The Sidney Awards
By DAVID BROOKS
NYT
Everything becomes a shorter version of itself. Essays become op-eds. Op-eds become blog posts. Blog posts become Twitter tweets. The Sidney Awards stand athwart technology, yelling stop. They are awarded every year to some of the best examples of long-form journalism and thought.
The first Sidney goes to Michael Lewis, whose essay “The End” appeared in Portfolio magazine. Lewis often writes about people who can see reality clearly while the rest of humanity is lost in a fog of delusion. He describes Meredith Whitney and Steve Eisman, two financial analysts who understood early on that the U.S. financial system had turned into a doomsday machine. Whitney announced early on that Citigroup was in a ton of trouble. Eisman stood up in the middle of a speech by a mortgage company C.E.O. to tell him that his default rates were about to become astronomical.
At the climax of his essay, Lewis has lunch with John Gutfreund, the former chief executive of Salomon Brothers who had been the subject and victim of Lewis’s first book, “Liar’s Poker.”
“Your [expletive] book destroyed my career, and it made yours,” Gutfreund told him. Lewis believes the turning point on Wall Street came when Gutfreund turned Salomon Brothers from a private partnership into a public corporation, leading to a wave of such transformations.
(More here.)
NYT
Everything becomes a shorter version of itself. Essays become op-eds. Op-eds become blog posts. Blog posts become Twitter tweets. The Sidney Awards stand athwart technology, yelling stop. They are awarded every year to some of the best examples of long-form journalism and thought.
The first Sidney goes to Michael Lewis, whose essay “The End” appeared in Portfolio magazine. Lewis often writes about people who can see reality clearly while the rest of humanity is lost in a fog of delusion. He describes Meredith Whitney and Steve Eisman, two financial analysts who understood early on that the U.S. financial system had turned into a doomsday machine. Whitney announced early on that Citigroup was in a ton of trouble. Eisman stood up in the middle of a speech by a mortgage company C.E.O. to tell him that his default rates were about to become astronomical.
At the climax of his essay, Lewis has lunch with John Gutfreund, the former chief executive of Salomon Brothers who had been the subject and victim of Lewis’s first book, “Liar’s Poker.”
“Your [expletive] book destroyed my career, and it made yours,” Gutfreund told him. Lewis believes the turning point on Wall Street came when Gutfreund turned Salomon Brothers from a private partnership into a public corporation, leading to a wave of such transformations.
(More here.)
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