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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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The Truth About Toilets

By Matthew Yglesias

Apr 2 2007, 5:53 PM ET Comment

Ever wondered about that implausible-sounding Coriolis Effect business? Well, I have. And thanks to the magic of Adium and Brian Beutler's trip to Argentina we were able to conduct a little experiment:

So, having been disabused of the Coriolis disinformation for a few years now, Matt and I conducted a (wasteful) experiment. It turns out that when you fill up and drain my kitchen sink here in Buenos Aires it drains clockwise. AND, perhaps evidince of swirl-rumor confirmation, Matt's toilet flushes counter clockwise. But nothing's ever that simple. Because my toilet down here flushes counter clockwise as well.

I have no idea how regular hemisphere-wide toilet-flush trends are, and if there is a physical explanation, I have no idea what it is. My guess would be that swirl direction is purely a function of how the relevant pipes are structured. But I'll leave that to the blogosphere (which I know to be a trustworthy and mature resource) to decide.


Take that, science!

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