An Evening with Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis — author of Moneyball, The Big Short, and Liar's Poker — on his career illuminating the hidden systems driving American finance and power.
Why we picked this
Lewis has an unmatched talent for finding the one person inside a broken system who understood exactly what was happening — and making that story feel like something you were always supposed to know.
Michael Lewis arrived as a writer with Liar’s Poker, a first-person account of his time at Salomon Brothers that revealed the inner logic of Wall Street bond trading to people who had never thought much about it. What followed across three decades was a consistent project: finding the moments when a system failed or was gamed or was operating in ways nobody had bothered to explain, and writing about them in ways that made the mechanics visible without losing the human story.
Moneyball changed how baseball thinks about talent evaluation. The Big Short explained the 2008 financial crisis through the handful of people who saw it coming and bet against it. Flash Boys exposed high-frequency trading. The Undoing Project explored how two psychologists’ friendship produced the foundational insights of behavioral economics.
An evening with Lewis is an evening with one of the few journalists whose books actually explain how consequential things work — and who finds the right characters to make you feel it.