38 Minutes With Elizabeth Warren
❧ Waxing diplomatic as she makes a premature exit from Washington, the consumer advocate still can’t manage to entirely hold her fire.

July 22, 2011
By Reid Cherlin

For someone who’s just had her dream job snatched away from her, Elizabeth Warren is remarkably upbeat as she gives a sort of farewell tour of her offices at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The agency, chartered to fight consumer abuse by banks, is her brainchild, and her strenuous advocacy for its creation—against just-as-strenuous objections from the financial lobby—has made her the closest thing to a rock star the American left has seen since 2008. But when the CFPB opens the following day, Warren won’t be running it. And when a director finally does take the helm, she won’t even be in the building.

“We have our Zoo Pals plates,” Warren says, holding up a stack of animal-themed paper plates, each with articulated cardboard lobes like little ears. “This is a birthday-party kind of place.” The analysts whose office she’s popped into nod adoringly and recount a particularly elaborate prank on a colleague carried out six months ago, when a menacing (even job-threatening) e-mail turned out to be just a pretext for a “Happy Birthday” sing-along. Warren describes it as a “punking”...

Read on at New York Magazine ➝