The Price Is Righteous

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN money and well-being is simple (as in, the more money we have, the better off we think we are) but also horribly, irreducibly complex. You don’t need more money to improve your well-being; you can just be smarter about how it’s put to use. Instead of buying stock in an arms manufacturer or a tobacco company, for instance, maybe an investor could help to indemnify a group of small biotechnology companies against the failure of their clinical trials. The investor’s return would come from sharing in the upside if the trials succeeded. Or maybe a philanthropist could give

culture Dec/Jan 2011

Giant Sucking Sound

Matt Taibbi is, by some margin, the best polemical journalist in America. His dispatches for Rolling Stone—long, carefully reported, deeply angry, and chock-full of information and vitriol—throw complex policy debates into stark relief and are loud and powerful enough to compete with the sex and celebrity filling up the rest of the magazine.

One of Taibbi’s signal talents is that he repeats this feat on a regular basis: He’s no one-trick pony. But the undoubted high point of his career—the phrase that will make it into the first paragraph of his obituary, no matter how long he lives—came in