Worth reading if you have the time (and you're interested in this sort of stuff): Michael Lewis's lengthy take on the financial crisis, especially the part when he meets up with John Gutfreund twenty years after the publication of Liar's Poker: "Your fucking book destroyed my career, and it made yours." [Portfolio]
It was something of a coup when Vanity Fair, in May, did what its Condé Nast sibling Portfolio couldn't and poached Fortune's winsome star writer Bethany McLean. If Portfolio's uncertain editor Joanne Lipman was annoyed then, she must be really steaming now that rival Graydon Carter snagged his latest catch from her own magazine. Vanity Fair's editor just inked an exclusive deal, the Observer reports, with Michael Lewis, who had contracts at both Lipman's glossy and with the Times magazine. Carter lured Lewis even though the Liar's Poker author recently saw his pay upped at Portfolio and despite a grudge the financial writer harbored against Vanity Fair for 10 years over an an unflattering 1997 profile. How did Carter do it?
At this point, the soul of professional sports is beyond worrying about: Athletes are frantically self-interested; marvelously self-absorbed; always looking for any edge, however unfair; and forever leaping from team to team in search of a few more dollars. In other words, the jock market already has the morals of the stock market.
Let us begin with the cover of Portfolio. It's a gilded city image, a metropolis of lit-up office windows in earth tones, oddly, as it is supposed to be an homage to Berenice Abbott. (A funny reference, as she was told that New York City was too toxic for her to live in and so she left.) Publisher David Carey and Editor in Chief Joanne Lipman are shown in the Times this morning comparing their cover favorably to a recent Fortune cover, with Carey saying, "We're not giving you peas and carrots. We want to capture that glamour." By that measure things are certainly already a success; the magazine certainly weighs as much as Glamour.
We're very happy for Moneyball author Michael Lewis—he's got a new baby, and that's occasion for another Slate column about birth of said baby. But we think Lewis might have misplaced his anxieties about his older daughters' rivalry with their newborn brother. He fails to mention that by giving his children the names of Quinn and Dixie (girls) and Walker (boy), he's doomed them to lives of ridicule anyway. Who does he think he is, Gwyneth Paltrow?
