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MOST PEOPLE TOOK subprime loans because, by the ’00s, real average wages in the United States had stagnated for thirty years, the social safety net had been disassembled, and yet prices had continued to rise. Wealth inequality had reached heights not seen in a century. Ordinary people were not buyi…

Michael McVay created American Summit in 1997. The company quickly moved from his garage to a number of well-appointed office buildings. By 2003, it was the seventh-largest IMC in Minnesota. Like the others, it specialized in nonconventional mortgages, designed for people who would be rejected by m…

I was only 17 but longed for a radical transvaluation of my life. I’d grown bored with my trifling mendacity and skeptical of Rand’s righteous dogmatism and maladroit prose, skeptical less about her truth than her usefulness to whatever game I was playing. I shed all my allegiances. I quit marching…

In the lull before September 11, before the Iraq war and resurgent white nationalism and 4chan, we were young, upper-middle-class white men with excess energy, more than we could expend on Swedish death metal or catfishing with a 28.8 Kbps modem. Our lefty cousins, ahead of the curve, attentive alr…

In the lull before September 11, before the Iraq war and resurgent white nationalism and 4chan, we were young, upper-middle-class white men with excess energy, more than we could expend on Swedish death metal or catfishing with a 28.8 Kbps modem. Our lefty cousins, ahead of the curve, attentive alr…