number of his peers-might not recognize Levitts work as economics at all. But he has merely distilled the so-called dismal science to its most primal aim: ex- plaining how people get what they want. Unlike most academics, he is unafraid of using personal observations and curiosities; he is also unafraid of anecdote and storytelling (but he is afraid of calcu- lus). He is an intuitionist. He sifts through a pile of data to find a story that no one else has found. He figures a way to measure an ef- fect that veteran economists had declared unmeasurable. His abid- ing interests-though he says he has never trafficked in them himself-are cheating, corruption, and crime.       viii An Explanat ory Not e     Levitts blazing curiosity also proved attractive to thousands of New York Times readers. He was beset by questions and queries, rid- dles and requests-from General Motors and the New York Yankees and U.S. senators but also from prisoners and parents and a man who for twenty years had kept precise data on his sales of bagels. A former Tour de France champion called Levitt to ask his help in proving that the current Tour is rife with doping; the Central Intelligence Agency wanted to know how Levitt might use data to catch money launderers and terrorists. What they were all responding to was the force of Levitts underly- ing belief: that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not un- knowable, and-if the right questions are asked-is even more in- triguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. In New York City, the publishers were telling Levitt he should write a book.