Los Angeles Magazine

California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It: The former deputy treasurer of California teams with a Daily Beast columnist to describe how the system fell to pieces and how it can be remedied.

Original article

Hamilton Chan was the smartest person I knew at Harvard. He was maddening. When I stayed up all night because a paper was due the next day, I worked on the paper. Too often I got a B. When Hamilton pulled an all-nighter, he played computer games, chatted with girls in the dorm, beat all comers at foosball, and napped. At dawn he began to write, and inevitably he got an A.