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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.

Terrorism Is a Tactic, but Osama Made It a Goal

By Megan McArdle
May 5 2011, 10:01 AM ET Comment

My friend Brendan Greeley has written a blistering leader for Businessweek that explains why, in the end, the terrorists were never going to win.  To excerpt it is to do it an injustice--you should read the whole thing--but here's one of my favorite bits:

On Twitter on May 2 a Bahraini named Mubarak Mattar, in a translation from the Arabic by Global Voices, wrote, "With all our differences with al Qaeda, we are proud of the death of a Muslim man who was able to shake the world at a time all the Arab armies united couldn't do that. ... You are the only one who said 'No' in an era where the Arabs said 'Yes.' "

In a spectacular, bloody way, Osama bin Laden said, simply, "no." This is not the philosophy of a new prophet in a clash of civilizations; it's the word of a nihilist. We feared the compelling power of his ideology, but what actually resonated was his raised fist. That's why it gives him too much to call him a monster. Remember him as a thug and murderer, but also as a self-obsessed diva with a gift for timing and spectacle. Bin Laden was a trust-funder who took up performance art.

Again, this is easier to understand when we are not numb with rage. You don't have to be an Arabist to see that "no" is not an idea that can outlive its youth. It's not a governing principle, nor is it an economic strategy that could deal with jobless rates that have averaged about 12 percent in the oil-free states of the Maghreb and the Mashreq. It's a pose.

The worst thing about the past ten years: to the extent that he "won", it's because he tricked us into scoring a bunch of own-goals, not because he was a better player.



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