(FORTUNE Magazine) – Making sense of complexity is, to use the jargon of consulting, a core competency at FORTUNE. We do it in two main ways: through compelling narratives and profiles that capture the tangled reality--for better and for worse--of the human side of business and through in-depth reports that plow through reams of data to emerge with a nuanced but clear take on what it all means for you.

Senior writer Shawn Tully is the rare bird who can do both. During his 22 years at FORTUNE (interrupted briefly by a stint at CNBC), Shawn has spun gripping yarns about characters like Donald Trump and Marc Rich while also delivering trenchant analyses on everything from doctor shortages and the case against academic tenure to the Vatican's finances--as well as our current cover on real estate. (He also warned more than three years ago that the stock market was wildly overvalued and that the '90s merger boom would end in tears because buyers were paying insane premiums.) An English major and varsity tennis player at Princeton, Shawn got his love of storytelling from his father, Edward (a.k.a. "the Skipper"). "He was a tanker captain," says Shawn, "and loved to spin dramatic yarns about delivering elephants to India or the storms around Cape Horn." Shawn honed his analytic rigor and belief in markets while earning an MBA at the University of Chicago, where he fell under the spell of Nobel Prize winner George Stigler and finance legend Eugene Fama. His favorite source, though, is another Nobelist--Milton Friedman. "Whenever I phone to interview him, he always calls back collect." That, as Shawn notes admiringly, "is a very economically rational thing to do."