Award Season

It has been said many times that awards are meaningless — unless you happen to win one. I guess that’s true. When we heard not long ago that the Webby Award for Best Copy/Writing on a website was not awarded to Freakonomics.com (yeah yeah yeah, we were happy just to be nominated) but to some hack outfit called TheNewYorker.com, I thought, Well, that would have just been another wasted evening in black tie.

But then we heard that BookSense, the national coalition of independent bookstores, had chosen Freakonomics as its nonfiction Book of the Year. Today, Levitt and I are going to Washington, D.C. for the annual Book Expo America to accept the BookSense award.

We also recently received news that Freakonomics has been named a finalist in the 2006 Gerald Loeb Awards for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism, administered by the Anderson School of Management at UCLA.

And maybe someday we’ll even get our hands on an Oscar. Freakonomics has just been optioned by a Hollywood producer for a feature-length documentary. More details when we’re able to say …