Stephen J. Dubner is an author and journalist who lives in New York City.
Posts published in November, 2005
Freakonomics Illustrated
By Stephen J. DubnerThe 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, [...]
Just a reminder
By Steven D. LevittThe 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. :)
A Bunch of Books We Like
By Stephen J. DubnerAmazon.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.
Tim Harford spills his guts
By Steven D. LevittPatri 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.
Everything in Freakonomics is wrong!
By Steven D. LevittOr 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 [...]
Three Cheers for Big Pharma
By Stephen J. DubnerJeffrey 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 [...]
Freakonomics: Just Another Thing to Sh*t On
By Stephen J. DubnerAlthough 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 [...]
Know Any Foreign Newspaper or Magazine Editors?
By Stephen J. DubnerIf 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 [...]
Held Hostage by our Blog
By Steven D. LevittWhile 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 [...]
Who Is Loyd Eskildson, and Why Does He Game the Amazon.com Review System?
By Stephen J. DubnerThere’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 [...]
Family Affairs
By Stephen J. DubnerPo 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 [...]
Ebay Charity auction update
By Steven D. LevittTim 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 [...]
Huge in Canada
By Stephen J. DubnerWell, 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 [...]
You Can’t Win Them All
By Stephen J. DubnerI’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 [...]
You can own the very first signed copy of Freakonomics (and change a child’s life in the process)
By Steven D. LevittJust 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 [...]