Based on the New York Times bestseller by journalist Stephen J. Dubner and economics professor Steven D. Levitt, the movie adaptation of Freakonomics entertains while exploring facts.
Taking such topics as parenting, cheating, crime, and bribery as points of departure, producer Chad Troutwine assembled six independent filmmakers, including Morgan Spurlock, Alex Gibney, and Eugene Jarecki, to direct a collection of documentary shorts. By applying the science of economics to its subjects, the film reveals some surprising answers to how the world really works.
Just days before the release of the new book by the authors of Freakonomics (not-so-imaginatively titled Superfreakonomics), a controversy sprung up about whether or not the book gets the science on global warming very, very wrong. As folks know, the Freakonomics team of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt found their original zing by taking a contrarian approach to persistent economic puzzles; but a rising chorus of critics — including their New York Times colleague Paul Krugman — are charging that, this time, the pair are way out of their depth.
We spotted an out-of-print Sidney Sheldon on the F train, Bloodline, and discovered through some trick of Amazon’s search semantics that an awesome-looking movie called Burn Witch Burn exists, if only on VHS (the film is directed by an entirely different Sidney). A D train reader held Blood Meridien, the best Cormac McCarthy novel Oprah didn’t tell you to read. We were shocked to see A Million Little Pieces on the Q train: proof of James Frey’s comeback or was the reader simply too young to know that he’s a lying liar who lies and his publisher is still offering refunds (as long as you bought the book before the Oprah skewering).
Also spotted: Freakonomics; Jeanette Walls’ memoir The Glass Castle, a paragon of the “difficult childhood” genre; James Michener’s uber historical epic, Alaska (we wonder if Sarah Palin has ever read it); Sandra Brown’s Chill Factor; Sistah Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever, and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, which we clearly need to get on board with — as we had recurring dreams about having to choose the “right” mother from a hall of witchy doppelgangers when we were growing up.
