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

Prompted by reading the great Portfolio piece and his piece Jonathan Ledeb. Here's a list of all his books and articles:

http://www.newnewjournalism.com/bio.php?last_name=lewis

only book i've read is liar's poker, which is classic. magazine articles i've read have been good. smart guy, good writer.

classique

Losers, his story of the 1996 presidential race = essential reading. (Also as a fascinating portrait of McCain en route to perfecting his 'maverick' image, which Lewis finds himself fully going for.)

joe morgan is not a fan

Joe Morgan's not a fan of Billy Beane's Moneyball. He's never read Michael Lewis' Moneyball.

This piece on Cuban baseball is a dilly:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/07/cuban_baseball200807

That Portfolio piece was fantastic. That's as close as I've managed to come to understanding what the fuck has been going on on Wall St.

Classic, search all.

For some reason I was think that was Marc Cuban baseball. Funny.

That article is fantastic btw.

Totally classic, The New New Thing is probably the weakest of the book-lengthers, and it's still pretty damn good.

Anybody who hasn't read The Blind Side should read The Blind Side. Even if you don't care about football.

I've only read Liar's Poker and Moneyball which are both excellent.

He lives in Berkeley.

I've read portions of the Blind Side, but the opening aside I couldn't get quite as into it (perhaps because it's hard to quite know what to think of the family at the center.)

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

a different continued from page 183 person

indeed

I love how the final act of arnold's life is 'la bike hipster'

Anyway, the larger issues -- sounds about right. And yet the place is not collapsing about our ears.

http://nymag.com/news/features/michael-lewis-2011-10/index4.html

The interview with him on Fresh Air today was very interesting, even though Terry Gross was more annoying than usual.

“It’s really one of the most remarkable long-form journalism careers,” says Gerald Marzorati, his former editor at The New York Times Magazine. “He’s had at least as big a career as Gay Talese or Joan Didion or Tom Wolfe. ”

big ups to michael and all

but prose-wise michael is maybe fit to shine tom wolfe's left wingtip

michael is awesome everyone just let him be himself

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2011/10/24/michael_lewis_s_home_game_the_essays_that_will_soon_become_a_sit.html

why do you need so much money michael lewis

He gave quite a commencement speech at Princeton: http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S33/87/54K53/

The "Moneyball" story has practical implications. If you use better data, you can find better values; there are always market inefficiencies to exploit, and so on. But it has a broader and less practical message: don't be deceived by life's outcomes. Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.

I make this point because — along with this speech — it is something that will be easy for you to forget.

I now live in Berkeley, California. A few years ago, just a few blocks from my home, a pair of researchers in the Cal psychology department staged an experiment. They began by grabbing students, as lab rats. Then they broke the students into teams, segregated by sex. Three men, or three women, per team. Then they put these teams of three into a room, and arbitrarily assigned one of the three to act as leader. Then they gave them some complicated moral problem to solve: say what should be done about academic cheating, or how to regulate drinking on campus.

Exactly 30 minutes into the problem-solving the researchers interrupted each group. They entered the room bearing a plate of cookies. Four cookies. The team consisted of three people, but there were these four cookies. Every team member obviously got one cookie, but that left a fourth cookie, just sitting there. It should have been awkward. But it wasn't. With incredible consistency the person arbitrarily appointed leader of the group grabbed the fourth cookie, and ate it. Not only ate it, but ate it with gusto: lips smacking, mouth open, drool at the corners of their mouths. In the end all that was left of the extra cookie were crumbs on the leader's shirt.

This leader had performed no special task. He had no special virtue. He'd been chosen at random, 30 minutes earlier. His status was nothing but luck. But it still left him with the sense that the cookie should be his.

This experiment helps to explain Wall Street bonuses and CEO pay, and I'm sure lots of other human behavior. But it also is relevant to new graduates of Princeton University. In a general sort of way you have been appointed the leader of the group. Your appointment may not be entirely arbitrary. But you must sense its arbitrary aspect: you are the lucky few. Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interests to anything.

All of you have been faced with the extra cookie. All of you will be faced with many more of them. In time you will find it easy to assume that you deserve the extra cookie. For all I know, you may. But you'll be happier, and the world will be better off, if you at least pretend that you don't.

Never forget: In the nation's service. In the service of all nations.

Thank you.

And good luck.

obama piece is kinda boring

I can't imagine it would be good.

flash boys is a good page-turner

i can't believe I haven't mentioned that he is a little league coach where we live, and my son plays against his teams all the time. he's very nice in person; tabitha may be too, she's very reserved although I talked to her a few times one year when she was coaching. it's a dwindling population of people who know who she is and are excited about that, really. His team this year bit the dust (and my kid's team won the championship! Take that ML!)!

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.