Quotes from Michael Lewis

By the middle of 2011, roughly 30 percent of all stock market trades occurred off the public exchanges, most of them in dark pools. The appeal of these dark pools—said the Wall Street banks—was that investors could expose their big stock market orders without fear that those orders would be exploited.

They decided that their hides would be saved by the countries that had bungled their pandemic response. They'd be able to point to them and say, "Look! That's what would have happened to us!" They never imagined that other countries would use the United States to demonstrate their own counterfactual. "We are the bad example for the rest of the world," said Carter. "That's what is so embarrassing.

From the point of view of the history of the universe, Max's death was not a big deal," said Eisman. "It was just my big deal." At

he came to see there was nothing arbitrary or capricious about the Trump administration's attitude toward public data. Under each act of data suppression usually lay a narrow commercial motive: a gun lobbyist, a coal company, a poultry company.

a surprising number of the people responsible for them were first-generation Americans who had come from places without well-functioning governments. People who had lived without government were more likely to find meaning in it. On the other hand, people who had never experienced a collapsed state were slow to appreciate a state that had not yet collapsed

The Mexicans, interestingly, had taken the new pandemic strategy of the United States and run with it. They'd closed schools, and socially distanced the population in other ways that, studies would later show, shut down disease transmission.

The best computer science students at Stanford were some of the best computer science students anywhere. Under Clark they gathered together into a new, potent force. 'The difference was phenomenal, for me. I don't know how many people around me noticed. But my God I noticed. The first manifestation was when all of these people started coming up and wanting to be part of my project.' That

Amos approached intellectual life strategically, as if it were an oil field to be drilled, and after two years of sitting through philosophy classes he announced that philosophy was a dry well. "I remember his words," recalled Amnon. "He said, 'There is nothing we can do in philosophy. Plato solved too many of the problems. We can't have any impact in this area. There are too many smart guys and too few problems left, and the problems have no solutions.

Before any of the calls could be made, however, the president of Egypt called in to the switchboard at Trump Tower and somehow got the operator to put him straight through to Trump. "Trump was like . . . I love the Bangles! You know that song 'Walk Like an Egyptian'?" recalled one of his advisers on the scene.

People said some strange things. For

recalls Avishai Margalit. "You discussed people. It was a constant thing, a constant puzzle: What makes others tick? It comes from the shtetl. Jews were petty merchants. They had to assess others, all the time. Who is dangerous? Who is not dangerous? Who will repay the debt, who won't repay the debt? People were basically dependent on their psychological judgment.

The public-health officer is like the garbage disposal," she said. "Whatever issue can't be filed into someone else's box or slot winds up in the health officer's.

You Can Be a Stock Market Genius

The deeper he got into his medical career, the more Burry felt constrained by his problems with other people in the flesh. He briefly tried to hide in pathology, where the people had the decency to be dead, but that didn't work.

Buy potatoes," he said. "Gotta hop." Then he hung up. Of course. A cloud of fallout would threaten European food and water supplies, including the potato crop, placing a premium on uncontaminated American substitutes. Perhaps a few folks other than potato farmers think of the price of potatoes in America minutes after the explosion of a nuclear reactor in Russian, but I have never met them.

season, 1984, he did. The feelings of those assigned to prevent Taylor from hurting quarterbacks were trivial compared to those of the quarterbacks he wanted to hurt. In Taylor's first season in

You can tell a lot about a country by observing how much better they treat themselves than foreigners at the point of entry.

It's the idea that is a tiny push away from general acceptance and, when it gets that push, will change the world. The

it was the only time he'd done something just for the money, and that he'd never do something just for the money ever again.

Amos said. "The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who happens to be around at the right time of life. On the other hand, the small decisions are very systematic. That I became a psychologist is probably not very revealing. What kind of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits.

Snake hearts don't stay put, like human hearts, but travel up and down the snake's body.

When he spoke to people in the flesh, he could never tell what had put them off, his message or his person.

If this story has a soul, it is in the decisions made by its principal characters to resist the temptation of easy money and to pay special attention to the spirit in which they live their working lives. I didn't write about them because they were controversial. I wrote about them because they were admirable.

The CEOs of every major Wall Street firm were also on the wrong end of the gamble. All of them, without exception, either ran their public corporations into bankruptcy or were saved from bankruptcy by the United States government. They all got rich, too.