HarperCollins Speakers Bureau

Jeffrey Kluger

Senior Editor and Writer, Time Magazine


  • Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple
  • The Simplexity of Investing and the Stock Market
  • Skills vs. Pay and Product vs. Profit in Business
  • The 10 vs. 90 Percent Rule in Medicine
  • The Simplexity of Politics, Sports, the Arts, and Science
  • Expert Speaker on the Topics of Psychology, Anthropology, and Sociology


New York

Jeffrey Kluger is a senior editor and writer at Time magazine, principally covering science and social issues. In his newest book Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple (Hyperion) he adeptly translates a newly evolving science into a delightful theory of everything that will have audiences rethinking the rules of business, family, art – and the world around us in much the same way that Freakonomics, The Tipping Point, and Predictably Irrational have done. A seasoned speaker, Kluger explaines how the fascinating theory of simplexity can be applied and made relevant to a diverse range of groups from the corporate world to academic campuses to the realms of politics, the arts, sports, medicine, science, and psychology.

Quite simply, the concept of simplexity shows how things that seem complicated can be preposterously simple; things that seem simple can be dizzyingly complex. In entertaining, informative and eye-opening lectures, Kluger reveals the surprising truths of simplexity such as: how a drinking straw can save thousands of lives; how a million cars can be on the streets but just a few hundred of them can lead to gridlock; how investors behave like atoms; and why swatting a TV indeed makes it work better.  In introducing this concept, he provides audiences with new insight to the following areas:

  • Why are the instruction manuals for cell phones incomprehensible?
  • Why do we always worry about the wrong things?
  • Why do bad teams win so many games and good teams lose so many?
  • Why does a small child talking to a parent learn more from that brief encounter than during a full day in school?
  • Why does the addition of a new bridge or tunnel actually make traffic tie-ups worse?
  • Why do voters who are given a lot of electoral choices often end up electing a candidate most of them don’t want?
  • Why when a football team is trailing its opponent, is it better to attempt a failed touchdown than go for the sure thing – a field goal?
  • Why the American and National Leagues mirror the global economy?
  • Why we all worry most about the least harmful diseases or the wrong injury risks? 

During his tenure at Time, Kluger has written hundreds of stories, including 23 cover stories. Among them are 2003’s coverage of the loss of the shuttle Columbia, 2005’s cover on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and a 2001 cover on global warming, which won the Overseas Press Club Award for best environmental reporting of the year.

Before coming to Time, Kluger worked for Discover magazine, where he was a senior editor and humor columnist. Prior to that, he was health editor at Family Circle magazine, a story editor at The New York Times Business World Magazine, and associate editor at Science Digest. His feature articles and columns have appeared in dozens of publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, The Wall Street Journal, Cosmopolitan, Omni, McCall’s, New York magazine, The New York Post, Newsday, and, of course, Time.

He is the co-author, along with astronaut Jim Lovell, of the best-seller Apollo 13, the book that served as the basis of the 1995 movie. He is the sole author of 1998's Moonhunters, which told the story of the unmanned exploration of the solar system. He is also the author of Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Polio Vaccine, and the novel, Nacky Patcher and the Curse of the Dry-Land Boats. He is currently writing a book about siblings - the science, the psychology, the emotional mysteries. His young adult novel, Freedom Stone, will be published in late 2010.

Kluger has worked as an adjunct instructor in the graduate journalism program at New York University; is a licensed – though non-practicing – attorney; and is a graduate of the University of Maryland and the University of Baltimore School of Law. He lives in New York City with his wife and daughters.

Praise for Simplexity:

“Kluger makes the modern world comprehensible, analyzing social and technological systems to reveal that ‘things that seem complicated can be preposterously simple; things that seem simple can be dizzyingly complex’. . . Kluger’s findings are likely to incite controversy, confirming his contention that explaining simplicity and complexity is never as straightforward as it seems.”

Publishers Weekly

Simplexity, the book, is a study of human behavior, and the way we perceive things and events, and how our perception frequently causes us to make wrong assumptions and to perceive simplicity (or complexity) where it does not exist. The book is sure to be a deserved hit among the ever-growing Freakonomics crowd.”


Time magazine writer Kluger here introduces us to the concept of
simplexity – the notion that seemingly complex things can be more simple than they appear and that, alternately, seemingly simple things can be more complex than they appear. Like Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point, he uses a single idea to offer readers a peek inside a wide variety of familiar occurrences, taking us on a fascinating journey.”

Library Journal