For years, the financial writer Alice Schroeder had urged Warren Buffet to write his autobiography. Buffet continually demurred, and then countered with a question: why don’t you write a biography. He offered her full access to himself and to his papers, and encouraged his family and associates to cooperate, without, importantly, exerting any sort of control over what Schroeder would write. The result, The Snowball: Warren Buffet and the Business of Life, turns out to be the best sort of authorized biography–honest, insightful, reasonably critical, admiring but not beguiled. Buffet turns out to be an astonishing individual, particularly in the first half of his career, when his restless urge to make money and to learn about making money taught him habits that created the foundation for his astonishing fortune. We’re grateful that Alice Schroeder agreed to take some questions

Is Warren Buffett a genius? Could another similar focused individual achieve the same spectacular results? Does he have a unique gift?

There’s intellect and focus. But Warren also has a charm and skill at promoting himself that brought opportunities his way. Because he is almost phobically risk-averse he protected himself financially throughout his career. And he is almost scarily detached emotionally when it comes to business decisions. Maybe it’s not impossible to replicate his complicated personality, but nobody’s done it. Luck also played a role. He began his career at perhaps the most opportune time for investing in the past century.

What separates Buffet from other great investors? Why has he lasted longer and outperformed so many others?

Many great investors eventually get suckered by their own success into believing that they are infallible — or they start snoozing and take their eye off the ball. Warren has done neither. He sticks to his core principles. He never kids himself that he’s so smart he can stop thinking and learning. His habit is to question himself about every decision because he’s so cautious about ever making a mistake. And he’s energetic — still excited like a little kid when he finds a new investment idea.

Is Buffett a tough guy? Contrast with his periods of passivity. Is it fair to say that he gives greater leeway to people who have achieved a higher profile and more success?

Warren can be tough as tree bark. It’s not easy to win his trust; he’s quite skeptical of people’s motives. Yet he hands over the reins and relaxes into passivity with people whom he has learned to trust. And on occasion he has shown an almost astonishingly one-dimensional way of looking at people who can enhance his bank account or reputation. Their role defines them – whether linked to fame, financial success, or as members of the media – so that other qualities (or drawbacks) are simply swept away.  I see this Warren Buffett — tough, passive, and starstruck in turn — as the pugnacious little kid who is always looking for an even more powerful protective figure, the one he never had while growing up. (more…)

You’d think that HBO, the network that for seven seasons gave us a perfectly pitched story of the personal and professional life of a criminal monster, would have done a better job with the story of Saddam Hussein, but House of Saddam, a four-part miniseries that begins airing Sunday, disappoints. The son of an interfering mother, the husband of an ambitious wife, the father of ungrateful children (one a flat-out psychopath), and brutal tyrant to a region,  Saddam could have been Tony Soprano, only with less pasta. Unfortunately, this Saddam also lacks charm, and in a real sense, motivation. Okay, he wants power, but apart from some references to a dad who was brutal when he wasn’t neglectful, there’s little to tell us what Saddam wants to accomplish and why he wants to accomplish it. There are some brief suggestions about what this series could have been–in one scene, Saddam takes his young son Uday hunting, and Uday complains about the heat. “Of course it’s hot!” an exasperated Saddam replies. “We’re in the desert!  Drink some water!” But little of that inner man surfaces. Instead, we get a lot of roaring and glowering and scowling, two borad dimensions in dire need of an enlivening third. Next week’s installments, which are longer dramatic pieces about the betrayal of Saddam by his sons-in-law, and about the overthrow of Saddam, are better, but would have been more dramtic had the characters been more fully brought to life in the fist episodes. Couldn’t they have put some ducks in his pool? (For what it’s worth, it’s always nice to see the brilliant and beautiful Shoreh Aghdashloo, here playing Mrs. Saddam.)

Here is a piece I published this morning on The Daily Beast. Click on the link to see their fabulous slide show.

“I’ve been spending a lot of time reading Lincoln,” President-elect Barack Obama told 60 Minutes recently. “There is a wisdom there and a humility about his approach to government, even before he was president, that I just find very helpful.’’

Well, of course he would. Obama and Lincoln have much in common. Both men come from Illinois, though both men spent many years living in other states. Both are stylish writers and eloquent speakers. Both have a background in law. Both have as his principal rival a senator from New York, and both selected that rival to be secretary of state. Both come to the presidency under most difficult of circumstances.

But only one, so far, has spent his transition growing a beard.

Most histories and biographies repeat the story that Lincoln grew his beard at the suggestion of an 11-year-old girl from Westfield, N.Y., named Grace Bedell, who wrote Lincoln in October 1860, a month before the election. “I have got 4 brothers and part of them will vote for you any way and if you will let your whiskers grow I will try to get the rest of them to vote for you. You would look a great deal better, for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husband’s to vote for you and then you would be president.” (more…)

The website iwantmedia.com is conducting a poll for Media Person of the Year, and it turns out that among the nominees, along with Tina Fey, Arianna Huffington, Mel Karmazin, Jason Kilar, Rachel Maddow, Rupert Murdoch, Eric Schmidt, th Twitter Trio and Sam Zell is– me!  Or at me, in the guise of The Laid-Off Journalist. Says the site in its touching nomination statement: “I Want Media stopped updating its Media Layoffs roundup page more than two years ago. Bad timing. Job cuts accelerated in 2008, as the economy tanked and more belt-tightening ensued. . . .Hollywood‘s striking writers won sympathy in 2007; will this be the year of The Laid-Off Journalist?” Just to be clear, if I am elected, I will be a gracious winner, and warmly credit all who made it possible: the bloated management at my company that sopped up resources, the ignorant advertisers who didn’t think a real circulation of three million and a readership of 10 million was worth investing in, and above all, America’s increasingly website-fixated readership, who believes that reading a website is exactly the same as reading a newspaper, a magazine or a book, items which to them seem as strange and dated as the plough. Thanks, guys! I couldn’t have done it without you. (By the way, to vote for me, click here.)

Yesterday we heard from the still-lingering president of the United States a statement that indicated a certain vagueness about what he thought the duties of his office entailed. “I think I was unprepared for war,” George Bush told ABC News’ Charlie Gibson. “In other words, I didn’t campaign and say, ‘Please vote for me, I’ll be able to handle an attack. “In other words, I didn’t anticipate war. Presidents — one of the things about the modern presidency is that the unexpected will happen.” In other words—WTF? It would have been one thing if he had said, “Until you get there, you never really know the magnitude, blah, blah, blah”, but to say “I didn’t campaign on it?” And how could he say that he didn’t anticipate it? Didn’t he think it signified something that people kept calling him “commander-in-chief’’? And during his first inaugural address, when he said “The enemies of liberty and our country should make no mistake. . . we will defend our allies and our interests,’’ didn’t he wonder what his speechwriter was referring to? And when his father led the nation into war in 1991, did Bush just think that launching an attack was one of dad’s hobbies, like horseshoes or golf? In 2000, some smart-aleck journalist was criticized for asking Bush “gotcha’’ questions, like if he could name the president of Pakistan. As we see once again, it turns out the questions weren’t gotcha enough.