Freakonomics god Stephen Dubner is our SuperGuest for today's Scramble, and he talks about how to think more rationally and creatively, the upside of quitting, and the latest studies on happiness. Then, we chat with sports economist Andrew Zimbalist, and WNPR's capital region reporter Jeff Cohen, on the value of publicly-funded sports arenas. What's the status on the possible building of a baseball stadium in Hartford? Is it a done deal? What else have we learned and expect to understand about what a business like that may do to the city?
Finally, theater critic Frank Rizzo joins us to talk about the big wins for Hartford Stage's "A Gentleman's Guide to Love And Murder," which snagged the Tony Award for best new musical. The accomplishments extend to Robert L. Freedman, who won best book of a musical, Linda Cho, who won best costumes, and Artistic Director Darko Tresnjak, who became the first artistic director of a Connecticut theater to win a Tony for staging a musical.
MAYHEM AND CATASTROPHE! Something bad happened in our audio-storing equipment, and we lost some of this show. (If you insist on a technical explanation, I'm told one of the crossbeams has gone out askew on treadle.) Actually we lost all of the show, but will be able to recover the last two segments and embed them here. But my conversation with Stephen Dubner has been lost forever and will probably be acted out in crude puppet shows as part of our post-apocalyptic oral tradition. A post mortem suggests that the big mistake, never to be repeated, was allowing Chucky to be weekend guest engineer. Really sorry!
We now resume the normally scheduled webpage. What do you think? Comment below, email Colin@wnpr.org, or tweet @wnprcolin.
GUESTS:
- Stephen Dubner is the co-host of Freakonomics Radio, and author of many books, including his latest, Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain, co-authored with Steven Levitt
- Frank Rizzo is the theater critic for The Hartford Courant and blogs on Behind the Curtain
- Andrew Zimbalist is the Robert A. Woods Professor of Economics at Smith College who has written extensively on the business of sports. He’s the author of several books including his most recent, The Sabermetric Revolution: Assessing the Growth of Analytics in Baseball
- Jeff Cohen is the capital region reporter for WNPR
