Stephen J. Dubner

Stephen Joseph Dubner was born at Duanesburg in New York State, the youngest of eight children of parents who had both been born Jewish and had converted to Catholicism before his birth; he grew up in a devout Catholic household, and his father, a copy editor at a Troy newspaper, died when he was ten. He finished high school a year early, graduated from Appalachian State in 1984 after a spell in a rock band that signed with Arista, and took an MFA in writing at Columbia in 1990, where he also taught English.

As an adult he returned to Judaism — the faith his parents had left — and told that story in his first book, Turbulent Souls: A Catholic Son's Return to His Jewish Family, a finalist for the Koret Jewish Book Award in 1998. He has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker and Time, and with the economist Steven Levitt he wrote Freakonomics and its sequels, SuperFreakonomics, Think Like a Freak and When to Rob a Bank; he hosts the programme Freakonomics Radio.