The hot book of the moment, Michael Lewis ‘s Big Short , was influenced by a Harvard undergraduate’s thesis . But few people know the bestselling author has followed the footsteps of someone else’s college thesis before, with Moneyball. Lewis’s skill at adapting smart ideas from academia is no doubt one of the reasons the financial writer has had no sophomore slump: A decade or so after publishing his first hit book, Liar’s Poker , the author is on top again with the Big Short , poised to be the latest in a series of more than half a dozen bestsellers. The acknowledgements section of Big Short credits for some measure of inspiration a prize-winning thesis from 24-year-old financial analyst A.K. Barnett-Hart (top pic, left), who while at Harvard analyzed reams of data on instruments at the heart of the financial meltdown, Collateralized Debt Obligations The Wall Street Journal recently suggested that people ” read [her] Harvard thesis instead ” of Lewis’s book, even though Lewis has been the one featured on the Daily Show and in glowing press notices . Although she’s in Lewis’ shadow, Barnett-Hart has already received far greater notice than Gregg Bell (top pic, right), who at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism wrote a thesis entitled, “Toeing the Bottom Line: Trying to Compete Within Baseball’s Skewed Financial Structure.” Bell’s research examined how the general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team, Billy Beane, sifted through other teams’ scrap heaps to find cheap players; relentlessly cut expenses to make the most of his small budget; and had trouble retaining talent under the free-agent system. When Bell was completing his thesis, Lewis was a visiting fellow at his journalism school, sponsored by the Koret Foundation. Bell finished his thesis during his second and final year, ending in 2000, only several months after Lewis had begun work at Berkeley. Not long after Bell’s thesis was turned in, Lewis was hanging out on the A’s beat, doing the reporting for Moneyball. Published in 2003, Moneyball was, like Bell’s thesis, a look at how sifted through other teams’ scrap heaps to find cheap players. The book was later slated (and then un-slated) for adaptation into a movie . According to a person familiar with both works, Lewis definitely went beyond Bell’s analysis, digging into Beane’s methodology and the statistics behind it, and contrasting his recruiting strategy with more traditional approaches to scouting. Bell, now a sports reporter with the Associated Press, had largely avoided a discussion of the stat-geek stuff Lewis delved into. Credit to Lewis, then, for promoting an idea that had been languishing in obscurity of academia. But students from the school gossiped years later over whether Lewis should have given Bell more acknowledgment — i.e., any — for helping to inspire his book, if in fact Bell’s provided such inspiration. Despite the groundwork Bell laid and Lewis’s close proximity to his work, there’s been no confirmation that Lewis got the idea for Moneyball from Bell’s thesis. It remains something of a mystery, even to some of the people involved. Those people include Neil Henry, the professor and thesis advisor who pushed Bell to explore the money side of the A’s. Henry, now dean of the Berkeley journalism school, wrote the following after we asked him about Moneyball : How Michael Lewis happened on the idea, I don’t know. I also don’t know if Gregg knew Lewis while he was a student here, and perhaps had enrolled in one of his courses… I also don’t know if Lewis saw Gregg’s project before he began work on the book. In any event, Gregg’s project was really great. He spent nearly his entire second year with Beane to flesh out the profile, which focused on how a GM for a low budget, small market baseball team manages to keep competitive with other teams. We’ve tried to reach Lewis through a couple of different channels for comment, and not yet heard back. Still, some points in his defense are readily apparent: As his books and must-read magazine articles have demonstrated, Lewis a skilled and prolific writer with a knack for soaking up information from insulated subcultures — sports, Wall Street, his hometown of Berkeley, California — and explaining developments in those subcultures to the world at large. If a writer like that isn’t taking some inspiration from academia, he should be. Also, no one we’ve spoken to denies that Moneyball is a much fuller realization of Billy Beane’s story than Bell’s “Toeing the Bottom Line,” and given the how much longer Lewis had to work on his book than Bell had to work on his thesis, that’s about what you’d expect. Lewis definitely should have acknowledged Bell if Bell’s work was the inspiration for his book, but that doesn’t make Moneyball any less his own success. Big Short , meanwhile, is bigger and better still in comparison with Barnett-Hart’s thesis, even though the latter won the Harvard Hoopes prize and “virtually every thesis honor,” according to the Journal . Barnett-Hart told us, Although there has been some talk about how my thesis inspired Lewis’s book, that is actually far too generous to say. He was being very kind by acknowledging my work and while I did try to share my ideas with him, he already knew most everything I could have told him. I can in no way take credit for anything he did in his great book. I am very happy that he acknowledged me because it has gotten people to read my thesis which I honestly thought no one would ever read. Let this be a lesson to Bell and the smart students who followed him: Have your thesis readily accessible online . That way you can ride the publicity wave if and when a top author expands on some of your ideas. And it’s the sort of move financially savvy authors like Michael Lewis don’t think twice about.
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Does Michael Lewis Snatch His Ideas From College Kids? [How Things Work]
Posted in Celebrities, Hot Stuff
Tagged bennyhollywood, california, college, ideas, inspiration, michael lewis, Money, school, statistics, the big short, thesis
‘She’s filled with ideas,’ Jonas Akerlund says of working with the pop star. By Jocelyn Vena, with reporting by Matt Elias Lady Gaga in her “Telephone” video Photo: Interscope After making “Paparazzi” together in 2009, Lady Gaga and Jonas
Posted in Music
Tagged culture-cheat, director-jonas, Hollywood, ideas, Madonna, Mtv, news article, Photos, time, TMZ, video, Videos
Singer Miley Cyrus has denied reports that she is now living with her new boyfriend Liam Hemsworth . Cyrus, 17, met Hemsworth on the set of their new movie, The Last Song , last year, and there were reports that they are now living together. However, she denied she is living with the Aussie actor. “No. How would anyone know who lives with me or not? No one’s ever been in my house, no one’s ever like… no creepers who write in magazines have ever seen my house, ever talked to my parents, ever, like, spoken with my friends. “So they have nothing better to do than make up stories. I think they should take their ideas and put them somewhere useful.” There’s a good joke in there about Miley being from the South but we’ll leave you to make it in the comments.
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MIley Cyrus And Liam Not Playing House
Posted in Celebrities, Gossip
Tagged aussie, hemsworth, Hollywood, House, ideas, liam hemsworth, miley cyrus, new-boyfriend, nothing-better, singer, south, were-reports
Authorities have identified 36 year-old John Patrick Bedell as the man who calmly opened fire at a Pentagon checkpoint Thursday, wounding two police officers before being killed himself. His Internet activity suggests a man with deeply paranoid political views. According to the AP, Bedell walked up to a Pentagon checkpoint at 6:40pm, drew a gun and began shooting. Richard Keevill, the chief of Pentagon police told the AP: “He just reached in his pocket, pulled out a gun and started shooting… He walked up very cool. He had no real emotion on his face.” Here is Bedell, also with no real emotion on his face, as he explains in a Youtube video his complex system of “information currency,” which appears to have been one of his obsessions: Bedell was clearly intelligent; he was an avid software developer and aspiring engineer who worked to develop technology he believed would lead to “liberty and justice. He was nonetheless a certifiable wackjob. Steve Huff at mediaelites has posted a summary of what can be gleaned from Bedell’s Internet activity. Bedell, who had a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, believed the government was behind 9/11, and these beliefs interfaced strangely with an enthusiasm for marijuana legalization and the “Information Currency” system he explains above. Speaking of the suicide of Marine Col. James Sabow—who 9/11 conspiracy theorists believe was assassinated to cover up a 9/11 plot—Bedell wrote on his wikipedia profile (now deleted): I am determined to see that justice is served in the death of Colonel James Sabow, as a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions and institutions such as the coup regime of 1963 that mantains itself in power through the global drug trade, financial corruption, and murder, among other crimes. Bedell claims these beliefs led him to attempt to devise a subversive marijuana-based monetary system based on his ideas of Information Currency. He started with a 16-plant growing operation on his balcony in Irving, CA. (In fact, Bedell uploaded a picture of his own pot plant to wikipedia.) Police discovered his plants in June 2006 and he was arrested. The felony complaint, which he posted to a pro-marijuana website, details a contentious arrest: When the police came to Bedell’s door, he wouldn’t let them in and began resisting arrest, pushing against police and collapsing to the floor when they tried to bring hm out of his apartment: Here’s what they found: His marijuana operation thwarted, he appeared to turn his efforts to the Internet and his software development company, Infoenge. (The first post on the company’s blog is October 3, 2006 ) With Infoeng, Bedell working on technology that might someday lead to ” a USB flash drive that performs personal DNA sequencing information “—presumably as a component of his Information Currency scheme. Almost every trace Bedell left on the Internet from that point on displays an obsession with information—storing, retrieving, and revealing it—coupled with boilerplate Libertarian and pro-marijuana ideology. His wikipedia talkpage is a litany of rejected edits, detailing his efforts to insert 9/11 truther dogma into various pages. An Amazon review praises the book Inside Delta Force for its Insights into America’s Secret History He apparently left audio recordings as well, which he posted to the Internet Archive. A two-part address called “Directions to Freedom” which proses “directions to freedom, security, and prosperity, which could be considered his manifesto. “Directions to Freedom” opens with Hello, thank you for listening. I have an intense personal desire for freedom and I need your help so we can, together, continue to enjoy the benefits of freedom and work toward the more perfect realization of liberty and justice in our society. Anyone hoping for a better glimpse at what led Bedell from an obsession with the liberating power of information to violence would probably do well starting with these recordings—which he transcribed on his blog here . What Bedell did was terrible, but any attempt at writing Bedell off as simply a brain-washed Glenn Beck zombie or an idiotic anti-government 9/11 truther can’t capture the complexity of his motivations and the singular weirdness going on in his brain. As a Mediaelites commenter writes, “this guy was one of those dudes to smart for his own good and far from a tea bagger.” [ Infoeng ][ Rothbardix ][ Tekgnosis ][ mediaelites ][ AP ]
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In Video, Audio and Writing, Pentagon Shooter Left Bizarre Internet Trail [Shootings]
Writing on the internet is not committed to paper nor subjected to the same bureaucratic intercession of minders charged with protecting institutional reputations. For loathsome New Republic Leon Wieseltier , this makes the web suspect and newfangled and just annoying. While Wieseltier’s interminable indictment of Andrew Sullivan on charges of anti-Semitism may have seemed like an unhinged shriek of tribal defense, he’s really just another old guy complaining about the internet. Wieseltier’s attack on Sullivan earlier this month was couched in scolding moral terms as a rebuke against what he regards (unreasonably and stupidly) as Sullivan’s sloppy descent into anti-Semitic tropes. But the subtext was clear: What bothers Wieseltier so much about Sullivan’s views on Israel isn’t so much what he says as the way he says it: He is the master, and the prisoner, of the technology of sickly obsession: blogging–-and the divine right of bloggers to exempt themselves from the interrogations of editors–-is also a method of hounding. Sullivan doesn’t “dive deep into the substance of anything,” Wieseltier says, because he’s too busy “cursing and linking.” His rapid-fire posts and prodigious output—”ejaculations,” as Wieseltier puts it—are not so much arguments as “bar-room retorts; moody explosions of verbal violence; more invective from another American crank.” In other words, he writes a blog. When Sullivan countered that, to the extent that whatever excesses he’s guilty of were in part a function of the fact that he produces a continuous recording his unmediated reactions and thoughts and frames of mind, Wieseltier scoffed: Compose yourself, man, and think. For a deeply felt opinion may be false, and even pernicious. In intellectual life, volatility has no authority, and spontaneity is not a virtue, and neither is sincerity…. And when Sullivan boasts about his Proteanism—one of the reasons I dislike blogging is that it is often the perfect vindication of the postmodern glorification of the self as discontinuous and promiscuous—why should his blog be read as anything more than a psychological document, as a record of his shifts and his seasons? These aren’t accusations of on anti-Semitism, or arguments against a view of the propriety of Israeli actions over the past decade. They’re complaints about the volatility and moodiness and spontaneity that comes with writing things down quickly, all day, for consumption over the internet. It first hit us that Wieseltier was masking a tired anti-blogging tirade with a shameless and irresponsible accusation of anti-Semitism when Philip Weiss at MondoWeiss helpfully published the preposterously pompous toast that Wieseltier delivered at the wedding of Cass Sunstein and Samantha Power in 2008 . How would Weiss have the text of a wedding toast handy? Wieseltier was so pleased with it that he e-mailed it to some friends lest they miss out on its profound lessons simply for not rating an invite: “Love is a revolution in scale, a revision of magnitudes; it is private and it is particular; its object is the specificity of this man and that woman, the distinctness of this spirit and that flesh.” Seriously. Read it . But he regaled Power and Sunnstein’s guests with this dour little note that, taken with his vicious sniffing at Sullivan, smacks of the striver trying to knock out the rungs of the ladder beneath him: We are ceaselessly in motion, spinning up and out, mentally and physically…. We deny distance and we revere speed, not least as proof that we may bend reality to our wishes and our needs; and we have taught ourselves to think swiftly, and also to feel swiftly. We are accustomed to celebrating ourselves, and to being celebrated, and what we accomplish in our various callings is often worthy of celebration. These are bad things—bloggy things—to which a lovely wedding is an antidote. Wieseltier is finished with motion and spinning and swift feeling, and he’s decided that the spinners are ruining everything and hate the Jews, to boot. His feelings on the matter were clarified on Friday when Wieseltier issued another diatribe, this time against the crime that interns, young upstarts, and unemployed nonprofessional writers are poorly paid , if at all, when they write for the internet. We are all for editorial workers getting paid for their services ( perhaps in free iPads ?), so we’re not going to argue with Wieseltier on that point. But he betrays the codger in him by going after the medium of wired and wireless text communication as the villain. Otherwise he would have written the same lament two decades ago upon learning that certain venerable magazines like the New Republic , the Washington Monthly , Harper’s Magazine , Dissent , Mother Jones , the Nation , Commentary , and all manner of literary reviews that we’re sure Wieseltier feels better about himself for reading have a lengthy history of paying below-market salaries to their editors and writers. Some are even known to employ interns without paying them anything! But since they’re institutional members of the Manhattan-D.C. print aristocracy and not part of the “cheap entropy of the web,” they escape Wieseltier’s gaze. It’s not that web sites don’t pay writers enough—it’s that they’re peopled by “brats” as he described the (paid!) writers here at Gawker, which he confessed to reading with the telling excuse, “see what insomnia can do to a man?” Our understanding of what insomnia can do to a man is that it can prevent them from sleeping and cause them to read whatever it is that they choose to read , you prick. This particular brat happens to be a 36-year-old father of a 16-month-old brat of his own. Wieseltier’s beef is literally with a suite of communications technologies, and the fact that the people who use them are young and unschooled by his lights. “Leave aside the question of the relation of blogging to writing, of posting to publishing,” he writes at one point, appearing to take seriously the idea the blogging and writing are different things, or that publication only occurs by virtue of some mystical alchemy of ink and paper. The only difference between the Wieseltier-approved forms of communication and the lowly digital variants are cultural. “Blogging” is done quickly by brats, “writing” is done in garrets or university libraries by people Wieseltier has heard of. “Posting” is a vulgar and lonely thing done by means of a button, “publishing” is a grand process paid for by publications Wieseltier reads. The former is a seedy affair to which virtually anyone has access; the latter is a privilege granted to those who’ve navigated a decades-old professional maze to Wieseltier’s satisfaction. It’s fine to hate Andrew Sullivan, or Gawker, or all manner of bloggers. We do! But it’s deeply reactionary to reflexively and arrogantly sneer at anyone who publishes things online simply because they publish things online. Wieseltier’s wordy war on “blogging” is as stupid and empty as the 18th century worry that reading novels—not certain novels, just novels — corrupted the morals of young women . Some writing published online is useful, and some isn’t. But all of it is fast and scary and cheap and ejaculatory to Wieseltier, because it doesn’t conform to the rules that he’s become comfortable with. And because it’s not long enough: Brevity may be the soul of wit, or lingerie, or texting, or quail eggs, but all subjects are not the same. Efficiency of expression is in some realms a virtue and in some realms a vice. Brevity is certainly not the soul of news, if by news you mean more than information. “The point” is not always easy. There is not always a “takeaway.” Anyway, this is already an abbreviating age. The forces of concision and distillation are winning. After the death of waiting, I do not see the wisdom of preaching impatience. A culture cannot thrive upon a fear of discourse. We’re not quite sure what Wieseltier’s concern is: We’re not suffering from a shortage of long, pointless magazine articles that require patience to finish. The section of the New Republic that Wieseltier edits replenishes the supply on a biweekly basis. His real fear seems to be that no one likes to real long pointless things anymore, notably the long pointless things that he writes—though he’s recently learned that long, pointless, reckless allegations of Jew-hatred certainly goose the pageviews. Anyway, the culture will not thrive without them, just as it collapsed after the use of the telegraph became routine. Here’s an Atlantic Monthly writer anticipating Wieseltier’s whinging 119 years ago : The frantic haste with which we bolt everything we take, seconded by the eager wish of the journalist not to be a day behind his competitor, abolishes deliberation from judgment and sound digestion from our mental constitutions. We have no time to go below surfaces, and as a general thing no disposition. New Yorker writer George Packer’s arguments against Twitter —which were “published” rather than “posted” on the New Yorker ‘s web site, we gather—are similarly anachronistic. While Packer was simply speaking for himself when he likened Twitter to crack, rather than pronouncing on the bankruptcy of a whole means of communicating with an audience, his irrational fear of what reading people’s thoughts via Twitter will do to his mind comes from fear and a reflexive unwillingness to understand what he’s talking about rather than curiosity. Packer quotes David Carr’s Twitter love in the New York Times —”There is always something more interesting on Twitter than whatever you happen to be working on”—adding, “This last is what really worries me.” You’re worried that you might learn about interesting things? And your job is to tell other people interesting stories? If Packer bothered to hit the pipe for an hour or so he would have quickly learned that a) nothing anyone writes on Twitter is ever even remotely interesting and b) it’s a really easy way to find out about other interesting things that people are writing on the internet. While I wholeheartedly support Packer’s decision to not read the things people write on Twitter, it would be easier to understand if he had an actual reason not to that amounted to more than a generalized phobia of Blackberries and such. These things come in threes, so we’re really looking forward to director Michael Haneke’s take on the internet—he has reportedly dropped a film about “the humiliation of old age” in favor a to-be-written film about the online world . Perhaps he should combine the ideas and just option the recent works of Leon Wieseltier.
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A Call for a Moratorium on Cranky Old Writers Complaining about the Internet
Our Twitter followers share their ideas for a LOST video game.
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Twitgeist: How Would You Design a LOST Video Game?
Tagged bennyhollywood, Hollywood, ideas, lost, news shows, People, their-ideas, tv shows, Twitter
We don’t want to jinx it, but Spencer Pratt, master manipulator and media madman, has remained mute regarding the whole Heidi Montag plastic surgery debacle. Speaking out for the first time to People, Heidi’s husband says he supports her, but at the same time he isn’t totally in favor of what she did. A politician at work! For the past three years, while Heidi Montag has obsessed about her imperfections and eagerly planned her 10 procedures, Pratt was there to voice his opinion.
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Spencer Pratt Sort of Stands By Heidi Montag
Posted in Celebrities, Gossip
Tagged Gossip, gossip-girl, heidi-montag, ideas, lifestyle, most-important, People, singer, spencer-pratt
For a few hours a couple weeks ago, there was a rumor that said Adam Lambert would appear on Glee . It was quickly shot down.
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Adam Lambert Crushes on Chace Crawford, Teases Guest-Starring Gigs
Posted in Celebrities, Gossip
Tagged Adam Lambert, bennyhollywood, chace crawford, couple-moments, Gossip, gossip-girl, Hollywood, ideas, lifestyle, made-it-clear, singer, star-on-one, Vampire, vampire-nature, white
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