Corey Booker, the junior United States Senator from New Jersey, is 46 years old.

He was a superstar athlete in high school, went to Stanford on a football scholarship, won

a Rhodes scholarship, and studied at Oxford, then got a law degree at Yale.

With that pedigree and with any number of options open to him, what did he do?

He moved to Newark, one of the poorest big cities in the US.

He served on the city council, and then as mayor.

By most accounts, he did a good job, uniting long time rivals and lifting the city up.

But as one journalist wrote, Booker's detractors saw him as, quote,

an infuriating phony who cares more about national fame than problem solving.

Newark Mayor Corey Booker is prepared for a food stamp challenge.

He plans to live for a week on the monetary equivalent of food stamps or less.

The way to the shore, Senator Booker made a stop to help with some shoveling.

Where the mayor's digging his people out, one constituent at a time.

He just got in home when he saw the house next door on fire, a woman trapped inside.

He ran into a burning building to save a name.

They got her out a lot, and their book was taken to the hospital for smoke inhalation.

They are calling the super mayor tonight.

Today on Freakinomics Radio, if Corey Booker is indeed a superhero, he just found

his kryptonite writing a book.

I literally hit the heaviest I've been in my life as I ate my way through the stress

of working full long days and then starting at midnight and finishing it for

on the morning of trying to write as well.

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