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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.

Power corrupts

By Megan McArdle
Mar 17 2008, 1:06 PM ET Comment

Incidentally, last week when I was in California I had dinner with another blogger I'm quite fond of. During the course of dinner we were talking about various blogs we like, and he said "No offense, but I think Radley Balko is the most valuable blogger in America right now."

None taken, as I quite agree. Radley is one of the few bloggers doing actual reporting on police and prosecutorial abuse, shining light on the darker spots of the justice system. If you're not reading him, you either need to rectify this situation, or get your head examined. I think most cops are fundamentally good people doing a dangerous and that is neither well-paid nor particularly rewarding. Likewise, prosecutors generally went into their work because they care deeply about justice. But both groups of people have vast and poorly supervised powers of coercion, which is a recipe for making bad things happen. The work Radley does actually makes America a better place, which is more than almost any of the rest of us can claim.

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