Michael Lewis movies are the next big thing, huh? First Brad Pitt and Steven Soderbergh in Moneyball, now word that Sandra Bullock will star in Lewis' The Blind Side. The star of the book, left tackle Michael Oher, is scheduled to be picked in the top half of the NFL's 2009 amateur draft, by the way. Seems like someone probably owns the option on Liars Poker, right? That would be topical.

Michael Lewis checks in with a profile of player Shane Battier and statistical whiz kid Daryl Morey. Some nuggets for you:

The virus that infected professional baseball in the 1990s, the use of statistics to find new and better ways to value players and strategies, has found its way into every major sport. Not just basketball and football, but also soccer and cricket and rugby... — each one now supports a subculture of smart people who view it not just as a game to be played but as a problem to be solved.

[Interesting because this is a virus caused in part by Lewis' book Moneyball]

There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group. On the baseball field, it would be hard for a player to sacrifice his team’s interest for his own. Baseball is an individual sport masquerading as a team one...[In football] the players most famous for being selfish — ...Terrell Owens, for instance — are usually not so much selfish as attention seeking. Their sins tend to occur off the field.

...A point guard might selfishly give up an open shot for an assist...He’s racing down court for an open layup, and...he passes it back to a trailing teammate...the likelihood of scoring...declined. “The marginal assist is worth more money to the point guard than the marginal point,” Morey says. Blocked shots — they look great, but unless you secure the ball afterward, you haven’t helped your team all that much...Dikembe Mutombo, Houston’s 42-year-old backup center, famous for blocking shots, “has always been the best in the league in the recovery of the ball after his block,” says Morey, as he begins to make a case for Mutombo’s unselfishness before he stops and laughs. “But even to Dikembe there’s a selfish component. He made his name by doing the finger wag...And if he doesn’t catch the ball,” Morey says, “he can’t do the finger wag. And he loves the finger wag.” His team of course would be better off if Mutombo didn’t hold onto the ball long enough to do his finger wag...

It turns out there is no statistic that a basketball player accumulates that cannot be amassed selfishly.

“I thought he’d be the first black president,” Wetzel says. “He was Barack Obama before Barack Obama.”

In the statistically insignificant sample of professional athletes I’ve come to know a bit, two patterns have emerged. The first is, they tell you meaningful things only when you talk to them in places other than where they have been trained to answer questions. It’s pointless, for instance, to ask a basketball player about himself inside his locker room. For a start, he is naked; for another, he’s surrounded by the people he has learned to mistrust, his own teammates. The second pattern is the fact that seemingly trivial events in their childhoods have had huge influence on their careers.

One other interesting point in this article is that the Rockets gauge which teams in the league are looking at data the same way they are by how that team plays the game. I wonder if this causes them to over think aspects of the game, though, if they think there opponent is smarter than it is.

The 'Moneyball' movie version of Michael Lewis' book about undervalued resources in baseball is now said to be drawing attention from director Steven Soderbergh - having Brad Pitt attached will do things like that.

A reader of Talking Points Memo writes in to suggest there may be hope yet for struggling newspapers. Essentially, quite a few of the troubled newspapers operate profitably, just not profitably enough to cover the interest payments of these over-leveraged corporations.

So, these bankruptcies may in the medium to long run be good for journalism (in the traditional sense). Assuming the new owners emerge from bankruptcy with limited debt, the papers have many positive attributes upon which to earn a reasonable profit while building new sources of revenue. They have an unparalleled local focus and understanding, they are the most efficient vehicle for several categories of advertising, and they have significant advertising sales forces that can be re-focused on lines of business that can sustain the papers over the long haul. This is particularly true if the surviving owners are people who believe in the public trust mission of their papers and news-oriented web channels.

Also, in an interview with Michael Lewis in The Atlantic, we learn that Lewis isn't concerned about the magazine industry.

Well it makes it a little hard for me to prophesize doom. And I hate spinning theories to which I'm an exception. So my sense is, there'll always be a hunger for long-form journalism, and that it's just a question of how it's packaged. And that people will always figure out how to make it sort of viable. It's never going to be a hugely profitable business: it's more like the movie business or the car business in that there are all sorts of good non-economic reasons to be involved in it. The economic returns will always probably be driven down by too many people wanting to be in it.

But I don't feel gloomy about the magazine business at all.

Since my favorite authors refuse to have blogs of their own, I will do it for them. Here's an article by Chuck Klosterman about Obama's brother-in-law Craig Robinson a college basketball coach in Oregon. The famous campaign story of Michele making (NBA alumni) Craig let Obama play basketball with him and his friends is retold and analyzed from a different light.

Here's Klosterman on The B.S. Report podcast. Haven't listened yet, but I imagine it will be good.

And you know what else? Someone needs to come up with an Alltop channel that features all the articles by all the good authors who refuse to have blogs. I'm thinking Michael Lewis, Michael Pollan, Klosterman, maybe Susan Orlean if it's about origami or orchids, maybe Krakauer, Gladwell because he never updates his site. There's others. Who am I missing?

As if a salve for people like me who have to go back to work tomorrow, Michael Lewis hits the New York Times Op-Ed pages this weekend with TWO articles with cheery titles. The End of the Financial World as We Know It and How to Repair a Broken Financial World.

Gleaned from these articles are 7 ways to begin the recovery:

1. "Congress might grant qualifying homeowners the ability to get new government loans based on the current appraised values without requiring their bank’s consent."
2. "Stop making big regulatory decisions with long-term consequences based on their short-term effect on stock prices."
3. "End the official status of the rating agencies."
4. "Regulate credit-default swaps."
5. "Impose new capital requirements on banks."
6. "Break up any institution that becomes too big to fail."
7. "Close the revolving door between the S.E.C. and Wall Street...But keep the door open the other way."

The funny thing is, there’s nothing all that radical about most of these changes. A disinterested person would probably wonder why many of them had not been made long ago. A committee of people whose financial interests are somehow bound up with Wall Street is a different matter.

There are rumblings that Michael Lewis' book about using undervalued resources to your advantage is going to be made into a movie, possibly starring Brad Pitt. No word yet on whether he'll play Kevin Youkilis, Nick Swisher, Chad Bradford, Mark Teahen, or Billy Beane.

Incidentally, Nick Swisher, the 1st pick of the A's the year Michael Lewis spent in Oakland, at 16th, was picked one pick after Scott Kazmir and one pick before Cole Hamels, 2 picks ridiculed in the book. The picks were ridiculed because Kazmir and Hamels were high school pitchers, though, judging by this year's World Series, I'd say they worked out OK.

(Via kottke.org and Baseball Musings)

Sorry, Portfolio.

This post has changed in the 3 weeks since I started it. Right now, the way I'm blogging is writing posts in bulk a couple times per week and then roboposting them one post a day. This makes it easier for me to blog and makes the blog better, I think. I imagine that most of you don't care about any of this, but I feel an explanation is in order. So anyway, I started this post after it seemed like I was about to post a lot of stuff that had appeared on Kottke. Since then, 2 more things I would have posted were posted by him and, well, we got linked by him, somehow (which was about all I hoped to achieve on the internet in an ZOMG!!11!! kind of way). So although the title of this post is Unabashed Kottke Linking, as you can tell, I'm feeling quite bashed. I don't want Unlikelywords to be a sort of delayed version of the Kottke RSS, but that's how it's gonna have to go sometimes. Below is the original post.

Look, here's the thing. I read kottke.org and I assume most of you do, too. It's full of good stuff. Lately, though pretty much everything on the internet I have ready to post shows up on his site. If I'm lucky, I haven't gotten to it on my RSS feed yet and I don't feel guilty or derivative. If I'm unlucky, I agonize over whether I should still post it. Usually I do. I can't help it if I like Gladwell and Lewis and lists and Fenway Park and Manny (well, I don't like him, but you know what I mean) and Pollan. These are things I liked before I started reading Kottke (and boingboing, for that matter), and I'm going to have to link to them.

Anyway, here are the explanations for a few that will be showing up in the next couple weeks/days. Hopefully, "I saw it somewhere else first" is a good enough defense.

100 skills (I saw it somewhere else first).
Brad Pitt in Money Ball (My admiration for Michael Lewis is on record, and I would have blogged this after hearing about it anyway).
Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker (My admiration for Malcolm Gladwell is noted in the fact that I work for a company partly based on The Tipping Point, and I would have blogged this after hearing about it anyway).
Michael Pollan in the NYTimes (I write about him and Orleans, Gladwell, Pollan, Schlosser, Krakauer, etc)
Manny (Come on.)
Tiny picture of Fenway Park. (No excuses, this is just awesome and people send their awesome stuff to him first).

So those are the excuses for a while, I hope they suffice. And if in the future you notice a higher than acceptable proportion of Kottke-biting posts, know I am suffering internal turmoil.

Can someone, preferably, the man himself, start Michael Lewis a blog? Best known for the books Moneyball and Liar's Poker, he's also had articles/columns in The New York Times, Slate, The Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg, Portfolio (no author page), and almost assuredly The Wall Street Journal (again, no author page). Shouldn't there be a central repository of all these articles in chronological order updated as a new one is published?

What inspired me to write this post, though, was the fact that he's popped up 4 times in my RSS in the last week, so he may as well have had a blog with its own feed.

He moved his family into the biggest mansion in New Orleans to better understand the "acceptable lust" Americans have for a bigger house. He sarcastically muses about how the former CEO of Goldman has treated his former employer since becoming Secretary of the Treasury. He looks on the bright side of economic crisis. And he's writing a book about the meltdown. Also, here's a bonus article from last year I never got around to commenting on. This one includes the quotation, “If there’s been a theme to John’s life,” says his brother Nelson, “it’s pricing tail”, though it's about figuring out what to charge for insurance against cataclysmic events that have less than a 1% chance of happening.