Quotes from Michael Lewis

teetering on toothpicks. From the depths of the barrel emerged sounds so clotted and guttural that, when you first heard them, you did not recognize them as

improvement in all weather predictions. The five-day-out forecast in 2016 was as accurate as the one-day-out forecast had been in 2005. In just the last few years, for the first time in history, a meteorologist's forecast of how hot it will be nine days from now is better than just guessing.

There, a year later, at the age of thirteen, Danny made his final decision about God. "I still remember where I was—the street in Jerusalem. I remember thinking that I could imagine there was a God, but not one who cared whether or not I masturbate. I reached the conclusion that there was no God. That was the end of my religious life.

They were an invisible mob inside an ivory tower. The calls themselves irritated rather than informed her. "They'd do mental masturbation," said Charity. "Mental masturbation is actually an important concept. It's when you talk in circles for an hour and reach no decision.

Police officers who had just come from an emotionally fraught situation—a suicide, or a domestic abuse call in which a child was involved—were more likely to use excessive force. Maybe the problem wasn't as simple as a bad cop. Maybe it was the emotional state in which the cop had found himself.

After Trump took office, DJ Patil watched with wonder as the data disappeared across the federal government. Both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior removed from their websites the links to climate change data.

Maybe because there are so few Icelanders in the world, we know next to nothing about them. We assume they are more or less Scandinavian—a gentle people who just want everyone to have the same amount of everything. They are not. They have a feral streak in them, like a horse that's just pretending to be broken.

I think it's going to set the world on fire," said Gates. "It didn't do anything. There are fifteen comments at the bottom of the piece on the Web, and all of them are Russian mail order brides.

The absence of pandemic prevention was another example of a deficiency in the system.

Wall Street paid the most for what I could do, which was nothing.

Guys who can't get a job on Wall Street get a job at Moody's," as one Goldman Sachs trader-turned-hedge fund manager put it.

One list consisted of nineteen male names and twenty female names, the other of twenty female names and nineteen male names. The list that had more female names on it had more names of famous men, and the list that had more male names on it contained the names of more famous women. The unsuspecting Oregon students, having listened to a list, were then asked to judge if it contained the names of more men or more women.

We know what the virus will do," she liked to say. "We don't know what the humans will do.

Carter invented a name for what they were doing. "Redneck epidemiology," he called it.

States government with stealing Goldman Sachs's computer code. I'd thought it strange, after the financial crisis, in which Goldman had played such an important role, that the only Goldman Sachs employee who had been charged with any sort of crime was the employee who had taken something from Goldman Sachs. I'd thought it even stranger that government prosecutors had argued that the Russian shouldn't

The new acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mick Mulvaney, said he wanted to end public access to records of consumer complaints against financial institutions. Two weeks after Hurricane Maria, statistics that detailed access to drinking water and electricity in Puerto Rico were deleted from the FEMA website.

The great thing about this project," said Tim, "is that it's software that talks to physical things rather than software that just talks to other software. You can see the effect of what you are doing.

It reflects a general property of the human organism as a pleasure machine. For most people, the happiness involved in receiving a desirable object is smaller than the unhappiness involved in losing the same object.

Theories for Amos were like mental pockets or briefcases, places to put the ideas you wanted to keep. Until you could replace a theory with a better theory—a theory that better predicted what actually happened—you didn't chuck a theory out. Theories ordered knowledge, and allowed for better prediction.

The paper analyzed the effects of that inability, and showed that American cities that caved to pressure from business interests to relax their social distancing rules experienced big second waves of disease. American cities that didn't did not.

The Greek public health-care system spends far more on supplies than the European average—and it is not uncommon, several Greeks tell me, to see nurses and doctors leaving the job with their arms filled with paper towels and diapers and whatever else they can plunder from the supply closets.

Not even Steve Bannon thought this was a good idea. "I was fucking nervous as shit," Bannon later told friends. "I go," Holy

Everyone has a story they tell themselves about themselves. Even if they don't explicitly acknowledge it, their minds are at work retelling or editing or updating a narrative that explains or excuses why they have spent their time on earth as they have.

But as revenues subsided, costs all of a sudden mattered, too.