Daniel Akst Biography

Dan Akst is a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Slate and other leading publications. His most recent book is We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess (2011, the paperback has been retitled Temptation). He was also a member of the editorial board at Newsday, where he used write a weekly column. Now he has taken over the Ideas Market blog at Wall Street Journal, where he also does the Week in Ideas column in the paper's weekend edition.

His first book, Wonder Boy, was chosen one of the 10 best books of 1990 by Business Week. His novel St. Burl's Obituary (1996) was short-listed for the PEN/Faulkner prize for best work of fiction by an American. His novel The Webster Chronicle, was praised in the Atlantic Monthly, Washington Post and elsewhere.

Akst is a contributing editor at the Wilson Quarterly, where he has written about the historical impact of plummeting food prices, the reasons looks should matter, our changing attitudes about thrift, and the problem of self-control. He has been a Koret Fellow at the University of California (Berkeley) Graduate School of Journalism, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC, and a public policy fellow at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and lives in New York's Hudson Valley.

Daniel Akst's website

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