The first time I went on The Daily Show, nearly five years ago, I dreaded it for weeks in advance. I had a terrible fear of going on TV and had avoided it scrupulously, even in publicizing our first book. When Jon Stewart came knocking, however, it was impossible to come up with a credible reason to give the publisher as to why I couldn’t do it. I had no choice.
Here’s a sampling of the latest coverage:
Reviews
* Wall Street Journal: “Not only a book with mind-blowing ideas, innovative research, and quality investigative journalism, it’s also a story about creativity and what it takes to get the mindset to turn conventional concepts upside down.”
By the time you finish this blog post, you will understand why we differ from our critics in our conclusions.
Tonight, ABC’s 20/20 devotes a full hour to SuperFreakonomics. The show’s five segments can be previewed online:
That was the question posed in this recent contest.
As usual, it didn’t take long for the correct answer to be posted. In this case, it came from one P. Mardel, commenter No. 3:
Both introduced low-cost interventions that had dramatic results. Both were also ostracized by the then-conventional wisdom. Ignatz Semmelweis promoted hand-washing in maternity wards, Robert S. McNamara introduced seat belts in Ford cars.
SuperFreakonomics officially debuts today, already near the top of the Amazon bestseller lists here in the U.S., in Canada, and in the U. K.. The Financial Times calls SuperFreakonomics “a page-turner… a book with plenty of style; underneath the dazzle, there is substance too.” The New York Post advises: “Don’t go to the water cooler without it.”
Our critics accuse us of manipulation and cherry-picking and misrepresenting a variety of arguments about climate change and energy production. If everything they said was actually true, it would indeed be a damning indictment. But it�s not.
There’s a price war going on among booksellers — WalMart is offering a handful of big new books for just $10, which forced Amazon to counter — but unfortunately, SuperFreakonomics is not one of them. On Amazon, it costs $16.19. Is it worth it?
To help you decide, here’s a roundup of some early notices for the book:
Yesterday, HuffingtonPost ran this cast of characters you can expect to hear about in SuperFreakonomics. It was accompanied by a video preview in which Dubner’s juggling practice pays off and Levitt wonders why college students, if they’re so altruistic in the lab, never give him money in the subway:
Fascinating article in today’s Washington Post by Emily Wax about how Indian brides-to-be are holding out for one particular convenience before committing to marriage: an indoor toilet.
But wait, you may say: women in India don’t have the leverage to make such demands, do they?
For a few years now, this blog has included a link whereby readers could sign up for an e-mail newsletter. Many of you did so but for whatever reason we never actually sent out anything. If we had something to say, we’d just say it here on the blog. But now with a new book finally about to be published here and in the U.K. (and other English-speaking nations), we have fired up the e-mail list. The first missive went out last week. If you wanted it and got it, do nothing. If you got it and didn’t want it, you may unsubscribe and our feelings won’t be hurt. If you didn’t get it and want it, sign up here.
The charity auction for the first copy off the presses of SuperFreakonomics will wrap up later today.
Our new book comes out on October 20.
If you’d like to own this first copy and be a good citizen at the same time, here’s your chance: it is being auctioned off on eBay, with the proceeds going to The Smile Train, a charity which performs cleft-repair surgery on poor children all over the world.
A while back, we gave you a sneak peak of the SuperFreakonomics book cover. Your comments were a blast to read. Who knew there were so many graphic designers among our readership?
Alas, we didn’t change a thing about the cover. Here’s a brief video clip, shot by Meghan Shupe, of the cover being printed. The machine is in Maryland and shoots out 900 jackets a minute.
It is fascinating to poke through history and see how often cheap and simple fixes solved problems that were routinely thought to be either unsolvable or, at best, solved by very expensive, complicated, and invasive means.
We wanted to let you know that Dubner is scheduled to appear on Good Morning America this Thursday, Aug. 27.
The mother of all deadlines fast approaches: our new book, SuperFreakonomics, is due to be published on October 20. In the meantime, how about a little contest?
Think of it as a guess-the-number-of-jelly-beans-in-a-jar contest except in this case the jar is infinitely expandable, and the jelly beans don’t yet exist.
We are hard at work on SuperFreakonomics, which will be published as soon as it finishes simmering in our computers. This may well occur before the end of the year. In the meantime, how about some pants? A company named Bonobos makes what it calls “awesome fitting trousers.” New York magazine agrees, as does The Times; their pants have even . . .
I asked my 8-year-old daughter Amanda if she had any suggestions as to how I could be a better dad. “Finish SuperFreakonomics,” she answered. “I am tired of waiting to read it.”
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, natch) should include visuals to . . .