?That Wall Street has gone down because of this is justice,? he says. ?They fucked people. They built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience.?
Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker, which described the financial problems going on in the 1980's, returns to talk about what went wrong this time. Here are the gory details of the sub-prime market and the story of one hedge fund manager who saw it all coming, shorted the whole mess, and told everyone what was going to happen as loudly as he could. No one was listening, and his own shorts helped fuel the ever-more-self-destructive system.
Via Austin Bunn
James Gunn has written an essay about the "protocols of science fiction", a concept he draws from the 1984 Samual R. Delany essay collection Starboard Wine (or more exactly, the MLA conference that preceeded it). (This book is sadly out-of-print and difficult to find -- Amazon Auctions has a copy for $175 or so -- though Matt Chaney is leading the effort to bring out a new edition.) In the essay, Gunn, quoting Delany, says that Science Fiction does not work in the same way as other written categories, in that it has "specific conventions, unique focuses, areas of interest and excellence, as well as its own particular ways of making sense out of language." Gunn then introduces an example, the story "Sail On! Sail On!" by Philip José Farmer.
While we do toil each day to bring you a bigger & better website, we would likely go numskull if we did it twenty-four hours a day. Here's a round-up of some of our favorite links for this week:
*You begged your mom to pay the extra $4
*It's a little late for tears, isn't it, Barbara?
*Apocalypse Chow: Cooking in the End Times
*A contender for best kitty video ever
*Small glimpses, technical glitches
*For when you want people to remember that you were never going to get laid
Enjoy.
-Sarah-
