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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.

Thursday random music note

By Megan McArdle
May 1 2008, 4:11 PM ET Comment

If there's one thing that Kathy G. and I can agree on, it's that Dolly Parton is pretty remarkable, both as a person, and as a musician. Music snobs who wish to challenge this statement are invited to send their seconds around to my lodgings this evening.

I highly encourage you to read the whole post--it's got some terrific YouTube clips, including, I am not making this up, Dolly singing "After the Gold Rush" with Linda Ronstadt and EmmyLou Harris. As a passionate fan of the original, I'm not quite sure how I feel about that, though it definitely has novelty appeal. But the rest are definitely fascinating, especially the early clips--I'd never seen what she looked like when she was starting out.

My modest contribution is this song, which is . . . how else can I put this . . . adorable.



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