THEBLOWUP - Stephen J. Dubner

- Date of Birth: August 26, 1963 (annivesary of Women's Suffrage Day, FWIW)

- Location: Schenectady, N.Y. (hometown of Mickey Rourke, Pat Riley, and Ann B. Davis)

- Profession: Writer

- What are you most excited about right now? Being home (am typing on a plane, once again)

- Who or what has influenced you the most? A ton of people, living and dead, Including my mother, Ring Lardner, Adam Moss, Steve Levitt.

- What is your biggest road block when it comes to working? If I don't have a deadline, I might as well not even try to work. That's why I gather up as many deadlines as I can and lay them out In front of me like an Impossible obstacle course.

- What do you hope to do in the future? See the Steelers win another Super Bowl; watch my kids become better people than I am; write a few more books; travel to about 50 places I've never been; learn to play chess well and piano better; complain less.

- Does your work fufill you? Inevitably.

- What antagonizes you the most? Sometimes there are puzzles to solve In my work -- reporting or thinking or writing puzzles -- that will torture me, day and night, until I've solved them.

- What is your working space like? It's a one-bedroom apartment I rent as a studio, with me In the bedroom and my assistant In the living room. It's In the back of a brownstone across the street from where I live, so my kids can stop In after school and look out the window and see the blue jays beating up the sparrows In the garden.

- What makes you do what you do? No talent at anything else.

- Explain a formative moment or idea for you. When I got to the New York Times Magazine as an editor, I was working on manuscripts by a lot of well-known writers, and these manuscripts were often … well, bad. I thought, Hey, I could be that bad too. In a weird way, It gave me the confidence to push ahead with my own writing. [Close Interview]