Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis is an American author and financial journalist. He studied art history at Princeton and economics at the London School of Economics, then worked as a bond salesman for Salomon Brothers in the 1980s. That experience became Liar's Poker, his first book and his first close account of how an institution explains itself from the inside.

Lewis's narrative nonfiction often follows people who notice a system's incentives or measurements from an unusual position. Moneyball looks at baseball through undervalued statistics; The Blind Side follows a player through the structures around American football; The Undoing Project traces the collaboration between psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Finance remains his most persistent subject. The Big Short follows investors who examined subprime mortgage bonds before the 2008 crash and found that market prices ignored the loans beneath them. Flash Boys turns to high-frequency trading, while Going Infinite follows Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX.

Lewis makes technical structure readable by attaching it to a person with something at stake. The method is powerful because incentives become visible in action, though it also means the reader sees a large system through a deliberately narrow cast of characters.

Start with The Big Short for finance, Moneyball for measurement and sport, or The Fifth Risk for the often invisible work of the U.S. government. The Undoing Project is the best entry if you are more interested in judgment and decision-making.