From the intro to Armageddon in Retrospect, the first collection of previously unpublished works by author Kurt Vonnegut since his death:

The unhappiest times in his life were those months and sometimes a whole year when he couldn't write, when he was "blocked." He'd try just about anything to get unblocked, but he was very nervous and suspicious about psychiatry. In my early-to-mid-twenties he let it slip that he was afraid that therapy might make him normal and well adjusted, and that would be the end of his writing. I tried to reassure him that psychiatrists weren't nearly that good.

Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet.

• Hurricane price tags soaring on crowded U.S. coast (Reuters)
• Housing crisis is hitting the Mortgage Banking Association itself (washingtonpost)
• Inside the run on E*Trade (Fortune)
• U.S. could escape with no more than a mild recession (Bloomberg)
• Sam Zell sees himself as sort of an industrial Viagra (Globe & Mail)
• How hedge funds are pushing the boundaries of computational science (Alpha)

The current issue of Alpha has the most interesting piece on quantitative investors I have read in ages. Lots of Money:Tech-style stuff about what's happening at the bleeding edge, right where technology and capital markets smack into one another. Everything from computational linguistics, to herding models, micro stochastics, etc.

Granted, there is also lots of hubris, nuttiness, and even some chatter about creating the Bell Labs of computational finance. But where is the fun in capital markets if you can't dream big?