The book cover – featuring a view of planet Earth presumably from a heavenly vantage point – offers the first hint that William D. Cohan’s plan here is not critical thinking but rather hyperbolic imagery.  Inside he writes a survey not of Goldman, Sachs & Co.’s overall history but rather of historical points selected for

Back in College, in social science classes, we learned never to rely on cultural explanations.  Professors excised culturally deterministic phrases from our analysis: “The Spanish society tends to…The African American culture explains…Inevitably, Catholic norms led to… ” Cultures change, as does our view of them, the intellectual posits, and culture drops out as a powerful

In one obvious respect, The Big Short follows Michael Lewis’s winning formula for a blockbuster book on sports or finance: character sketches so compelling, funny, and sympathetic that he makes an arcane industry understandable by the average reader. Less recognized, but even more impressive, however, Lewis bucks the dominant trend in media coverage of the

You may, like me, be curious about what happened during the Great Credit Crunch.  You may, like me, have the feeling we reached a financial precipice, peeking over the edge into the abyss.  But before falling in we blacked out and woke up in the hospital, a thick IV needle in the arm, tired and