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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.

Why I'd Have Trouble Making It As a Real Magazine Writer

By Matthew Yglesias
Nov 9 2007, 1:27 PM ET Comment

I'd have trouble writing lines like this one from Washingtonian's profile of Anthony Bourdain:

Despite his undying hatred of celebrity-chef culture, Bourdain, still affiliated with French bistro chainlet Les Halles, has reached Emeril-like levels of popularity. Tickets to what was essentially a book-promo talk on Wednesday night sold for $28 a pop, and most of the 1,490 seats at Lisner Auditorium were full. Known best for Kitchen Confidential, his best-selling 2001 exposé on the knife-flinging, drug-addled subculture of restaurant kitchens, Bourdain now eats his way around the world for Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, his show on the Travel Channel. (A picture-heavy book based on the series was just released.)


He hates celebrity chef culture, but he's a chef who's written a best-selling book, has a cable television series, lectures to audiences of over a thousand, and sits down for magazine profiles in which he riffs on Nigella Lawson and the Barefoot Contessa. Plus: he appears on Top Chef. But he's managed to achieve all this despite his hatred for celebrity chef culture, a truly remarkable achievement!

It seems to me, though, that eight-five percent of celebrity profiles I read feature some line about how much the being-profiled celebrity loathes the limelight.

UPDATE: Look, I like Bourdain: Kitchen Confidential is a great fun book, I watch No Reservations sometimes and Top Chef always, etc., but we just shouldn't take his affected disdain for celebrity chefs all that seriously.

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