Michael Lewis (aka Mr. Tabitha Soren) C or D/S & D

im pretty sure hes a left tackle

http://www.billrotelladrumbeatings.com/rimshot.gif

ty! ty!

wow, tabitha is a photographer these days
http://www.tabithasoren.com/

some lolstalgia in the "UNDERDOGS" section

perhaps because it's hard to quite know what to think of the family at the center

if you can get over your reflexive need to judge people you'll never meet or interact with, it's actually pretty easy

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/magazine/04coach.html?pagewanted=all

and follow-up!:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/sports/playemail/1113playlewis.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/sports/playmagazine/1029play_parcells.html?pagewanted=all

^^^ nobody gets an interview with bill parcells

"if you can get over your reflexive need to judge people you'll never meet or interact with"

Hahahahaha

The Blind Side is certainly good, but the problem I had is that every so often a new bit of the story appears that doesn't make sense - like it'll be revealed that Michael Oher, whom you've gotten to know as a helpless rootless big baby who doesn't even know where he is, has secretly been making moonlight trips to West Memphis to bail his old family out and hang out with his hitherto-unmentioned best friend. I appreciate that the guy's supposed to be an enigma, but some hint that that's even possible would make the narrative less jarring. But I guess that's because it's journalism - it's a tribute to Lewis that you can read it like it's fiction.

In any case, the guy's prose is about the sharpest I've ever read. I've got both Liar's Poker and The Real Price of Everything on order right now, majorly looking forward to it

if you can get over your reflexive need to judge people you'll never meet or interact with, it's actually pretty easy

― El Tomboto, Monday, November 17, 2008 3:42 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

owned

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9900E5D61E3DF93BA15753C1A9619C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print

this one's good too

A few folks had fits about them on the Blind Side thread from back in the day. I'll find it in a minute, but here's another football one that cankles posted on ILNFL, about kickers:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/sports/playmagazine/28lewis.html?_r=2&ref=playmagazine&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

lolol

:3

the thread that ended up being mostly about the blind side:
Michael Lewis piece on the evolution of the left tackle in Sports Illustrated this week

on Colbert tonight.

I discussed Billy Beane's self-image as Captain Kirk w/ him at a SABR convention for about a minute.

the nytimes sports magazine that printed a couple of those lewis pieces and the great dfw-on-federer thing from two years ago just folded

michael lewis goes to iceland. one of the funniest things i've read about the meltdown -- unless you're icelandic, i guess. i like the story's running sub-theme about the relative roles of women and men in iceland (and elsewhere).

One of the distinctive traits about Iceland’s disaster, and Wall Street’s, is how little women had to do with it. Women worked in the banks, but not in the risktaking jobs. As far as I can tell, during Iceland’s boom, there was just one woman in a senior position inside an Icelandic bank. Her name is Kristin Petursdottir, and by 2005 she had risen to become deputy C.E.O. for Kaupthing in London. “The financial culture is very male-dominated,” she says. “The culture is quite extreme. It is a pool of sharks. Women just despise the culture.” Petursdottir still enjoyed finance. She just didn’t like the way Icelandic men did it, and so, in 2006, she quit her job. “People said I was crazy,” she says, but she wanted to create a financial-services business run entirely by women. To bring, as she puts it, “more feminine values to the world of finance.”

Today her firm is, among other things, one of the very few profitable financial businesses left in Iceland. After the stock exchange collapsed, the money flooded in. A few days before we met, for instance, she heard banging on the front door early one morning and opened it to discover a little old man. “I’m so fed up with this whole system,” he said. “I just want some women to take care of my money.”

I like to compare articles about Iceland from after the crash with this one from before it:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/18/iceland

I was reading that guardian article and assuming it was from 2006 or something. May 2008! Less than a year later they're walking around with sacks of money and blowing up their cars.

the financial crisis is crowning michael lewis king of magazine journalism - i get like actually excited when i see a link w/his name on it

that iceland piece is great--not michael lewis but the nyer article abt it is great too

His report from New Orleans a few weeks after Katrina is great, too.

I just read that Iceland piece, someone had copy/pasted it on another board - the funny thing is, halfway thru reading it, without knowing it was from VF or who wrote it, i was just like 'yeah this has to be michael lewis' - dude brings the fukkin HEAT

also i hate iceland and wish them all ill

got exited for a new michael lewis piece when i saw this thread bumpd

yeah, this thred, the castro thred and the avalanches thred should be revived sparingly.

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2009/03/reality_check_vanity_fairs_fis.html

Calls out Lewis for his description of Icelanders as inbred trogolodytes

Amongst other things. Does not call them out for implying that everyone knows Bjork.

on buffett http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=12ef5554-1023-4be9-ad93-681003b280ef

^^ good article, just read it this morning

http://a123.g.akamai.net/f/123/12465/1d/media.canada.com/24be34eb-ecfe-4969-88c2-5aa898db4139/buffett.jpg

new piece on AIG - http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/08/aig200908

wow thx 4 posting

excerpt from his new book - http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/04/wall-street-excerpt-201004

Read that the other day. Ends on just the right note, the whole piece is superb.

yeah i havent had a chance to read it yet - looking fwd to it

1 of the guys with a hedge fund in this has a glass eye and aspergers ? that is a good character

I just finished the big short - pretty fantastic, although I would have preferred there to have been more hard number crunching. the whole thing would be pretty lol if it was about some fictitious country, instead it's pretty sad and makes me want to move overseas.

he's got an article in the new vanity fair abt greece, it's pretty crazy

thanks, just reading

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/10/greeks-bearing-bonds-201010?currentPage=all

The glass-eyed Asperger hedge fund manager from The Big Short seems to have been portrayed with more than a bit of caricature by Lewis, so I'm not sure I buy his characterisations.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-07/burry-discusses-investing-in-farmland-real-estate-gold-video.html

MICHAEL LEWIS: Merrill Lynch fired analyst who predicted banking crisis because banks (clients) went ballistic
http://www.businessinsider.com/michael-lewis-merrill-lynch-fired-analyst-who-predicted-irish-bank-crisis-after-banks-clients-went-ballistic-2011-2

another great article on the financial collapse of a eurpoean country (this time, ireland): http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/03/michael-lewis-ireland-201103?currentPage=all

he's apparently compiling these vanity fair pieces (greece, iceland, ireland) into a book

bump 4 fanboys

now on germany - http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/09/europe-201109

did anyone read this? wasnt really sold on it tbh

idk i thought it was pretty classic lewis -- not really as informational as his other european pieces, especially if you know your EU history, but i dug it nonetheless

really can't wait for his book

yeah i found it entertaining but pretty bullshit i guess? idk trying to explain germanys role in the credit crunch by using some stereotypes that he got out of an old book just seems weird

SO MUCH FOR MONEYBALL.

lmao

he seems nice on charlie rose

If I recall correctly, he DID give up a job in finance to do some good in the world.

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-two-friends-who-changed-how-we-think-about-how-we-think

review of his new book

my son quit playing baseball and now I miss seeing tabitha soren around

I read a huge excerpt from it on VF: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/decision-science-daniel-kahneman-amos-tversky

Pretty good stuff although if you've read Thinking, Fast and Slow you probably know a lot of it already

almost every time i talk to my mom, she will bring up the time we saw Michael Lewis eating lunch at Cesar Berkeley. I think this was 3 years ago?

Apparently Michael Lewis has been working on a new crypto book built around a profile of Sam Bankman-Fried, currently at the center of the dramatic FTX crypto-currency meltdown. In other words, this book is going to be great.

Moneyball is about market inefficiencies; this book will be about imaginary markets

he's out of his depth

“They had a great real business. If no one had cast aspersions on the business, if there hadn’t been a run on customers deposits, they’d still be making tones of money”

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!!

pic.twitter.com/VmSBvx9y1w

— Sean Tuffy (@SMTuffy) October 2, 2023

michael lewis lost a daughter two years ago in a horrible car accident and because of that I'm willing to extend a huge amount of sympathy toward him, but still, I don't know WTF he's thinking defending SBF

My Ponzi scheme would have been fine if I hadn't run out of new investors.

I kinda assume that’s in response from him to this piece which specifically called him out for his credulity. And I think I want to read the book it’s from.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/zeke-faux-number-go-up-book-excerpt.html

"number go up" looks great

bought his book on the pandemic The Premonition but haven't read it yet.

Seems like he wrote the new one before the arrests and couldn’t be bothered to change its thesis.

Lewis spoke about the lawsuit that Michael Oher, the young Black football player in The Blind Side, has filed against the Tuohys--Lewis's friends, and the white couple who took Oher in: [4] pic.twitter.com/zzi0LslSFV

— Samanth Subramanian (@samanth_s) October 3, 2023

🤔

I'd be suspicious of any untrained lay person making a medical diagnosis of brain damage in someone they haven't recently spoken to, but there's no question that many former NFL players suffer from brain damage, so he's got a point.

he does not have a point

Good thing he won't be called to testify then. Whew! Close call.

Oof.

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/review-michael-lewiss-going-infinite

Matt Levin today:

I am about halfway through Going Infinite, Michael Lewis' book about Sam Bankman-Fried, and I am very much enjoying it. Many of the reviews that I have read of the book complain that Lewis does not sufficiently explain that Bankman-Fried is Guilty and Bad, Actually, but that is not the book that he wanted to write or the one I want to read. He wanted to understand and explain Bankman-Fried's psychology and tell a good story. If you want to read a moral condemnation of crypto theft, you can get that anywhere. You go to Michael Lewis for character and story.

Also, reading those reviews you would think that the book is a defense of Bankman-Fried, but it is actually quite damning.

(Levine)

He wanted to understand and explain Bankman-Fried's psychology and tell a good story.

About Sam Bankman-Fried, the bestest boy ever?

Ever wanna feel the magic of being swept up by the thrills of the criminal ring of a theiving fraudster? Forget the moralizing, that is EXACTLY what I needed, and this book delivered.

Remember how good you felt when that nerd loser was actually good at fraud in Wolf of Wall St? It’s like that but extra credible because ~crypto~! 5 big tomatoes.

haven't read the book, but I liked this New Yorker review

The book is not, as it turns out, a hagiography. Bankman-Fried is not portrayed as a hero. But he isn’t portrayed as an antihero, either. The book’s tone is one of tender beguilement, with the occasional flash of remonstrance; Lewis isn’t sympathetic, exactly, but he is defiantly open to evidence of Bankman-Fried’s innocence. Bankman-Fried does come off as a recognizable contrarian. But perhaps the most relevant contrarian subject in this magnificently ambiguous book is Lewis himself. Lewis likes to write about figures who survey the informational landscape, weigh the probabilities, and, under conditions of uncertainty, take expensive gambles—which is exactly what Lewis himself has done.

Lewis likes to write about figures who survey the informational landscape, weigh the probabilities, and, under conditions of uncertainty, take expensive gambles

Waiting for his Madoff book, Ponziball.

Just...my guy:

Lewis focused on the material benefits Oher got from the Tuohys. “Did you get a sense of how much money they spent on him when he was living with them? They bought him a truck. They bought him clothes. They housed him.” He continued: “There’s not a whiff of possibility the Tuohys are going to milk money off Michael Oher. You’ve gotta sort of know more about them. They’re rich. And generous. They aren’t stingy rich people. They’re openhanded rich people.”

When I brought up aspects of his book that I believed were inaccurate — among them, that Oher barely knew how to play football when he first came to live with the Tuohys — Lewis said that he was confident that the people who witnessed Oher’s story in real time had provided him with an accurate account. I told him I had seen Terio Franklin’s house and that I did not think its description as a trailer that served as Oher’s temporary base camp was correct. “You should ask the Tuohys about that,” he replied.

In a profile of Lewis in The Guardian last October, he seemed to attribute Oher’s “change of behavior,” as he put it, to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., the degenerative brain disease that afflicts some football players, which can only be diagnosed after death, through a brain autopsy. “This is what happens to football players who get hit in the head,” he said. “They run into problems with violence and aggression.” Lewis told me his inference that Oher had C.T.E. was made in anger, and he regretted it, but he then repeated it. “It should be part of the conversation about Michael Oher,” he said.

And on top of that!

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/michael-lewis-speaks-sam-bankman-181123549.html

i'm reading this now. lewis has a REALLY hard time relating to black people. the way he writes about oher and other "Blacks" is almost entirely anthropological, with him dimly wondering aloud why "they" don't think like him. i'm enjoying the book, but all of these moments are making me cringe. and let's not forget oher's white financial supporters, a husband who "doesn't know what race he is" and a wife who was brought up explicitly racist and talks about oher lovingly, but with the tone of "look at the beast." so so so weird.
― Jams Murphy (ystrickler), Monday, September 25, 2006 11:17 AM (seventeen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

some smart takes about the Tuohys in that other thread (though everyone else yelled at him)

I strongly suspect it occurred to Lewis that mmmmmaybe his next piece should be about people who aren't famous and actually do shit.

https://wapo.st/3Xr9usa

well, it also seems like an extension of his 2018 book The Fifth Risk

Oh I'm sure! But still, convenient.

I think Lewis’ best skill is describing and explaining the significance of arcane technical things.