I have been a big fan of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. They are about to release a new book Think Life a Freak on May 18th. Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics are well known best sellers. They have an amazing ability to tell stories with data.
Telling stories with data has impacted other books that I have chosen to read including Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw, Mark Penn’s Microtrends and Tom Davenport’s Competing on Analytics.
After Freakonomics I was pleased to see Levitt and Dubner make a movie with new stories that focused on the hidden side of everything.
And I found the movie very enjoyable. A few of the stories out of their original book while a new story focused on Chicago, their hometown.
The segment, paying high school students $500 for good grades simply brought out the ‘freak’ side of their research. At the same time I have wondered about how the impact of paying students in middle school may have a bigger impact on success rates.
A few were also new to the movie and not addressed in their follow up book SuperFreakonomics. For their new upcoming release they describe a new take on approaching stories with data:
The first two books were rarely prescriptive. For the most part, we simply used data to tell stories we found interesting, shining a light on parts of society that often lay in shadow. This book steps out of the shadows and tries to offer some advice that may occasionally be useful, whether you are interested in minor lifehacks or major global reforms.
I found many interesting twists to Freakonomics. SuperFreakonomics was even better. Cannot wait to begin reading how Levitt and Dubner are going to retrain my brain! The book’s Table of Contents:
- What Does It Mean to Think Like a Freak?
- The Three Hardest Words in the English Language
- What’s Your Problem?
- Like a Bad Dye Job, the Truth Is in the Roots
- Think Like a Child
- Like Giving Candy to a Baby
- What Do King Solomon and David Lee Roth Have in Common?
- How to Persuade People Who Don’t Want to Be Persuaded
- The Upside of Quitting