The Top Five Longreads of 2011

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One year ago today, I published my post on the best longreads of 2010. Today, I bring you my list of the best longreads of 2011. It’s been another amazing year for long-form journalism, and it’s hard to whittle down the list to just five entries. Nevertheless, these five pieces stood out in my mind:

(1) “The Man Who Played Rockefeller” [Wall Street Journal] – first highlighted in this post, I wrote: “riveting, at times unbelievable, account of how a German-born Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter came to the United States at the tender age of 17 and proceeded to climb up the ranks of society. But he did it through conniving tactics, playing cool, and always acting the impostor.” It is already on my short list for best long read of the year.

When he entered the magnificent Gothic church in early 1992, the former Christopher Crowe had a new name and a meticulously researched persona to go with it. “Hello,” he greeted his fellow worshippers in his perfectly enunciated East Coast prep-school accent, wearing a blue blazer and private-club necktie, which he would usually accent with khaki pants embroidered with tiny ducks, hounds or bumblebees, worn always with Top-Sider boat shoes, without socks. “Clark,” he said, “Clark Rockefeller.”

(2) “The Assassin in the Vineyard” [Vanity Fair] – I am a huge fan of reads that involve mystery, espionage, and crime. This piece by Maximillian Potter, which I first highlighted here, is far and away one of the most thrilling short reads I’ve read in 2011. In that post I wrote:

The gist of the story: La Romanée-Conti is a small, centuries-old vineyard that produces what most agree is Burgundy’s finest, rarest, and most expensive wine. But when Aubert de Villaine received an anonymous and sophisticated note, in January 2010, threatening the destruction of his heritage, unless he paid a 1 million euro ransom, he did not treat it seriously at first. Who was the mastermind behind this crime? And did the criminal get caught? All is revealed in the article…

Thoroughly engaging and entertaining read.

(3) “The Epidemic of Mental Illness” (Part I) and “The Illusions of Psychiatry”(Part 2) [New York Review of Books] — this two part series, written by Marcia Angell changed my perspective on depression, the medicine used to treat it, and the field of psychiatry in general. I point out both reads because they are meant to be read in order (Part I then Part II).

Reviewed in Part I are books by  Irving Kirsch, Robert Whitaker, and Daniel Carlat. A notable paragraph of skepticism from Part I:

Do the drugs work? After all, regardless of the theory, that is the practical question. In his spare, remarkably engrossing book, The Emperor’s New Drugs, Kirsch describes his fifteen-year scientific quest to answer that question about antidepressants. When he began his work in 1995, his main interest was in the effects of placebos. To study them, he and a colleague reviewed thirty-eight published clinical trials that compared various treatments for depression with placebos, or compared psychotherapy with no treatment. Most such trials last for six to eight weeks, and during that time, patients tend to improve somewhat even without any treatment. But Kirsch found that placebos were three times as effective as no treatment. That didn’t particularly surprise him. What did surprise him was the fact that antidepressants were only marginally better than placebos.

I thought I’ve read a fair amount of skepticism in Part I. And then I read “The Illusions of Psychiatry,” which totally transplanted my thoughts on psychiatry from one mindset to another.

While Carlat believes that psychoactive drugs are sometimes effective, his evidence is anecdotal. What he objects to is their overuse and what he calls the “frenzy of psychiatric diagnoses.” As he puts it, “if you ask any psychiatrist in clinical practice, including me, whether antidepressants work for their patients, you will hear an unambiguous ‘yes.’ We see people getting better all the time.” But then he goes on to speculate, like Irving Kirsch in The Emperor’s New Drugs, that what they are really responding to could be an activated placebo effect. If psychoactive drugs are not all they’re cracked up to be—and the evidence is that they’re not—what about the diagnoses themselves?

(4) “Gilad Shalit and the Rising Price of an Israeli Life” [New York Times] – of all the longreads I’ve read this year, I think this one most likely escaped a lot of people’s radar. The story is about Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who was captured by Hamas in June 2006 and didn’t gain his release from captivity until October of this year. The author of the piece, Ronen Bergman, offers why he is an authority on writing about this controversial subject:

I have covered Israeli hostage and M.I.A. cases for more than 15 years, including the covert ways in which Israel’s powerful espionage agencies operate to bring soldiers home alive or dead. Over that time, the issue has come to dominate public discourse to a degree that no one could have predicted. Israeli society’s inability to tolerate even a single soldier held in captivity results in popular movements that have tremendous impact on strategic decisions made by the government. The issue has become a generator of history rather than an outcome of it.

Perhaps more than any other issue in the last five years, the politics behind negotiating the release of Gilad Shalit embroiled the country of Israel. This is a must-read piece that offers an eye-opening perspective.

(5) “The Man Who Sailed His House” [GQ] – Michael Paterniti writes a remarkable story of a Japanese man named Hiromitsu who survived the March 11 earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Not only is the story incredible, but so is the narration (you here are this man, experiencing the catastrophe in the present):

At two forty-six, something rumbles from deep in the earth, a sickening sort of grinding, and then everything lurches wildly, whips back, lurches more wildly still. The cut boards stacked along the wall clatter down, and your first move is to flee the shed, to dive twenty feet free onto open ground and clutch it, as if riding the back of a whale. Time elongates. Three minutes becomes a lifetime.

When the jolting ends, stupefaction is followed by dismay—and then a bleary accounting. Already phones are useless. The boss, Mr. Mori, urges you to rush home to check on your wife and parents, but fearing a tsunami, fearing a drive down into the lowlands by the sea, and trusting the strength of your concrete house to protect your wife and parents, you at first refuse. There are ancient stone markers on this coast, etched warnings from the ancestors, aggrieved survivors of past tsunamis—1896, 1933—beseeching those who live by the water to build on the inland side of their hubris or suffer the consequences.

Originally featured in this post.

I think 2011 was another excellent year for long-form journalism. I highly recommend checking out the Longreads Tumblr for more “Best of 2011 in Longreads” posts. Finally, check out my #longreads tag on this blog for more reading.

The Histrionics of Grief in North Korea

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Following the death of Kim Jong-Il, North Koreans took to the streets to mark their grief of their beloved Leader. I watched, mouth aghast, not believing if these scenes were real:

Amy Davidson has a brief post in The New Yorker about the hysterics of the North Koreans:

How does a whole crowd fake tears? Barbara Demick, in “Nothing to Envy,” her book on the ravaged social landscape of North Korea, collected accounts of how ordinary North Koreans set themselves to just that task after the death of Kim’s father, Kim Il-sung, back in 1994: “It was like a staring contest. Stare. Cry. Stare. Cry,” a student told her. “Eventually, it became mechanical. The body took over where the mind left off and suddenly he was really crying. He felt himself falling to his knees, rocking back and forth, sobbing just like everyone else.”

Cue Barbara Demick’s explanation of how the North Koreans grieve:

Those waiting in line would jump up and down, pound their heads, collapse into theatrical swoons, rip their clothes and pound their fists at the air in futile rage. The men wept as copiously as the women.

The histrionics of grief took on a competitive quality. Who could weep the loudest? The mourners were egged on by the TV news, which broadcast hours and hours of people wailing, grown men with tears rolling down their cheeks, banging their heads on trees, sailors banging their heads agains the masts of their ships, pilots weeping in the cockpit, and so on. These scenes were interspersed with footage of lightning and pouring rain. It looked like Armageddon.

Seems like history repeats itself.

Your Credit Score and Social Media

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Well, this is slightly unnerving. In a BetaBeat post titled “As Banks Start Nosing Around Facebook and Twitter, the Wrong Friends Might Just Sink Your Credit,” we learn about a new wave of start-ups that is…

working on algorithms gathering data for banks from the web of associations on the internet known as “the social graph,” in which people are “nodes” connected to each other by “edges.” Banks are already using social media to befriend their customers, and increasingly, their customers’ friends. The specifics are still shaking out, but the gist is that eventually, social media will account for at least the tippy-top of the mountain of data banks keep on their customers.

“There is this concept of ‘birds of a feather flock together,’” said Ken Lin, CEO of the San Francisco-based credit scoring startup Credit Karma. “If you are a profitable customer for a bank, it suggests that a lot of your friends are going to be the same credit profile. So they’ll look through the social network and see if they can identify your friends online and then maybe they send more marketing to them. That definitely exists today.”

And in the last year or so, financial institutions have started exploring ways to use data from Facebook, Twitter and other networks to round out an individual borrower’s risk profile—although most entrepreneurs working on the problem say the technology is three to five years away from mainstream adoption.

Here’s what I am thinking. If you have a solid credit rating, then exposing your social media outlets could potentially hurt you. On the other hand, these algorithms may be devised such that you take a bigger hit if you don’t divulge your information. If you have a poor credit rating but a strong network of friends, then divulging your social media crumbs could help you in your overall credit score. One thing is for certain, however: if there is any way that a bank could find out more information about you to better predict your ability to repay a loan, the more aggressively it will try to implement the schema into its arsenal of judging your credit score.

We live in a brave new world.

How To Be a Better Blogger

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Dan Frommer’s post on how to blog better is one of the most helpful blog posts I’ve read this year. Here are some of Dan’s ten tips to be a better blogger:

  1. Above all else, factual accuracy and attention to detail. That’s the easiest and best way to build and maintain trust over the long-term. If a fact is wrong, fix it and don’t be shy about it. If an opinion or prediction is wrong, learn from it and consider explaining how you got it wrong.
  2. Write the site that you want to read. That covers story selection, length, frequency, style, vocabulary, attitude, humor, level of sensationalism, and more. Don’t publish anything you’re not proud of. Be yourself.
  3. Be more skeptical. Companies and people have no interest in telling any side of the story but their own. Often, that side is flawed, invalid, or incorrect. Let someone else be the gullible one who looks silly later: Always question everything. (But don’t let it turn you into too much of a conspiracy theorist.)
  4. Try new things, all the time. Especially those that are a little outside your comfort zone. This is the Internet — don’t act like you’re writing for Time Magazine in the 80s. Stories can be pictures, charts, lengthy essays, numbered lists, or 140 characters. Measure how your experiments do, and take the results into account for the future.

However, I think the most important lesson for me is regarding attribution. I make it very clear when I quote or paraphrase, but what I have to get better at is referring you, the reader, to click over to the original piece I link to. Writes Dan:

Aim to become as big of a traffic referrer as you possibly can — not only is that good policy, but it’s a great business asset.

Amen. With that in mind, you should read Dan’s post to see his other tips for better blogging.

Dispelling Your Illusions

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Freeman Dyson has a good review in New York Review of Books on Daniel Khaneman’s latest book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Freeman Dyson presents an anecdote from his own life to explain the illusion of validity:

An episode from my own past is curiously similar to Kahneman’s experience in the Israeli army. I was a statistician before I became a scientist. At the age of twenty I was doing statistical analysis of the operations of the British Bomber Command in World War II. The command was then seven years old, like the State of Israel in 1955. All its institutions were under construction. It consisted of six bomber groups that were evolving toward operational autonomy. Air Vice Marshal Sir Ralph Cochrane was the commander of 5 Group, the most independent and the most effective of the groups. Our bombers were then taking heavy losses, the main cause of loss being the German night fighters.

Cochrane said the bombers were too slow, and the reason they were too slow was that they carried heavy gun turrets that increased their aerodynamic drag and lowered their operational ceiling. Because the bombers flew at night, they were normally painted black. Being a flamboyant character, Cochrane announced that he would like to take a Lancaster bomber, rip out the gun turrets and all the associated dead weight, ground the two gunners, and paint the whole thing white. Then he would fly it over Germany, and fly so high and so fast that nobody could shoot him down. Our commander in chief did not approve of this suggestion, and the white Lancaster never flew.

The reason why our commander in chief was unwilling to rip out gun turrets, even on an experimental basis, was that he was blinded by the illusion of validity. This was ten years before Kahneman discovered it and gave it its name, but the illusion of validity was already doing its deadly work. All of us at Bomber Command shared the illusion. We saw every bomber crew as a tightly knit team of seven, with the gunners playing an essential role defending their comrades against fighter attack, while the pilot flew an irregular corkscrew to defend them against flak. An essential part of the illusion was the belief that the team learned by experience. As they became more skillful and more closely bonded, their chances of survival would improve.

When I was collecting the data in the spring of 1944, the chance of a crew reaching the end of a thirty-operation tour was about 25 percent. The illusion that experience would help them to survive was essential to their morale. After all, they could see in every squadron a few revered and experienced old-timer crews who had completed one tour and had volunteered to return for a second tour. It was obvious to everyone that the old-timers survived because they were more skillful. Nobody wanted to believe that the old-timers survived only because they were lucky.

At the time Cochrane made his suggestion of flying the white Lancaster, I had the job of examining the statistics of bomber losses. I did a careful analysis of the correlation between the experience of the crews and their loss rates, subdividing the data into many small packages so as to eliminate effects of weather and geography. My results were as conclusive as those of Kahneman. There was no effect of experience on loss rate. So far as I could tell, whether a crew lived or died was purely a matter of chance. Their belief in the life-saving effect of experience was an illusion.

The demonstration that experience had no effect on losses should have given powerful support to Cochrane’s idea of ripping out the gun turrets. But nothing of the kind happened. As Kahneman found out later, the illusion of validity does not disappear just because facts prove it to be false. Everyone at Bomber Command, from the commander in chief to the flying crews, continued to believe in the illusion. The crews continued to die, experienced and inexperienced alike, until Germany was overrun and the war finally ended.

The New York Times named Thinking, Fast and Slow as one of the best books of 2011.

Top Ten Physics Breakthroughs of 2011

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Physics World begins thusly:

The two physics stories that dominated the news in 2011 were questions rather than solid scientific results, namely “Do neutrinos travel faster than light?” and “Has the Higgs boson been found?”

After that disclosure, the Physics World editorial team has compiled a nice end-of-the-year list. The first place goes to Aephraim Steinberg and colleagues from the University of Toronto in Canada for their experimental work on the fundamentals of quantum mechanics:

Steinberg’s work stood out because it challenges the widely held notion that quantum mechanics forbids us any knowledge of the paths taken by individual photons as they travel through two closely spaced slits to create an interference pattern.

This interference is exactly what one would expect if we think of light as an electromagnetic wave. But quantum mechanics also allows us to think of the light as photons – although with the weird consequence that if we determine which slit individual photons travel through, then the interference pattern vanishes. By using weak measurements Steinberg and his team have been able to gain some information about the paths taken by the photons without destroying the pattern.

See the rest of the breakthroughs and links to the original articles.

Original New York Times Review of George Orwell’s 1984

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From the 1949 New York Times review of George Orwell’s 1984 (which was written in 1948 and published in 1949):

James Joyce, in the person of Stephen Dedalus, made a now famous distinction between static and kinetic art. Great art is static in its effects; it exists in itself, it demands nothing beyond itself. Kinetic art exists in order to demand; not self-contained, it requires either loathing or desire to achieve its function. The quarrel about the fourth book of ”Gulliver’s Travels” that continues to bubble among scholars — was Swift’s loathing of men so great, so hot, so far beyond the bounds of all propriety and objectivity that in this book he may make us loathe them and indubitably makes us loathe his imagination? — is really a quarrel founded on this distinction. It has always seemed to the present writer that the fourth book of ”Gulliver’s Travels” is a great work of static art; no less, it would seem to him that George Orwell’s new novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a great work of kinetic art. This may mean that its greatness is only immediate, its power for us alone, now, in this generation, this decade, this year, that it is doomed to be the pawn of time. Nevertheless it is probable that no other work of this generation has made us desire freedom more earnestly or loathe tyranny with such fullness.

”Nineteen Eighty-four” appears at first glance to fall into that long-established tradition of satirical fiction, set either in future times or in imagined places or both, that contains works so diverse as ”Gulliver’s Travels” itself, Butler’s ”Erewhon,” and Huxley’s ”Brave New World.” Yet before one has finished reading the nearly bemused first page, it is evident that this is fiction of another order, and presently one makes the distinctly unpleasant discovery that it is not to be satire at all.

In the excesses of satire one may take a certain comfort. They provide a distance from the human condition as we meet it in our daily life that preserves our habitual refuge in sloth or blindness or self-righteousness. Mr. Orwell’s earlier book, Animal Farm, is such a work. Its characters are animals, and its content is therefore fabulous, and its horror, shading into comedy, remains in the generalized realm of intellect, from which our feelings need fear no onslaught. But ”Nineteen Eighty-four” is a work of pure horror, and its horror is crushingly immediate.

The motives that seem to have caused the difference between these two novels provide an instructive lesson in the operations of the literary imagination. ”Animal Farm” was, for all its ingenuity, a rather mechanical allegory; it was an expression of Mr. Orwell’s moral and intellectual indignation before the concept of totalitarianism as localized in Russia. It was also bare and somewhat cold and, without being really very funny, undid its potential gravity and the very real gravity of its subject, through its comic devices. ”Nineteen Eighty-four” is likewise an expression of Mr. Orwell’s moral and intellectual indignation before the concept of totalitarianism, but it is not only that.

It is also — and this is no doubt the hurdle over which many loyal liberals will stumble — it is also an expression of Mr. Orwell’s irritation at many facets of British socialism, and most particularly, trivial as this may seem, at the drab gray pall that life in Britain today has drawn across the civilized amenities of life before the war.

Here is the rest of that review. I first read 1984 when I was in high school. It wasn’t required reading at my school, but I think it should have been.
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(via Kottke)

Fly the Airplane

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Earlier this year, I highlighted a fascinating account of what happened to Air France Flight 447, which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

In the December issue of Popular Mechanics, we get an extended perspective of what went horribly wrong during that flight. Through an extensive transcript, we learn that the flight crashed due to human error. Here’s the conclusion from the Popular Mechanics piece:

Today the Air France 447 transcripts yield information that may ensure that no airline pilot will ever again make the same mistakes. From now on, every airline pilot will no doubt think immediately of AF447 the instant a stall-warning alarm sounds at cruise altitude. Airlines around the world will change their training programs to enforce habits that might have saved the doomed airliner: paying closer attention to the weather and to what the planes around you are doing; explicitly clarifying who’s in charge when two co-pilots are alone in the cockpit; understanding the parameters of alternate law; and practicing hand-flying the airplane during all phases of flight. 

But the crash raises the disturbing possibility that aviation may well long be plagued by a subtler menace, one that ironically springs from the never-ending quest to make flying safer. Over the decades, airliners have been built with increasingly automated flight-control functions. These have the potential to remove a great deal of uncertainty and danger from aviation. But they also remove important information from the attention of the flight crew. While the airplane’s avionics track crucial parameters such as location, speed, and heading, the human beings can pay attention to something else. But when trouble suddenly springs up and the computer decides that it can no longer cope—on a dark night, perhaps, in turbulence, far from land—the humans might find themselves with a very incomplete notion of what’s going on. They’ll wonder: What instruments are reliable, and which can’t be trusted? What’s the most pressing threat? What’s going on? Unfortunately, the vast majority of pilots will have little experience in finding the answers. 

I also want to highlight one blogger’s perspective about this crash. Dustin Curtis writes:

Every time I read about or experience one of these situations, I am reminded of a story I read in The Checklist Manifesto about the emergency checklist for engine failure in a single engine Cessna airplane. The checklist has just six vitally important steps, including things like making sure the fuel valves are open and ensuring the backup fuel pump is turned on. But the first step is fascinating. It is simply FLY THE AIRPLANE. In the confusion of losing an engine, pilots often panic and forget the most obvious things they should be doing. It seems completely unnecessary, but this step ensures the best chance for survival.

The human body’s physical “fight or flight” response evolved to help it evade a dangerous situation, which historically involved extreme physical exertion. The rush of steroids into the bloodstream essentially turns off unnecessary systems, including some higher thinking processes, to aid in escape. Unfortunately, as we’ve evolved into more intelligent beings, that response hasn’t evolved along with us. The stress response is still optimized to prepare for a short period of extreme physical exertion, not for increased mental clarity. The result is painfully obvious with Air France 447: the co-pilot made an absurd error that no pilot in his right mind would make.

This is a superb reminder of how we let our guard down, panic, and act irrationally (or outside of our normal habits) in intense situations.

Types of Commenters on the Internet

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NPR has a fun take on the hodgepodge of commenters you can expect to chime in for end-of-the-year lists (I will have one of my own soon). Which one do you think you are?

1. The Poisoned. “The fact that you included Adele on this list of 100 things you like makes it a total joke.”

2. The Really Pretty Sure Person, Who Is Really Pretty Sure. “I’ve never seen Game Of Thrones, but I’m really pretty sure it’s not as good as Boardwalk Empire.”

3. The Person Who Is Exactly Right. “It really seems like this list of things you thought were good is just your opinion.”

4. The Surprisingly Lucid Narcoleptic. “ZZZZZZZZZ” is the classic. “SNORE” and “YAWN” are acceptable variants.

5. The Mother Of Tim “Freckles” Matterley. “There is a musician in Ann Arbor named Tim Matterley who is better than all these songs! You would like his music. He has a web site at FrecklesMatterley.com, and you can get his songs free on your computer! Please check out Tim Matterley, who does not have a big record contract YET but is very very good!!!!” Two comments later, she will often come back. “Also, Tim Matterley is in this YouTube video where he plays ‘Imagine’ at a children hospital. I am just one fan but I think he is great and he will go far!!!”

6. The Read A Book Guy. “Not one of these movies is as good as reading a book.” On a list of books, by the way, he will say none of the books is as good as books used to be. He also hates Kindles, which he may or may not mention.

7. The Self-Punisher. “I always hate your tastes, so I knew this would be a miserable and useless list before I decided to click on it and read the whole thing, and now I know I was right.”

8. The Unwitting Outlier. “Has anyone really cared about George Clooney since ER?”

9. The Person With The Imperfect Grasp Of Obscurity.“These are all completely obscure picks nobody has ever heard of. The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo sounds like a Dr. Seuss book.”

10. Harry The Hipster-Hater, Who Really, Really Hates Hipsters. “This is all hipster music. I guess it’s okay for hipsters, but I’m not enough of a hipster to like hipster picks like this. Too bad I’m not hipster enough. Maybe I’d like it better if I were more of a hipster.” [His username: “notahipstersorry.”]

11. The Person Who Thinks You Were So Close. “I like all these picks, but you ranked The Descendants as your #4 and Martha Marcy May Marlene as your #5, and they should be the other way around. FAIL.”

12. The Person Who Never Says Die. “Why isn’t Arrested Development on this list?”

13. The Subject-Changer. “If we’re talking about great comedy performances, I don’t know how you can leave out [Barack Obama/the Republican debates/Occupy Wall Street/the Tea Party]. That was the funniest thing I saw all year.”

14. The Minimalist. “These blow.”

15. The Person Who Is Probably Too Hardcore For You.“The best film of the year was shot in Tokyo and the title translates to I [Bleep]ed Your Grandmother With A [Blank] And [Bleep] You Too. I guess that’s probably a little too hardcore for you. You should get outside the multiplex once in a while.”

16. The Person Who Is Laughing But Is Actually Not At All Amused. “You put Community on your list instead of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia? Ha ha ha yeah right.”

17. The Concerned. “What’s wrong with you? No, seriously, what’s wrong with you?”

18. The Person Who Wanted To Be Surprised. “Uh, way to go out on a limb. These are the same things you’ve been talking about all year and saying were the best things when they came out in the first place.”

19. The Disbelieving. “Really? Are you serious? Did you mean to leave off my favorite thing? Or did something happen? Did you forget it? Did you think it didn’t come out this year? Did you write it down and then accidentally delete it in a technology mishap? Do you not know how to spell it? Really? Are you kidding?”

20. The Humble Alternative. “If you really want to know what the best choices of the year were, I put my list up at my site, KnittingWithDagmarAndLaura.com — it’s not just about knitting!”

I like #6, #12, and #19 especially. You?

Jon Corzine and the Romance with Risk

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By now, I’ve read dozens of articles about Jon Corzine and the fall of MF Global. But I think this piece in Dealbook is a best all-around explainer about Jon Corzine and his appetite for risk:

[Jon Corzine] pushed through a $6.3 billion bet on European debt — a wager big enough to wipe out the firm five times over if it went bad — despite concerns from other executives and board members. And it is now clear that he personally lobbied regulators and auditors about the strategy.

His obsession with trading was apparent to MF Global insiders over his 19-month tenure. Mr. Corzine compulsively traded for the firm on his BlackBerry during meetings, sometimes dashing out to check on the markets. And unusually for a chief executive, he became a core member of the group that traded using the firm’s money. His profits and losses appeared on a separate line in documents with his initials: JSC.

This seems like a surprise, however:

He was a popular manager, former employees say. An avuncular presence with a beard and sweater vest, he had a knack for remembering names. Even in the firm’s final hours, they recall that Mr. Corzine never lost his temper. His work ethic also impressed colleagues. He often started his day with a five-mile run, landing in the office by 6 a.m. and was regularly the last person to leave the office.

But the most mind-boggling revelation is that MF Global, through Jon Corzine’s insistence, shied away from implementing a rigorous risk management system at the firm:

Yet soon after joining MF Global, Mr. Corzine torpedoed an effort to build a new risk system, a much-needed overhaul, according to former employees. (A person familiar with Mr. Corzine’s thinking said that he saw the need to upgrade, but that the system being proposed was “unduly expensive” and was focused in part on things the firm didn’t trade.)

Risk management is perhaps the most important function for a bank/financial firm. There is no too steep a price to pay for having a system of checks and balances that would have caught MF Global’s downward spiral and perhaps have done something about it. I need not even mention the lost customer deposits that is now at the core of the investigation following MF Global’s bankruptcy.