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I Eat a BookI made a stupid promise. And now I have to keep it.

By Daniel GrossPosted Friday, June 9, 2006, at 4:24 PM ET

Dan Gross Eats Dow 36,000
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On April 7, searching for one of those snappy rhetorical endings that is the hallmark of every Slate piece, I reached a bit too far. Skeptical that the Bush administration could convince a boldface banker to assume the thankless (and comparatively low-paying) task of replacing Treasury Secretary John Snow, I wrote: "John Snow will have a replacement, and he may very well come from the corporate world. But if it's an A-list Wall Street CEO, I'll buy a copy of Dow 36,000 and eat the first chapter."

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Oops. On May 30, President Bush nominated Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson to replace Snow. And Paulson is about as A-List a Wall Street CEO as there is.

And so, much to the delight of Slate's New York bureau, a luncheon of Dow 36,000 and field greens, drizzled (well, drowned) with balsamic vinaigrette, was served. See the video above.

Throughout the filming, several thoughts ran through my mind.

This is the first free lunch I've received from Slate all year.

And I thought Dow 36,000's argument was tough to digest the first time around.

Something tells me this isn't what Dr. Steinberg meant when he said I should eat more fiber.

I hope this posts late, very late, on a Friday afternoon.

Thanks to chef John Richards and auteur Jim Festante.

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Daniel Gross is the Moneybox columnist for Slate and the business columnist for Newsweek. You can e-mail him at and follow him on Twitter. His latest book, Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation, has just been published in paperback.

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