We are reading it in my Behavioral Economics class and so far we have finished the first 5 chapters which make up Part I of the book “Anticipating Future Preferences.” In Ran Spiegler’s typ...
David Mitchell is a stammerer who wrote beautifully about it in his semi-autobiographical novel Black Swan Green. Here is Mitchell on The King’s Speech. In the article he talks about his own ...
https://cheaptalk.org/2011/03/01/david-mitchell-on-the-kings-speech/
What makes an actor a big box office draw? Is it fame alone or is talent required? Usually that question is confounded: it’s hard to rule out that an actor became famous because he is talen...
https://cheaptalk.org/2010/11/29/harry-potter-and-the-quasi-experiment/
They say you can’t compare the greats from yesteryear with the stars of today. But when it comes to Nobel laureates, to some extent you can. The Nobel committee is just like a kid with a bag of...
https://cheaptalk.org/2010/10/03/nobels-revealed-preferences/
I saw it on the plane yesterday. Very funny, very insightful, somewhat disjointed at the end. Forgive me for doing the game theorist’s equivalent of spoiling a time-travel movie by pointing o...
We saw The Fantastic Mr Fox a few weeks ago. It was a thoroughly entertaining movie and I highly recommend it. But this is not a movie review. Instead I am thinking about movie previews and...
https://cheaptalk.org/2010/01/12/sitting-through-10-minutes-of-movie-previews-and-ads/
Out now is a collection of academic essays on The Big Lebowski. Where cult films go, academics will follow. New in bookstores, and already in its second printing, is “The Year’s Work in Lebow...
https://cheaptalk.org/2010/01/07/the-dude-theory-and-applications/