Remember the ostensible crack-baby crisis of the 1980s? I do, vividly. I was a kid then, and scare tactics were all the rage. I spent half of junior high watching b-movie filmstrips about the slippery slope from smoking a joint to shooting heroin to dying alone in a gutter while...

Alan Greenspan, the former five-term Fed chief once described as "the greatest central banker in history," has lately given us a new number to think about. Testifying last week before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in Washington, D.C., Greenspan was asked by Commission Chair Phil Angelides if he...

In my review of Michael Lewis's The Big Short, I argue that it is ultimately a book about the factors that conspire to lead us into either dazzling rightness or staggering wrongness. To an almost eerie degree, Lewis's otherwise rag-tag protagonists embody the qualities you need...

The story of the 2008 financial crisis is, overwhelmingly, a story of losses and losers. The losses include 5 million jobs in the United States alone, tens of millions more overseas, and some 40 percent of the world's wealth. The losers include, at a conservative estimate, several billion human beings.

To the usual list of new year's resolutions, most of them having to do with bettering ourselves in one way or another -- eating less, exercising more, learning Spanish, reading Proust -- I invite you to consider adding a new one: let's quit making so many mistakes.

Last week, I wrote a blog post about watching This Is It, the Michael Jackson movie, with a bunch of Iraqi refugees in Damascus. I would love to tell you that this week, in a natural follow-up, I went to go see New Moon in Kirkuk, and that...

On Watching the Michael Jackson Movie With Iraqi Refugees

Forgive me, but I am going to start at the end. I am sitting in a dark movie theater in Damascus, Syria. It is October 30 and This Is It, the Michael Jackson movie-slash-valediction, has just opened worldwide. In 24...