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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.

In the event of Rapture, this bank account will NOT be empty

By Megan McArdle
Jun 5 2008, 10:01 AM ET Comment

Markets in everything:

Surely we’ve all faced this scenario when making plans for our future and the safety of our loved ones: What if we are summoned to heaven by God while our loved ones are left behind to face the armies of the Antichrist as they spread out across the earth? Now, registered Republicans are fairly safe in this scenario, because they’ll either be raptured or else they’ll earn a good living as KBR contractors providing supplies to the Antichrist’s armies. But for the rest of us, this is a real fear that we face.

Fortunately, some good Christians have the perfect solution: A website that will let you store information to be emailed to your loved ones in the event of the rapture. The website will only send the information to your loved ones if the site proprietors fail to log in for 6 days. You can use your data storage on their site to store all sorts of information that might save their souls, including entreaties to accept Jesus.


Needless to say, as an agnotheist, I am not expecting to be swept up in the Rapture. But it really is a tribute to the triumph of the market that people work through these problems in advance and find innovative ways to solve them.

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