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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.

Dispatch from a lost city

By Megan McArdle
Aug 26 2008, 12:21 PM ET Comment

My (formerly) Floridian friend sends this from a Gawker caption contest:

"It is a complex miasma of longstanding social and economic gentrification; of people, regular and celebrity, of various races and ethnicities choosing to remain sequestered from one another, except during the hours between 9am and 5pm, or when they get their Chinese food delivered; of hot dog carts parked next to falafel carts parked next to storefront Wendys and Starbucks, creating a wonderfully malodorous assault on one's senses, and possibly killing them; of the media elite and the blogging underclass, and vice versa, of course; of traffic and pigeons and sometime smells of caramel or fudge or swamp gas wafting in from New Jersey; of layoffs at newspapers, TV anchors under layers of makeup and radio reporters acting like the days of the week are 'dress-down Fridays'; of sidewalk vendors selling goods you'd rather not know, or acknowledge, weren't and will never be 'the real thing'; of tall buildings that spit debris onto unwitting pedestrians below, and pedestrians that spit; and, above all, of triumph in love, of love in triumph, of all things ever thought romantic and tragic, right and wrong in the affairs of the heart. That, my child, is Manhattan, a floe of schist in humanity's complex sea, and never, my child, shall we tramp there."


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