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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.

Reading Comprehension

By Matthew Yglesias
Aug 25 2007, 7:54 PM ET Comment

The Forward did an interview with Max Blumenthal in which, among other things, they ask him a question about why he thinks he gets a bigger response from videos he makes than from articles he writes. He replies:

I wrote in 2005 a piece on the College Republican National Convention, and I asked participants the same question. While the reaction was immense, it wasn’t the same. I think for so many people, reading is just such a rigorous mental exercise; they just can’t handle it. They respond much more to my videos. That’s partly why I produced it, to break out of the liberal intellectual bubble that I’ve been working in and that audience that I’ve been writing for. And I think I’ve really broken through.


In short, he's not sure, but he does think that video reaches a broader audience than he's able to reach with print. Thus, one reason he makes videos is to reach an audience outside of the "liberal intellectual bubble" comprised of the print outlets he's written for. Jamie Kirchick, guest-blogging for Andrew, somehow manages to completely misconstrue this:

Portraying himself as a truth-telling hero for capturing the wignuttery of Christian Zionists, this part of the interview is particularly laughable:
That’s partly why I produced it, to break out of the liberal intellectual bubble that I’ve been working in and that audience that I’ve been writing for. And I think I’ve really broken through.
Because as we all know The Nation and The Huffington Post are bastions of objectivity and politically diverse readerships.


What's the sarcasm for here? I'm baffled.

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