The Money Honey

Now, while their landmarked house in Berkeley, Calif., is being restored, the family lives on Paris' Left Bank, a traditional haven for expat writers; the point, Soren says, is to keep Lewis away from U.S. politics. In '96, Lewis also hit it off with Sen. John McCain. (''Friendship with a politician is corrupting for a journalist, of course,'' he recently wrote in a Time piece on the presidential hopeful.) ''McCain asked me if I'd be a fly on the wall in his campaign, and I would have liked to have gone, but I didn't want to be an absentee father,'' Lewis says. ''If he gets the nomination, I may go out with him in the fall for a little bit.''

''Somebody once said that the most important quality in any piece of writing,'' Lewis says, ''is movement — motion on the page, a sort of swinging on the page, and a lot of times the simple way to get it is just to have people moving, to have things happening.''

He walks out of the hotel and west to Times Square. The new NASDAQ sign there is a 120-foot-tall, $37 million marvel that dwarfs the famous Panasonic Astrovision set nearby. The sign is at 4 Times Square, where — in a fatal accident unrelated to the sign — a construction scaffold fell in 1998. The soaring NASDAQ composite, says The New New Thing, is ''the best measure of Silicon Valley's fortunes.'' Michael Lewis tilts his head back into the light snowfall. ''It's amazing!'' he says, staring up at the screen. ''Is this the thing that collapsed and killed everybody?''