of those books and had much the same reaction. The trust-the-experts inertia of the financial markets described by Michael Lewis in The Big Short is much like that in the climate debate described by Andrew Montford in The Hockey Stick Illusion. Roberts's third book is about Bernie Madoff. I call these books The Emperor's New Clothes Trilogy. Their broad lesson:Sometimes the "best people" aren't right. Sometimes there's a point of view from which they're glaringly wrong. The Hockey Stick Illusion is about how Stephen McIntyre found this point of view. In No One Would Listen Markopolos found this point of view. In The Big Short several people found this point of view. Commerce has been the source of more virtue than glory or courage or faith Read this, taken from Roger Crowley's brilliant book Empires of the Sea: Everyone employed chained labour -- captured slaves, convicts, and, in the Christian ships, paupers so destitute they sold themselves to the galley captains. It was these wretches, chained three or four to a foot-wide bench, who made sea wars possible. Their sole function was to work themselves to death. Shackled hand and foot, excreting where they sat, fed on meagre quantities of black biscuits, and so thirsty they were sometimes driven to drink seawater, galley slaves led lives bitter and short. John Brockman's Edge site has lots of short essay-lets on what the ash cloud episode means. Maybe because of the way it was reported in the USA, remarkably few of the