The person who made this web page is plainly crazy, in a really good way. It is a visual rendering of the Freakonomics chapter titled “Why Do Drug Dealers Live With Their Moms?” The coincidence is that, inspired by the amazing work of Edward Tufte, I have been thinking about how our next book (SuperFreakonomics, [...]

The Ebay charity auction of the first signed copy of Freakonomics ends around 1 pm eastern time today.
Please don’t bid any higher, because I have pledged a matching donation for whatever the price of the book. :)

Amazon.com asked us to compile of list of good economics books (well, books that are at least loosely concerned with economics), and since we’re often asked that same question by our readers, I’ll go ahead and post the Amazon link here.

Patri Friedman, who is among other things a high-stakes poker player and a relative of Milton Friedman (I think), has
an interesting interview with Tim Harford at the blog catallarchy.
Patri’s webpage is pretty amusing as well.

Or at least that is the impression you might get if you read this article in today’s Wall Street Journal.
I will post a longer blog entry once I have had time to fully digest the working paper by Foote and Goetz which is the basis for the article.
For now, I will say just a few [...]

Jeffrey Lacasse, a PhD. candidate in social work at Florida State University, has co-authored a paper claiming that pharmaceutical companies allowed to market directly to consumers take maximum advantage, exaggerating the benefits of their products in large part because the F.D.A. doesn’t pay much attention to the ads. Here’s the paper. In related news, here’s [...]

Although I’ve written a fair amount for magazines and newspapers, I always believed an inevitable drawback of such work was that today’s article became tomorrow’s bird-cage liner. That may be why this photograph is somewhat disheartening: by writing books, I thought I had escaped the whole write/read/poop cycle. The photograph may also represent some sort [...]

If so, you might want to let them know that our monthly Freakonomics column in The New York Times Magazine is now being distributed for secondary publication through The New York Times Syndicate. The column has already been picked up by a number of U. S. papers including The Boston Globe and The Las Vegas [...]

While it is true that Dubner and I sometimes feel that we are held hostage by our blog (in the sense that the constant need to provide new content weighs on us), it has never been our intention to hold reader comments hostage.
We had no idea that if a reader comment contained one of hundreds [...]

There’s a Top 100 Amazon.com reviewer named Loyd Eskildson — that’s what he calls himself anyway — who is not only prolific but, um, hyper-current as well. What do I mean by this? Well, it seems that any time you see a review by Eskildson, it is near the very top of a given book’s [...]

Po Bronson is, among other things, the author of five books. The first two were novels. The third, The Nudist on the Late Shift, was a rat-a-tat chronicle of Silicon Valley during its most chaotic and muscular era. His fourth book became a big best-seller; it’s called What Should I Do With My Life? and [...]

Tim Harford has generously chosen to donate to charity the proceeds from the Ebay auction of the first copy of Freakonomics I ever signed. He was even kind enough to let me pick the charity, SmileTrain.
I don’t think he ever dreamed it would go for what the current bid is on Ebay. My [...]

Well, we took our lumps in the U.K., losing out to “The World Is Flat” in the inaugural Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. But here’s some consolation: it turns out we’re huge in Canada. Having grown up in upstate New York, I’ve got an “accent” that’s often mistaken for Canadian, and [...]

I’ve just returned to my hotel in London, from the inaugural Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, for which Freakonomics was short-listed. Well, you can’t them all. The award was won by Tom Friedman for The World Is Flat. As it turns out, this was the one book for which no author [...]

Just before Freakonomics hit the bookshelves, a reporter from the Financial Times named Tim Harford flew out to Chicago to write a profile about me, which you can read here.
At the end of the interview, he asked me to autograph his book. I was surprised because no one had ever asked me to sign [...]