My Favorite Things from 2024

These are a few of my favorite reads, listens, and sources of laughs from 2024.

Every December, I share a list of my favorite things from the past year in my newsletter. I hope you’ll enjoy this year’s list! Milkman Delivers will be back with a Q&A diving into a new insight from behavioral science in the New Year. In the meantime, I’m wishing you and yours a fabulous holiday season.

My Favorite Cartoon of 2024

“Do you have to stare at her right in front of me?” by Paul Noth in the September 20, 2024 issue of The New Yorker. Donuts are just so tempting… (follow Paul Noth on Instagram or X)

My Favorite Podcast of 2024

“Love Factually” by Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick

In each episode of this delightful new podcast, behavioral scientists Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick dissect a different romantic comedy. But they don’t engage in your standard banter about the movie’s highs and lows. Instead, after a quick summary of the film, they dive into an analysis of whether its plotlines and commentary accurately represent what we know to be true about relationships (according to science). This podcast is a gift to everyone who loves rom coms and learning. It’s magnificently fun edutainment, and I highly recommend it. I particularly enjoyed the “Clueless” episode.

Episode Honorable Mention: “Thanksgiving with Ina Garten” from The Daily in which the Barefoot Contessa offers a master class on the art of hosting a dinner party. Prominently featured tips that every behavioral science lover will appreciate include detailed planning and simplification.

My Three Favorite Books of 2024

I know it’s a bit lazy of me to choose three favorite books this year, but I just couldn’t pick between these gems. I highly recommend them all!

Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There by Tali Sharot and Cass Sunstein

This book will help you refresh your point of view. Sharot and Sunstein reveal why it’s easy to be lulled into complacency about anything and how to prevent falling into this trap. In the bargain, they’ll help you live a happier, healthier, wiser and more just life.

Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg

A perk of being an author is that I get a lot of free books, and I normally read the first page on the short walk between my mailbox and my office at Wharton. Rarely am I so engrossed that I’m unable to tear myself away, but this book captivated me from the start – I literally couldn’t put it down. In addition to being highly entertaining, Supercommunicators will make you a better conversationalist, both when the stakes are low and when they’re high. Highly recommended!

May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics and Studies Exploit our Biases – And What We Can Do About It by Alex Edmans

This book will improve the quality of your thinking. Edmans explains how to avoid common biases in order to successfully separate fact from fiction. May Contain Lies is all about the science of cause and effect and excerpts will soon be required reading in my Wharton MBA class.

My Favorite Research Paper of 2024

“The Health Costs of Cost Sharing” by Amitabh Chandra, Evan Flack and Ziad Obermeyer, which appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. This paper employs a clever statistical trick to causally determine what happens when an American over the age of 65 suddenly needs to pay more out-of-pocket for their medications. The key finding is that people make the critical mistake of cutting back on life-saving drugs (anticipating that missing a month of, say, their statins won’t matter much). These cutbacks have massive adverse consequences, producing a ~14% increase in mortality for each $100 per month sudden decrease in a person’s budget thanks to discontinuities in insurance companies’ out-of-pocket drug coverage.

Runner Up: “Megastudy Testing 25 Treatments to Reduce Antidemocratic Attitudes and Partisan Animosity” by Jan Voelkel and 75+ co-authors, which appeared in the journal Science. This paper features a megastudy, which is the approach to science that my collaborators and I have been promoting since 2021. This particular megastudy tests a variety of approaches to… you guessed it… reducing antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity. Happily, the paper finds a number of short, behaviorally-informed interventions capable of improving these important outcomes.

My Favorite Essay of 2024

“The Nobel Winner Who Liked to Collaborate with His Adversaries” by Cass Sunstein

This year, behavioral scientists around the globe mourned the passing of the great Daniel Kahneman (Nobel laureate, mega-bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom). In homage to Danny’s passing, his friend and co-author Cass Sunstein penned a terrific essay in the New York Times celebrating Danny’s habit of pursuing adversarial collaborations to find the truth in cases where Danny found himself in disagreement with other scientists.

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I hope you’ll enjoy exploring some of my favorite things from 2024.

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and Bestselling Author of How to Change

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