My article on Porsche received quite a bit of exposure. Much to my surprise, it was read by 200 thousand people in the last month, which tells me the present economic upheaval has people clamoring for good explanations of the inner workings of the finance world.

While the laborious minutiæ of my imminent move to the West Coast successfully sapped my desire (and the time) to write, there are a handful of top-notch articles that I’ve read recently and thought I ought to share.

Chief among them is Donald MacKenzie’s piece on hedge funds in the London Review of Books, a long — but not too long — explanation of just what it is that hedge funds do. MacKenzie’s writing is dense at times, but this is still the single best piece I’ve seen on the subject, and it goes into certain details of the Porsche/Volkswagen maneuver that I chose to leave out of my own article for simplicity’s sake.

Veteran New York Times reporter Joe Nocera’s piece, Risk Mismanagement: What Led to the Financial Meltdown, is a detailed answer to the key question I’ve had about the financial crisis. Where the hell was the math? Short answer: executives don’t understand that confidence intervals based on relatively short spans of historical data — by definition! — aren’t the right tool to predict rare radical outliers. Long answer: read Nocera’s article.

Finally, Michael Lewis and David Einhorn have a substantial, two-part Times op-ed, titled The End of the Financial World as We Know It and How to Repair a Broken Financial World which answers the other pressing question about the crisis: where the hell were the regulators, and why weren’t they paying attention?

Put together, these articles are some of the very best coverage of what’s been going on. They’re well worth a proper read.