Chronicling The End, a superb piece of long-form magazine journalism

(photo illustration by Ji Lee)

If you ever want to know what good magazines can do to make sense of the world, I can recommend to you the article The End by Michael Lewis in Portfolio. It's long form magazine journalism at its best and explains what went wrong in the financial markets by exploring who knew it was going to go wrong and how they profited by it. Lewis, who wrote the excellent book Liar's Poker, is bound to turn this into a book, too. But the beauty of magazine writing is that you get to read it now. The cover illustration of the piece says it all. [Thanks to David Hayes for alerting me to this piece.]