Look, the interview process is short, relative to how long you’re going to have to live with these people, right? And almost anybody with any amount of self-control can portray themselves as someone completely different through the space of five or six interviews. But, not everybody’s such a sociopath and is willing to do that just for a job. More…
It’s just so crazy, in order to follow this incredibly rigorous public moral code you end up doing things that people don’t usually do, like sitting with a middle-aged Saudi man in a hotel room. The compromise we came up with was to sit in the hallway on my floor where there were armchairs. We did the interview. They were vacuuming the floors around us. More…
And I always used to think that the reason that financial markets’ memory is so short is not because individuals are short-sighted or they easily forget lessons bought at very high cost, but that the average life of an investor is kind of like the life of a mayfly, I mean, they just turn over really fast. More…
Suddenly, you see Link 1 go. You’re like, “Holy cow. Six months ago I thought that was a 1 percent probability, but now it’s just happened, well, maybe the next link isn’t a 1 percent probability, it’s a much higher probability, and now if I multiply all these probabilities together, there’s like a meaningful probability that we could get blown up!” More…
People talk about corruption, but really effective corruption requires something like organization. Like Argentina. It’s organized, it’s very organized corruption. Africa is certainly corrupt. But it’s more that it was chaotic. The infrastructure is poor, volatility is high. In Africa, anything can happen. More…
What was happening was that the pay scale for finance was just—incredibly out of whack. You had guys who were literally just a couple of years out of college, maybe they’d done a year or two at an investment bank, making several hundred thousand dollars a year doing pretty low-value-added Excel-modeling tasks. More…
I had never heard of Bernie Madoff, OK? But one of the guys here who is very active in the options world, which is what Bernie Madoff was allegedly trading, as soon as the headline came across—it didn’t say what he was arrested for—he said two things. He said, “I knew it, I knew that guy was a fraud.” And the second thing he said was, “This is going to be huge. This is going to be the biggest thing ever.” More…
Ah, yes, but here’s the question. Who paid that Mexican guy to hammer together those houses? Well, the developer. Where did the developer get the money from? The developer got the money from a bank. Where did the bank get the money from? The bank got the money from a depositor. The depositor doesn’t think he spent the money. The depositor still thinks he has a claim on the money, right? More…
n+1: All right, let’s get to it. Is America now a Third World country? HFM: No, we’re a First World country with a weak currency. From time to time, the dollar’s been very weak; from time to time, it’s very strong; and unfortunately what tends to happen is people tend to just extrapolate. But over the very long term, currency processes tend to be fairly stable and mean-reverting. More…
I remember the New Yorker “Talk of the Town” when the first rumors of the Lewinsky scandal came out. One of Clinton’s aides was interviewed, not knowing whether the rumors were true or not, convinced (as was the case) that the Republicans, looking for one thing (Whitewater), had found something else (Lewinsky), but adding: “If you want to know who I blame, I blame Clinton. I blame him.” More…
In New York, they saved. They saved on orange juice, sliced bread, they saved on coffee. On movies, magazines, museum admission (on Friday nights). Train fare, subway fare, their apartment out in Queens. It was a principle, of sorts, and they stuck to it. To be poor in New York was humiliating, a little; but to be young—to be young was divine. More…
It’s been a really turbulent couple of weeks. Obviously the market has been in some, uh, degree of crisis since the last time we spoke, but what’s new is that it’s really been spreading … The particular market that I trade, I’ve seen prices much more distressed than they are today. But I’ve never seen the financial system as a whole more distressed. More…
Chemistry is a huge, huge thing in hockey. A great pitcher is a great pitcher. And a QB needs some chemistry but he’s got a lot of options. And even the NBA has become one-on-one. But in hockey you don’t know what’s going to click. More…
Allison Lorentzen,
Anthony Graves,
Carla Blumenkranz,
Chad Harbach,
Emily Votruba,
Keith Gessen,
Marco Roth,
Medi Blum,
Nikil Saval,
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow,
Wesley Yang
When I was in elementary school, we used to play a game that was called “Would you prefer to be frozen or burned alive?” At the time, I always chose frozen. It seemed like it would be possible to just curl up in the snow and die, which I had read about in White Fang. Whereas with burning, what I really imagined was boiling—in a big pot. More…
First of all, I am so grateful to be blogging on this blog. I mean, look at my predecessor. This is a guy who two weeks ago was living under the desk at the n+1 office, who’d never read a book his entire life, he had problems in the head, he had no girlfriend—and he started a lit-blog. Now he’s taking over the New York Times Book Review. More…
Barbara and I talked on the phone maybe a dozen times and saw each other half that often; I can’t claim I knew her well. And yet if the first thing you wonder about most powerful and impressive people is what they are really, truly like, this was not the case with Barbara Epstein. More…
How much money does a writer need? In New York, a young writer can get by on $25,000, give or take, depending on thriftiness. A slightly older young writer—a 30-year-old—will need another $10,000 to keep up appearances. But that’s New York. There are places where a person can live on twelve or thirteen thousand a year—figures so small they can be written out. More…
Whenever people suggest to me, either explicitly or otherwise, that the writing world is a meritocracy, that people eventually get what they deserve and the rest fall out, that the world, in short, is a fair world, I think of Patrick Giles. “I never established myself as a freelancer,” he’d say, frustrated with the course of his career. More…
A case could be made that he was, and will be, the last great American novelist, the beneficiary of a cultural field sowed by Partisan Review, Commentary, Dissent. He was historically necessary: the novelist of the post-war Jewish cultural ascendancy. He could write novels for adults, with references to Spinoza and Marx, because there were enough adult readers—men among them—to support his doing so. More…
I did not come to Harvard so that my roommate could sleep with, or almost-sleep-with, the Vice President’s daughter. In my secret dreams, or even from past experience, I would have thought that it would be I who slept with, or almost-slept-with, the Veep’s handsome daughter. But to have a roommate who did, that is also something. And to realize this, that it is something, may just be the beginning of wisdom—or almost-wisdom, as the case may have been. More…
My mood swings on this are so violent. I was sure at the end of the third debate that Kerry would sweep the nation. But watching five minutes of the Sunday morning talk shows this weekend, while we were staying with my in-laws, convinced me that we were going to lose by just as much. Debates, I realized, are a 19th—no, actually, an 18th-century political format that has, wonderfully, survived. More…
What if all the libels, brazen lies, gerrymandering, and fake voter registration groups that tear up the cards of Democrats are a shift from the symbolic violence of games to real violence in a real war where anything goes and not even the past will be safe if the enemy wins? More…
What to do—you can’t play here with my nerves, my angel. I played for ten hours, and ended up losing. Over the course of the day things were very bad at times, and at other times I was up, and then my luck changed. I’ll tell you all about it when we meet. For now, I’ll give it one more shot today, with what remains (very little, a drop). More…
So, you know, here it is on the counter. Which, frankly, it’s there because I just haven’t found another place to put it. But it’s here. And I’ll keep it another week. And if someone comes in, to be honest, I’ll sell it for whatever price they offer me. And then you can come by, we can use that money, we can buy a Coca-Cola. More…
