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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.

Pourquoi Blogger?

By Matthew Yglesias
May 17 2007, 12:10 PM ET Comment

The decision to tackle the timeless question, pourquoi blogger? ("why blog?") was, naturally, what drew my interest in this French magazine for teen girls. The magazine itself, however, turns out to interestingly demonstrate that French efforts to roll back franglais don't seem to be faring very well with the younger generation. Est-ce que je suis une party girl? seems like a wildly unnecessary anglicism.

partygirl

Similarly, the blog article itself runs in the magazine's "Fun Coach" department. Even worse, the TOC page repeatedly uses the word "love" (as in "LOVE SEX: Comment vous faire désirer" on page 88) instead of the familiar-even-to-Americans "amour." Intriguingly, based on the magazine France appears to be the prosperous modern society in which consumer goods are widely available and teens are interested in fashion, dating, and celebrities I've visited in the past rather than the poverty-stricken, strife-ridden hellhole I keep reading about in the newspapers.

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