Daniel Akst

Photo by Louise G. Dewhirst

about the author

Journalist and Author of Temptation: Finding Self-Control in an Age of Excess

Biography
Press

Dan Akst is a writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Slate, and other leading publications. His latest book is We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess (Penguin Press). He recently became a member of the editorial board at Newsday, where he also writes a weekly column.

His first book, Wonder Boy: Barry Minkow—The Kid Who Swindled Wall Street (1990), was the nonfiction account of a wondrous financial fraud he uncovered while working at the Los Angeles Times; it was chosen as one of the ten best books of 1990 by BusinessWeek. His novel St. Burl’s Obituary (1996), about a fat man who becomes unrecognizably thin (and takes up the chance to re-inhabit his former life), was short-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award for best work of fiction by an American. His novel The Webster Chronicle (2001), which updated the lives of Cotton and Increase Mather in the context of a very modern witch hunt, was praised in The Atlantic, The 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, D.C., 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 bucolic Hudson Valley, where temptation is easily avoided.

Learn more about this speaker