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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.

The best bad movie in the world

By Megan McArdle
Mar 26 2009, 11:00 AM ET Comment

We screened The Room a few weeks ago for a few friends, and it's everything the AV Club says about it, and so much more.  It is the worst movie you will ever love.  It is a low-budget romantic drama filmed at massive expense by a writer-director whose script suggests the deft social observations of an autistic Objectivist with a severe injury to the right temporal-parietal junction of his brain. The dialogue is not merely wooden, but petrified.  And the actors seem to be reading it off cue cards located somewhere over the left shoulder of whomever they happen to be talking to.

The end result is a sort of anti-genius.  I don't think I've laughed so hard at a movie since I saw Ghostbusters at the age of ten.  I was, perhaps, helped along just a touch by the companion whiskey-and-sodas we were consuming.  But alcohol really isn't necessary.  The movie itself is intoxicating.


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