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Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias - Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress. His first book, with the working title Heads in the Sand: Iraq and the Strange Death of Liberal Internationalism, scheduled to be published next spring by John Wiley and co., deals with the Democratic Party's struggle to find a post-9/11 foreign policy, focusing primarily on the rise and (hopefully) fall of the liberal hawk movement.

Previously, he was a staff writer at The American Prospect and an Associate Editor at TPM Media, where he contributed to the group blogs Tapped and TPMCafe. His main blog, now at The Atlantic, has existed in various forms since the dark ages of the blogosphere in January 2002.

His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Slate, The New Republic, and The Washington Monthly, and he is a regular on BloggingHeads.tv and makes the occasional radio or television appearance.

Desperately out of touch with the American mainstream, Yglesias was born and raised in Manhattan and studied philosophy at Harvard where he was editor in chief of The Harvard Independent, a campus alternative weekly.

His latest writings can be found on the Matthew Yglesias blog.

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Downward Spiral

By Matthew Yglesias

Jan 1 2007, 7:22 PM ET Comment

Is it just me, or does the tight race for first place in the woeful Atlantic Division seem to pose the risk of launching a downward spiral of tanking at the end of the season? After all, if 32 wins will earn you lottery pick in what's supposed to be an excellent draft, who really wants 35 wins and a hopeless playoff run? I could imagine three or four teams quietly throwing games in an effort to avoid becoming division champion. Meanwhile, as things stand right now, in the Eastern Conference the fifth seed gives you a considerably more favorable playoff matchup than does the third seed. On some level, I have to believe that the incredible awfulness of the Atlantic is a kind of karmic revenge on the NBA for thinking it had solved its seeding problems by decreeing during the offseason that winning a division would no longer guarantee a top-three slot.

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