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Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle - Megan McArdle is a senior editor for The Atlantic who writes about business and economics. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and The Economist. More

Megan was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra-dry skim-milk cappuccino. Her checkered work history includes three start-ups, four years as a technology project manager for a boutique consulting firm, a summer as an associate at an investment bank, and a year spent as sort of an executive copy girl for one of the disaster-recovery firms at Ground Zero … all before the age of 30.

While working at Ground Zero, Megan started Live From the WTC, a blog focused on economics, business, and cooking. She may or may not have been the first major economics blogger, depending on whether we are allowed to throw outlying variables such as Brad Delong out of the set. From there it was but a few steps down the slippery slope to freelance journalism. She has worked in various capacities for The Economist, where she wrote about economics and oversaw the founding of Free Exchange, the magazine's economics blog. She has also maintained her own blog, Asymmetrical Information, which moved to The Atlantic, along with its owner, in August 2007.

Megan holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. After a lifetime as a New Yorker, she now resides in northwest Washington, D.C., where she is still trying to figure out what one does with an apartment larger than 400 square feet.

Campaign woes

By Megan McArdle
Oct 29 2007, 1:26 PM ET Comment

For journalists, anyway. By travel troubles last week prompted me to remark that I haven't been on an on-time flight in at least a year (though to be sure, I don't fly very often.) My colleague Marc Ambinder responded that this is making it much harder to be a campaign journalist than it used to be. Journalists covering the presidential campaign can basically expect to spend most of the next 52 weeks on the road; the worse flying gets, the worse their lives become. If presidential candidates want to cast themselves in a sympathetic light, they should come up with a plan to reduce the congestion at a few key hubs, particularly JFK, that make listed departure times such a cruel joke.

You know, I never really understood why making the trains run on time was so important for Mussolini, but after last week, I can understand how that became one of fascism's main selling points*.

* The first person who suggests that this is an endorsement of fascism gets sent back to fourth grade for remedial reading class.

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