On the investors betting big on the Iraqi economy, which they believe has nowhere to go but up.

SHRIVER: Regarding your Playboy exposé, I know you've discussed this a great deal, but I'd like to ask you this: You've said that you were glad you did it. What role do you think that exposé played in your early career and the notoriety you've achieved? Is there a similar exposé that someone could do today--something that would be as shocking? STEINEM: It took me a very long time to be glad. At first, it was such a gigantic mistake from a career point of view that I really regretted it. I'd just begun to be taken seriously as a freelance writer, but after the Playboy article, I mostly got requests to go underground in some other semi-sexual way. It was so bad that I returned an advance to turn the Playboy article into a paperback, even though I had to borrow the money. Even now, people ask why I was a Bunny, Right-Wingers still describe me only as a former Bunny, and you're still asking me about it-almost a half-century later. But feminism did make me realize that I was glad I did it--because I identified with all the women who ended up an underpaid waitress in too-high heels and  a costume that was too tight to breathe in. Most were just trying to make a living and had no other way of doing it. I'd made up a background as a secretary, and the woman who interviewed me asked, "Honey, if you can type, why would you want to work here?" In the sense that we're all identified too much by our outsides instead of our insides and are mostly in underpaid service jobs, I realized we're all Bunnies--so yes, I'm glad I did it. If a writer wants to do a similar exposé now, there's no shortage of stories that need telling. For instance, go as a pregnant woman into so-called crisis pregnancy centers and record what you're told to scare or force you not to choose an abortion-including harassing you, calling your family or employer. Or pretend to be a woman with a criminal record and see how difficult it is to get a job. Or use a homeless center as an address and see what happens in your life. Or work at an ordinary service job in the pink-collar ghetto, as Barbara Ehrenreich did in Nickel and Dimed. But be warned that if you're a woman journalist and you choose an underground job that's related to sex or looks, you may find it hard to shake the very thing you were exposing.

By 2006, S&P was making its own study of such loans' performance. It singled out 639,981 loans made in 2002 to see if its benign assumptions had held up. They hadn't. Loans with piggybacks were 43% more likely to default than other loans, S&P found. In April 2006, S&P said it would raise by July the amount of collateral underwriters must include in many new mortgage portfolios. For instance, S&P could require that mortgage pools have extra loans in them, since it now expected a larger number to go bad. Still, S&P didn't lower its ratings on existing securities, saying it had to further monitor the performance of loans backing them. It thus helped the market for these loans hold up through the end of 2006.

An oral history of James Brown, from Macon to the top.

How an Italian thug looted MGM, brought Credit Lyonnais to its knees, and made the Pope cry.

A high school student disappears, only to turn up more than 10 years later – posing as a high school student.

Con man turned pastor turned con man; a profile of a serial scammer and the movie he tried to make about himself.

A reporter makes it his mission to track down all 42 members of a platoon after their service in Iraq.

On then-agent, now-congressman Michael Grimm and what happens when an F.B.I. informant turns out to be a con man.

In Michele Bachmann’s home district evangelicals have pushed anti-gay policies to the school board. After a rash of suicides, teens are fighting back.

On Mike Powell, a Chicago-area high school wrestling coach who hasn’t allowed a life-threatening illness to interrupt his life’s work.

From a small Ohio town to Afghanistan, a portrait of the perpetrator of a massacre.

A profile of the eccentric Gene Weingarten, the only person to twice win the Pulitzer for feature writing.

On L.A.’s Homeboy Industries, which offers former felons—including at least one disgraced CEO—the chance to work.

A trip to Disneyland in the mid-1960s.

Previously posted on Longform.org on January 25th, 2012.

What would drive a man to stand outside the Vatican embassy nearly every day for 14 years?

What is the sickness that leads inhabitants to sleep for days?

In Ontario, Canada, ribfests were largely non-profit affairs. Then one man decided to make a profit off their popularity.

How an apartheid-era psychiatrist went from torturing gay soldiers in South Africa to sexually abusing patients in Canada.

When Elysian Brewing sold itself to Big Beer, it set off a revolt among Seattle craft beer enthusiasts.

What happened when one of San Francisco’s most notorious underworld bosses tried to go clean.

How one woman’s sexual assault by four University of Oregon football players in 1980 unwittingly led to the state’s expansive free speech protections.

Michael Phelps returns to his Olympic training after a 45-day stint at The Meadows.

The story of a transplant from a 26-year-old bike mechanic to a 41-year-old fireman with severe burns.