Perhaps more than any other contemporary nonfiction writer, Michael Lewis has earned a living making esoterica not only legible but riveting. In his hands, the particulars of subprime mortgages and collateralized debt obligations (The Big Short), of baseball's sabermetrics revolution (Moneyball), and of global financial crises afflicting Greece and Iceland (Boomerang) become the stuff of best-seller lists. The result is his new book, which tells the dramatic and sneakily poignant stories of six public servants who resisted the encroachment of DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency.
There's Alexander Maranghides, a fire protection engineer with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Kathleen Walters, a privacy officer at the Internal Revenue Service who was ordered, by the slimy Musk sycophant Gavin Kliger, to hand over confidential information on millions of American taxpayers. Before setting off on a 20-city book tour, his largest one to date, Lewis confessed to feeling “a little nervous.” But he doesn't read reviews anymore, as he told GQ, and he's already thinking about his next undertaking: a play, if you can believe it, set to open at New York's Cherry Lane Theater next spring. GQ: Your new book, Blockers, is out this week, and in it you’re quite critical of the second Trump administration.
How do you think it’s going to land? Michael Lewis: I've already got some sense of how it's going to play, and I feel great. I can't really think of a book I've published that didn't trigger some anger.
I don't know why they do it, but they do. But that has not really materialized… yet. It's an interesting exercise in becoming the lone personal publicist for the American bureaucracy.
Did you reconcile yourself long ago with the idea that your work might ruffle some feathers? Or does that still unsettle you a little bit? It's not my natural state.
I don't move through the world trying to piss people off, but Liar's Poker was my first real taste of it. And Billy Beane was just furious with Moneyball when it came out. So you don't know how people are going to respond to how you've portrayed them.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
