Kingpin is a great primer on how criminals are using the Internet to collaborate in the electronic black market, especially credit card fraud, and how the Secret Service and FBI are fighting back. The story of hacker Max Ray Vision reads like a geek thriller but is fairly accessible to anyone interested in a great crime story.

Hope this becomes a movie.

Read the related Wired article or watch Poulsen discuss Kingpin at RSA Conference 2011:

Taibbi’s writing style is direct, at times profane, but never fails to entertain while giving insight into what’s happening within the world of high finance.

On his favorite target Goldman Sachs:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

With Griftopia, Taibbi calls out former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (“The Biggest Asshole in the Universe”), highlights how U.S. municipalities are leasing off public property to help finance themselves during budget shortfalls (“The Outsourced Highway”) and dresses down the health care reform legislation (“The Trillion Dollar Band-Aid”). It also includes a re-print of his initial Rolling Stone piece, which is one of the best pieces I’ve read that describes what happened during the financial crisis and the role Goldman played.

While his style may not resonate with most, I highly recommend Griftopia if you want to understand the convoluted world of banking and how it impacts the the United States without feeling like you need to need to get a finance degree or bore yourself to death reading a dry account of how money is moving around the world.

Many people lost homes they shouldn’t have held mortgages on in the first place, and the banking and finance industry was rewarded for its carelessness with a whimsical, multi-billion dollar government bailout. You finish The Big Short realizing the financial industry is one big sausage factory whose end product is something you’re not really sure what’s inside, but tastes great until you discover it might actually be bad for you.

In many ways Wall Street is a lot like legislation in Washington, DC, where no one completely understands what’s happening, but somehow everyone makes money off the deal.

Two excerpts best summarize the book’s gist:

The line between gambling and investing is artificial and thin. The soundest investment has the defining trait of a bet (you losing all of your money in hopes of making a bit more), and the wildest speculation has the salient characteristic of an investment (you might get your money back with interest). Maybe the best definition of “investing” is “gambling with the odds in your favor.” The people on the other side – the entire financial system, essentially – had gambled with the odds against them. Up to this point, the story of the big short could not be simpler. What’s strange and complicated about it, however, is that pretty much all the important people on both sides of the gamble left the table rich.

More to the point, from former Salomon Brothers CEO John Gutfreund, featured prominently in Lewis’ first book Liar’s Poker:

It’s laissez-faire until you get into deep shit.

There’s a great 60 Minutes interview with Lewis and others featured in the book:

Part 1

Part 2

Outcasts United is set in the refugee resettlement town Clarkston, GA, and focuses on the tough love spirit of soccer coach Luma Mufleh and her work with young boy immigrants from worn-torn countries like Afghanistan, Burma, Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, Liberia and Bosnia. Mufleh’s dedication is inspiring and will make you want to either play soccer or get up off your couch and do something to change the world.

You can learn more about the story and the nonprofit organization Mufleh founded, Fugees Family, by visiting the official Fugees Family Website or follow them on Twitter at @fugeesfamily. There’s also a great video about the Fugees here, on Tavis Smiley here, and on Inside Africa (CNNI) here.

The Q&A includes great quotes like this from Johnson:

Life seems to gravitate toward these complex states where there’s just enough disorder to create new things. There’s a rate of mutation just high enough to let interesting new innovations happen, but not so many mutations that every new generation dies off immediately.

Johnson’s TED talk: