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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.
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The next phone

By Megan McArdle

May 15 2008, 11:17 AM ET Comment

It's looking more and more like Apple is going to announce a 3G iPhone at its Worldwide Developer's Conference on June 9th, with units probably shipping in July. That will probably be the point at which I buy one, since my current contract expires in August, and I really need a phone that does double duty as a PDA. Given that the Atlantic is a mac shop, the iPhone is the obvious choice.

Also, to be perfectly honest, it's pretty.

But at first, the "3G" looks like it won't be anything to write home about. AT&T's EDGE network is already inferior to Verizon's EVDO, and it's pretty much got its hands full handling the data requirements of the previous versions of the iPhone. Those of us committing to one of the new models will be taking quite a leap of faith on AT&T's rollout.

Meanwhile, Sprint bleeds customers and revenue. Verizon has the better netwrok; AT&T has the iPhone. Sprint has . . . Nextel, which hasn't caught on outside industries like construction, and is further threatened by broadcast technologies like Twitter. America may end up with a wireless duopoly unless something changes, fast.

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