About a month ago, venture capitalist Chris Sacca wrote this on Twitter. Journalism: The art of ignoring all the facts that don’t support the article you’ve already written. I retweeted this and replied: The same could be said for my blogging…. Sacca’s quote generated some discussion on Twitter and some email as well. Some asked [...]
Michael Lewis
When Irish Eyes are Crying
Michael Lewis on how Merrill Lynch stuck the Irish people with 106 billion euros in debt. Ireland’s financial disaster shared some things with Iceland’s. It was created by the sort of men who ignore their wives’ suggestions that maybe they should stop and ask for directions, for instance. But while Icelandic males used foreign money [...]
Bill Kinnon on writing
Bill has a wonderful post on writing. The entire thing is worth reading but this one got me thinking In 2004, Nielsen BookScan tracked the sales of 1.2 million books and found that nine hundred and fifty thousand of them sold fewer than ninety-nine copies. So we are looking at author royalties of a couple [...]
One Good Example, One Bad Example
Newsweek is pointing to Canada as an example to follow in terms of banking regulation. The legendary editor of The New Republic, Michael Kinsley, once held a "Boring Headline Contest" and decided that the winner was "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative." Twenty-two years later, the magazine was rescued from its economic troubles by a Canadian media company, [...]
The moral of the housing crisis
Michael Lewis on the sub-prime mortgage crisis The real moral is that when a middle-class couple buys a house they can’t afford, defaults on their mortgage, and then sits down to explain it to a reporter from the New York Times, they can be confident that he will overlook the reason for their financial distress: [...]
Give Thanks?
Michael Lewis on five reasons we can give thanks for the financial meltdown of the decade Our willingness to believe that we can hire some expert to tell us how to outperform markets is a big problem, with big consequences. It underpins Wall Street’s brokerage operations, for instance, and leads to a lot more people [...]
