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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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Why Not America?

By Matthew Yglesias

Mar 14 2008, 8:44 AM ET Comment

Nicholas Kristof says he used to be for legalizing prostitution, but changed his mind after learning more about conditions in the Netherlands, and now favors something more like Sweden's approach. I underwent a similar trajectory myself, but it's occurred to me more recently that rather than looking at the Netherlands as a model, we should probably look at Nevada which is, after all, right here in the USA. Unfortunately, I don't actually know anything about the subject, but I thought I'd toss it out there.

Meanwhile, it's striking to me reading various takes on this that absolutely nobody -- including The Atlantic's resident moralizing social conservative -- seems to think the actual status quo policy of targeting hookers (rather than their clients) for primary legal sanction makes sense. The main impact of the current policy is, it seems to me, to make it easy for cops to rape prostitutes but hard for prostitutes to get out of bad situations.

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