Freakonomics Radio

His books include What Technology Wants and New Rules for the New Economy.

His books include What Technology Wants and New Rules for the New Economy.

Actually, it was told by the New York Times technology writer John Markoff, who wrote a kind of overlooked book called What the Door Mouse Said, which was telling the hippie origins of the personal computer and how basically from Doug Engelbert and Steve Jobs and Stuart Brand, they were all dropping acid.

And his coolest book yet. It's called Cool Tools.

So Cool Tools is a book on paper and it's only available on paper that's a little bit oversized. It's a lot oversized. Come on. If you open it up, it's kind of like a small towel the size of a dish towel. And it is about 1,500 recommendations for Cool Tools and tool is in the broadest sense of something that's useful to you.

It's more important that you know that these exist rather than that you purchase them because a tool is really just an opportunity with a handle.

It's just a way of thinking about something differently that we make real and so you can use this as a resource of getting ideas about what is possible to do.

Favorite author is Andy Dillard and her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was something that just made me want to write and I can read that any time of day or night and just be filled with excitement and I read anything by her and to me she's just genius.

The book is called The Way of the Knife. The subtitle is The CIA, A Secret Army and a War at the Ends of the Earth.

It's about the what I call the shadow war, the war outside of the declared war zone since the September 11th attacks in places like Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia and how the CIA has taken on a central role in this secret war the United States has been waging.

It's called The Churchill Factor, How One Man Made History.

It's doing very well in the UK. And I'm sure it will do well here. It's a very good book.

He's a fascinating character. Your interpretation of him is interesting on every page.

The Churchill Factor is the book. It's really extraordinary and I encourage anyone within the sound of my voice to read it.

I think the mission of the book is wonderful to remind generations now who Churchill was, what he did for those who are starting to forget or those who didn't know.

But the book I can always read with pleasure and find a laugh on every page is Scoop by Evelyn Waugh.

It was it was getting hold of a secondhand copy of Abbot and Mansfield's Greek grammar, accidents and syntax, without which I would not be where I am today.

Both Jim and I had an interest in zombies and vampires and other forms of the undead going back many many years That's Glenn Whitman. He's an economist at California State University Northridge and I also have a second career as a TV writer I wrote for the TV show fringe for many years and now I'm writing for the TV show matador The Jim he mentioned is Jim Dow who teaches finance at Northridge In fact, the two of us bonded over Buffy the vampire slayer when we discovered that we were both fans of it And so Glenn Whitman and Jim Dow decided to put together a book called Economics of the Undead zombies vampires and the dismal science

It contains 23 essays by a variety of scholars with titles like tragedy of the blood commons the case for privatizing the humans and Investing secrets of the undead I am not kidding

That's Joseph Tlushkin, author of many books, including Jewish Literacy.

And actually have a book coming out called Slim by Design, Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Places.

I'd written a bestseller called Mindless Eating. Why you eat more than you think.

But as McDonald later described in his book Truth, Lies, and O-Rings, the boosters had never been tested below 53 degrees. And the forecast for launch morning was calling for temperatures much lower than that.

We talked to Benjamin Barber, who's an academic, a political theorist, who wrote a book called If Mayors Ruled the World.

I'm a senior research scholar at the City University of New York, professor emeritus at Rutgers University, a political theorist, and an author of 18 books, the most recent of which is If Mayors Ruled the World, Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities.

In the book, Barber argues that cities are paragons of good governance, potentially at least, and at least compared to nation states.

And that is largely due to their mayors. Mayors, Barber says, are inherently bipartisan.

They can't afford not to be. And above all else, they're focused on solving actual problems.

So I think the attraction of this idea that we're talking that mayors should quote rule the world whether we mean that metaphorically or in some tiny way literally is the idea that mayors have to be responsible to voters if for no other reason than that their potential losses are so much more tangible than a federal or state official.

Benjamin Barber, in his book If Mayors Ruled the World, argues that we should create a global parliament of mayors to help solve problems that national governments aren't so good at solving.

Corley is an accountant and a financial planner in New Jersey. He wrote a book called Rich Habits, The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy Individuals.

6% of the wealthy gossip. Compare that to 79% of the poor who gossip.

So if you want to live in San Francisco, it's nice if you don't have to buy a five-bedroom house.

I was walking past the Georgia section at the University of Chicago library at some point and see this title that says the Cherokee Land Lottery. Big thick book, walking past it.

I pulled the book out and there are series of these books about the lotteries that describe the participants, names, actual winners, what they won, that sort of thing.

whose book The Psychological Care of Infinite Child was a big sensation in the late 20s.

Various and manifold is the harvest of diseases reaped by certain workers from the crafts and trades that they pursue. All the profit that they get is a fatal injury to their health.