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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. She is currently on leave.
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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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Department of Huh?

By Megan McArdle

Jan 19 2010, 8:15 AM ET Comment

In the middle of a post on Haiti, Michael O'Hare drops this head-scratcher:

"White man's burden" movies like the Indiana Jones series play this message out: the cookie-cutter plot is that a bunch of brown people are having a terrible time and can't do anything about it until a white guy comes into town and saves them (I haven't seen it, but have the impression Avatar follows this template).

It's been a while since I saw the Indiana Jones movies, but that's not exactly how I'd characterize the films.  Maybe Temple of Doom, but even there, destroying the Thugees is sort of secondary.

But in movies one and three, which are generally regarded as the best ones, I'd say the main people having a terrible time are Indiana Jones and his girlfriend.  (I'm not going to opine on the Crystal Skull film, because frankly, I've blocked the whole thing out and I don't want to risk reactivating the PTSD). The movies take place around "a bunch of brown people" because that's where archaeological digs tend to be.  I wouldn't put the movies down as enlightened critiques of imperialism, but they don't match O'Hare's description either, at least not as I remember them.


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