The guys over at Freakonomics have a show in the works exploring suicide and -- surprise -- Las Vegas will figure in prominently. No surprise, given that we have the highest metropolitan suicide rate in the U.S.

Why? They plan to find out as they interview former UNLV sociologist Matt Wray, now at Temple University, who penned a seminal paper on Las Vegas' suicide problem. An excerpt from the podcast interview with Wray over at Freakonomics:

I was living in Las Vegas and I wanted to understand more about Las Vegas as a community. I’d just moved there and was struck by the exceedingly high suicide rate in Las Vegas. So, I wanted to know what’s causing this, and more specifically could it be something about the place that actually is effectively sort of suicidogenic. You know, what’s generating this high rate of suicide over such an extended period of time? Because as far back as I could go in the statistics for decades I was seeing this consistently high rate. So it was a puzzle really that more than anything else, a curiosity that led me down this road.