This course will cover contemporary social science research on happiness. Topics will include major contributing and non-contributing factors, including money, relationships, technology, and physical health, global and historical perspectives on happiness, and biases and other problems of happiness measurement.

Why is your suburban hometown so boring? Why are American cities racially segregated? How can we make our cities more walkable for the future? I'll run through a crash course of the history, the present, and the future of urban design, and hopefully give you a better understanding of why our cities look the way they do.

Economists seem to have gone to absurd lengths to demonstrate causality in empirical ways. In this course, I'll talk about why we want to know this sort of thing, and I'll sample some of the most clever instrumental variables and other randomized trials for this purpose.

All sorts of weird drama has happened on Wikipedia. Edit wars over hyphens and dashes, over spellings and punctuation, very few with real-life consequences. I'll tell some of the stories here, and why they matter (or don't.)

Compete in a homemade imitation of a Japanese game show which centers on frivolous tests of ingenuity. Prove that you have more obscure knowledge than your friends, or that the judges like you better - we're not sure which.

Cars have completely changed how we live, how we think, and how we move in this country. Highways crisscross our cities, traffic keeps us frustrated, and suburban development keeps us isolated and far from each other. How has this changed our country? We'll explore what the effects of this are and examples of transportation innovation as a reaction to this.

People are really bad at hiding their hand. We'll talk about some ways they sometimes are really really obvious.