15 posts tagged Michael Lewis
“I understood about one word in every four of Moneyball, and it’s still the best and most engrossing sports book I’ve read in years. If you know anything about baseball, you will enjoy it four times as much as I did, which means that you might explode.”
—From The Polysyllabic Spree (Believer Books, 2004)
“I’m like the valley girl. And I’m like Michael Lewis.”
An in-depth interview with Michael Lewis from his “writing crib/man cave.” Skip ahead to 9:20 for the walking tour and a sneak peak at his works-in-progress.
“He’s like the Jon Stewart of print: Loose, but drum tight. Funny, but dead serious.”
Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize-winning economist:
“You are right to be indignant. This system is not working right. It is not right that we have so many people without jobs when we have so many needs that we have to fill. It is not right that we are throwing people out of their houses when we have so many homeless people.”
[watch the Zuccotti Park speech on YouTube]
Paul Krugman, Nobel prize-winning economist:
“The protesters’ indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right.”
[read the New York Times op-ed]
Michael Lewis, best-selling author of The Big Short, Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and most recently Boomerang:
“I think it could be a big deal…The reason I think it might have legs is that I think they have a point. There is a horrible unfairness at the heart of our economy right now. We have essentially socialism for capitalists and capitalism for everybody else.”
[watch the Reuters interview on YouTube]
Because Iceland is really just one big family, it’s simply annoying to go around asking Icelanders if they’ve met Björk. Of course they’ve met Björk; who hasn’t met Björk? Who, for that matter, didn’t know Björk when she was two? “Yes, I know Björk,” a professor of finance at the University of Iceland says in reply to my question, in a weary tone. “She can’t sing, and I know her mother from childhood, and they were both crazy. That she is known so well outside of Iceland tells me more about the world than it does about Björk.”
Michael Lewis, Boomerang
“Once the Bush and Obama administrations decided that you couldn’t let these firms fail and they didn’t want the mess of nationalizing them, there was really only one way forward — and that way was to gift money onto these banks until they’re back on their feet and can function at the center of the economy again. But that, to any normal person who is outside the system, just looks ridiculously unfair. It looks like socialism for capitalists and capitalism for everybody else. So it’s no wonder people are marching in southern Manhattan.”
(via nprfreshair)
“At its heart, of course, ‘Moneyball’ isn’t about baseball. It’s not even about statistics. Rather, it’s about challenging conventional wisdom with data. By embedding this lesson in the story of Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s, the book has lured millions of readers into the realm of the geek.”
