Matthew Weymar's List: Diigo Only

Fantastic article by Legal Affairs Reporter Tracey Tyler, describing a project initiated by David Chisling. He managed to put together a garden (with help from the Rotary Club and others) were youth offenders work to rehabilitate themselves/ get off drugs/ abandon bad lifestyles. Some very remarkable insights into creativity and working with living things, the value of producing something, and how this affects communication skills (which in turn are kind of key to a lot of stuff, although that's not something the article goes into).

Must-read expose/ explanation by Michael Lewis (author of Liar's Poker) of Wall Street's "doomsday machine," as Steve Eisman calls it. Not sure I understand completely all the ins and outs of "selling short" and "shorting," but Lewis articulates it well enough. The first passage I highlighted really captures the "sorcerer's apprentice gone mad" quality: There really weren't enough unqualified mortgage borrowers to satisfy investors' appetite for collateralized debt obligation (CDOs) packages, so "shorts" step in to create a kind of magic alternate -- like the splinters of wood when the apprentice tries to chop the enchanted broom into bits, and thereby just creates more brooms.... So in the end, you have more losses than loans.