Steven E. Landsburg is an economist at the University of Rochester, who writes for Slate. He has a perverse mind that applies economics to all sorts of problems, and comes up with suprising (and sometimes disturbing) results. Prof. Landsburg is also the author of the popular, entertaining, and very contrarian Armchair Economist. Tobin has a copy if you want to borrow.
I've heard things about Prof. Landsburg that I hesitate to add to this wiki. (-: