PORTFOLIO
December/January
How to understand the financial crisis in 15 minutes: Read this magazine's cover story.
Here, for instance, is author Michael Lewis on prescient analyst Steve Eisman:
"Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags.
"For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that, in and of themselves, might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 per cent of the new total being rated AAA. But he couldn't figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds ... He called Standard & Poor's and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn't say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number."
GQ
December
You'd think Jon Hamm, better known as urbane '60s advertising icon Don Draper on the TV hit Mad Men, would have been the most popular guy at school, the guy whom friend/actor Paul Rudd says struck him "as one of those unfair guys who are good-looking, really funny, and good at everything."
Instead, after his mother's death from cancer, he became "the kid who was always around other people's houses – popping up at the dinner table, crashing in the basement: `I knew where all the spare keys were kept.'"
As for Hamm's dad, Dan – nicknamed the Whale, for both his oversized body and personality – he was stricken with advanced diabetes and was dead when Jon was 20. "He was basically dying of a hard life," he says.
As Hamm later observes, "I believe that happiness is fleeting."
SWINDLE
Icons Issue
If Paul Reubens had gotten his wish, his alter ego – star of the surreal kidult series Pee-wee's Playhouse – would have spawned his own line of perfume.
"I wanted to make Pee-wee No. 5, Eau de Pee-wee, and then P was going to be my unisex scent. I was going to make it yellow."
Then there was the breakfast cereal."It was going to be called Pee-wee Chow, just like Dog Chow, and had the checkerboard on it," he says. "The commercial was going to be a mom pouring a bowl of it and putting it on the floor and kids crawling up like dogs and eating it on all fours.
"It was sweetened with fruit juice, no added sugar, had all these vitamins and minerals and was really good for you. Everything was going fantastic until, right at the last minute, they had to do a blind taste test with kids, and kids hated it."
THE BELIEVER
The Art Issue
Which side is more likely to overwhelm the other: art or activism?
"Even though art and activism can be very close, if art gets close enough to activism, it can become powerless," says Norwegian artist Dyveke Sanne.
"As an artist, you have a different set of tools. I think that your job is to expose the gap or the sliding position, or, if you like, to lift a stone, show the moment when one truth gets replaced by another. It's not that 'these are art thoughts, these are not art thoughts' – no. Life and art are not separate.
"But when you glimpse something for the first time, you may not recognize it. Rather than counting your steps forward and looking straight on, art encourages you to shift your position, move sideways, and look again."
