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1. But there's one more book about the fucking of us that you have to read, because it's the angriest, most informative, smartest, funniest book ever written about the financial crisis.

2. It only covers the last five seconds of a system that required centuries to build to its orgasmic, sociopathic peak and the first five seconds of the weird zombie economy that preys on America today, jacked up on malevolent economic voodoo.

3. Within a generation, the biggest rapper in the world was the vapid, hypermuscular 50 Cent (with his vacant lyrics and steroidal swagger, he was truly the George W. Bush of rappers), who bragged about the fortune he made repackaging the grape quarter-water that Charnas calls "the ultimate ghetto beverage" into an overpriced Vitaminwater flavor.

4. Jay-Z appears only in the last sixth of The Big Payback, but when he first walks onstage, flamboyantly turning down a record contract by boasting, "I don't rap for a record company... I own a record company," he carries the same casual air of heroism as King Richard the Lionheart at the end of most versions of the Robin Hood story—he's the outsize figure who sweeps in and fixes the world after everything goes wrong.

(Read the whole thing.)