\n
Comment on this story<\/title><path d=\"M14 14V2H2v9.47h8.18L12.43 13ZM3 10.52V3h10v9.23l-2.5-1.66Z\"\/><\/svg><\/button><\/p>\n<p>Comment<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"teaser-content grid-center\">\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">Matt Yglesias can talk about supervolcanoes and about Habsburg federalism and about the semiconductor industry in Taiwan vs. China. He can talk about regulatory sensitivities around geothermal drilling. He can talk normative ethics and the Ghent system and occupational licensing and maritime commerce in Westeros, the fictional realm of \u201cGame of Thrones.\u201d He can talk about all these things and, perhaps more importantly, he can sound like he knows what he\u2019s talking about.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cSo even very small improvements in the welfare of chickens has an incredible sort of aggregate impact,\u201d Yglesias said on a podcast last February, concluding a mini-monologue on poultry with this: \u201cIt\u2019s actually very, very important if we can make chickens\u2019 lives slightly better.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">That is a perfect Matt Yglesias quote: grandiose but granular. Draped in idealism and wisdom but anchored in data and incrementalism. Clear on its face but dotted with leaps like \u201cincredible\u201d and \u201cvery,\u201d then hedges like \u201csort of\u201d and \u201cslightly.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">The affect is one of solution, of authority, of \u201caha!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">The effect is vaporous, curious, \u201chuh?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">When enthusiastic or challenged in conversation, Yglesias\u2019s speaking voice can reach a cartoonish tenor reminiscent of Jiminy Glick. His writing voice, however, remains flat.<b> <\/b>He is a \u201clogic machine\u201d<b> <\/b>at the keyboard,<b> <\/b>according to friends. He is a parody of artificial intelligence, according to haters.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cIt\u2019s the best time there\u2019s ever been to be somebody who can write something coherent quickly,\u201d Yglesias says, over coffee. \u201cI find it relaxing to work. I put things out. People yell at me. I will write again the next day.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">Yglesias, 41, has been writing online nonstop<b> <\/b>since he was 20. In the aughts, he was an insurgent, liberal blogger who helped turn prolific posting into an industry standard. In the 2010s, he co-founded Vox to institutionalize this ethos and to bigfoot old-guard media. Now he\u2019s struck gold on the newsletter platform<b> <\/b>Substack, where at least 13,000 people each pay Matt Yglesias an average of<b> <\/b>$80 a year for access to his Yglesiasms, and to a robust comment section about moral relativism and windowless bedrooms and child tax credits and storm-water runoff. On Twitter, Yglesias has more than half a million followers, and a habit of exasperating people<b> <\/b>with his contrarian stabs at wit. But his Substack is a place where a fractious<b> <\/b>world is rendered logical, where self-proclaimed moderates and rationalists find refuge from so-called purists and radicals.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">There\u2019s an audience for that kind of thing, especially in Washington, especially at a time when the powerful feel rebellious for thinking centrist thoughts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cI don\u2019t always agree with Matt, but he always makes you think with his unique and sharp insights,\u201d says Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, via email. Klain has liked and shared multiple Yglesias tweets, usually ones that praise White House actions in defiance of wailing liberals or henpecking conservatives. Yglesias, Klain adds, \u201coffers \u2018unconventional wisdom:\u2019 He\u2019s not afraid to break with others and put his views out there \u2014 a perspective that is hard to find in a dialogue dominated by conventional wisdom.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">For others \u2014 especially those who say Yglesias punches left<b> <\/b>\u2014 his wisdom amounts to sleight of hand.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cI think that Matt is a smart and clever thinker who spends far too much time trying to simplify the world into discrete models, either economic or philosophical, and the world is much messier and much greater digging is required,\u201d says Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project, which saw right through <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/business\/2023\/01\/03\/ftx-bankman-fried-plea\/?itid=lk_inline_manual_19\" rel=\"noopener\">Sam Bankman-Fried<\/a>, the disgraced cryptocurrency exchange founder whom Yglesias had previously touted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cHe\u2019s basically a panhandler who\u2019s driving outrage on Twitter, and benefits from how he engages with the performance of discourse,\u201d says Melissa Byrne, an activist for student-loan cancellation, which Yglesias dismissed as a political liability for Democrats. (\u201cThis was dumb on my part,\u201d he wrote in November, after the party outperformed midterm expectations.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">But enough serious people take Yglesias seriously to negate the many people who don\u2019t. His Substack was tied for most-followed newsletter by members of the Biden transition team, according to digital strategist Rob Blackie, and Yglesias himself was No. 4 on the list of most-followed journalists. Some of Yglesias\u2019s posts on policy \u2014 <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/us-policy\/2022\/02\/11\/white-house-manchin-deficit-inflation\/?itid=lk_inline_manual_22\" rel=\"noopener\">particularly one on Build Back Better negotiations in February<\/a> \u2014 have reportedly circulated among White House staff.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cThere\u2019s a broad sense that he\u2019s a public intellectual, and they take his ideas like they\u2019ll take other ideas,\u201d says a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss<b> <\/b>outside influences on the administration. \u201cHe\u2019s not super influential, but he\u2019s a prominent normie liberal, just like Joe Biden is a normie liberal.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">Among the political newsletters on Substack\u2019s leader board, which is stocked with Gen-X reactionaries to what Yglesias has called the \u201c<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.vox.com\/2019\/3\/22\/18259865\/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020\" rel=\"noopener\">Great Awokening<\/a>,\u201d he is No. 8 in readership, between the conniptions of Glenn Greenwald and the braying of Andrew Sullivan. Yglesias\u2019s is one of a few<b> <\/b>Substacks that earn north of $1 million per year in subscription revenue. Yglesias named his Substack \u201cSlow Boring,\u201d after a 1919 lecture by the German sociologist Max Weber titled \u201cPolitics as a Vocation,\u201d wherein \u201cboring\u201d is not an adjective of dullness but a gerund of diligence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cPolitics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards,\u201d Weber said at the dawn of the Weimar Republic. \u201cIt takes both passion and perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">For two decades, Yglesias has been boring. A million boring posts, across many platforms, into many hard boards \u2014 into the brains of like-minded liberals, under the skin of policy experts and the extremely<b> <\/b>online. He has bored right through the 21st century and emerged exactly where he began: blogging for himself. Except now he\u2019s making bank, and he seems less liberal than he once was.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">What changed: Matt, or everything around him?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy drop-cap\">Two years into his Substack era, Yglesias bores the day away on his MacBook Air in a bare, closet-sized office at a co-working space off 14th Street NW, about 70 feet from a rowhouse where he and his blogger friends spent a portion of their 20s glued to their laptops, posting their way to notoriety amid pizza boxes and<b> <\/b>poker games. Now he\u2019s entered midlife, like the rest of his Xennial cohort. The hair on his crown has migrated to his eyebrows; his liberal politics have morphed into \u201c<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/nymag.com\/intelligencer\/2023\/01\/reactionary-centrism-left-liberal-progressive.html\" rel=\"noopener\">reactionary centrism<\/a>,\u201d according to the internet.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">He is mindful, for example, that red-state Democratic senators Jon Tester (Mont.), Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Sherrod Brown (Ohio) are up for reelection in 2024 \u2014 and that much depends on not alienating their coalitions with far-left slogans and hobby horses.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cThe question that I, and other more moderate people, have been trying to get the progressive movement to think about is: How are you going to accomplish anything without those seats?\u201d Yglesias says. \u201cWhat is the plan to win?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">He\u2019s aged into his curmudgeonliness, though friends say he\u2019s also mellowed. He and his wife, Kate Crawford, have a 7-year-old son. They are Slacking constantly, because<b> <\/b>Crawford also happens to be his editor and only gatekeeper. She first became aware of him in 2008, when he publicly knocked a congressional candidate she was working for \u2014 a Democrat in the South \u2014 for not supporting same-sex marriage.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cThe candidate was mad that [Matt] had written something that was, frankly, correct, but also a little rude,\u201d Crawford says. Correct but rude: \u201cI feel like that\u2019s Matt in a nutshell.\u201d A Jewish Democrat running for Congress in Alabama had<b> <\/b>to pick his battles to win and, in 2008, same-sex marriage was not the hill to die on.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cTwenty-seven-year-old Matt was very annoyed by this sort of pragmatism and hypocrisy,\u201d Crawford says. \u201cAnd I think 40-year-old Matt would be pretty sympathetic to it.<i>\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">Yglesias published his first real blog post at 11:50 p.m. on Jan. 10, 2002, while at Harvard.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cAllright \u2026 everyone\u2019s talking about this blogger technology \u2014 let\u2019s see if it works,\u201d he wrote, before launching into a 198-word commentary on a Slate article about media bias. (Yglesias called it both \u201con target\u201d and \u201cblah.\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">The blogger technology worked beautifully for him, and he hasn\u2019t stopped posting since: during the balance of<b> <\/b>the Bush years at The American Prospect, where deep-dive policy analysis found fresh staging on a communal staff blog, and then The Atlantic, where Yglesias\u2019s personal blog attracted 2 million page views in a month; during the peak Obama years at ThinkProgress, a liberal think tank blog that brought him closer to rising Democratic Party leaders; and then at Slate, where he chronicled the economy and lobbed the occasional contrarian softball like \u201cThe Case Against Eating Lunch Outside.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">The son of a novelist<b>–<\/b>screenwriter and a graphic designer at Newsweek,<b> <\/b>Yglesias comes from a line of passionate writers and dispassionate economists. His maternal grandfather, Jules Joskow, was a Bronx-born pioneer of the economic-consulting industry and a philanthropist for Jewish causes. Matt\u2019s paternal grandfather Jose, born in a cigar-making community in Tampa, clacked his way to the middle class via a pharmaceutical job and a Royal typewriter, penning film criticism for the Communist Party\u2019s Daily Worker, novels about Ybor City and New York, and journalism about Latin America and<b> <\/b>Martin Luther King Jr. Matt\u2019s paternal grandmother Helen, an editor for The Nation, was later a novelist herself. In the late 1960s the Yglesias household on the Upper West Side hosted a rotating, rambunctious cast of the left-wing intellectual world. The way to make a point was by being louder than the person next to you, recalls Rafael Yglesias, Matt\u2019s father.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cHe\u2019s the perfect blend of the two families,\u201d says<b> <\/b>Rafael, best known for his novel \u201cFearless,\u201d which he adapted into a 1993 film starring Jeff Bridges. \u201cThe Joskow family, in every situation \u2014 even looking at a menu in a restaurant \u2014 would be able to analyze clearly some flaw in their procedure, some more optimal way they could do something.\u201d On the Yglesias side, Matt \u201cwas being given a legacy of \u2018\u2018You say what you believe, no matter what the consequences are.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">In his last semester<b> <\/b>at the Dalton School on the Upper East Side, Matt, having secured a spot at Harvard, published <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1999\/01\/10\/magazine\/lives-the-candidate.html\" rel=\"noopener\">a bratty critique<\/a> of the college application process in the New York Times, in which he mocked the Ivy League administrators who\u2019d admitted him to their rarefied realm. The provocation made him semifamous among classmates before he set foot on campus.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cI remember thinking that, holy s—, this guy is smart \u2014 and also that this is a really trivial concept for an article,\u201d says former Harvard classmate Ben Wikler, now chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. At Harvard, Wikler says, Yglesias could \u201cdismember\u201d someone in weekly<b> <\/b>debates hosted by the Harvard Review of Philosophy. \u201cHe could create a 360-degree model of the logic of the argument and find the weak point and blow it up.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">Yglesias majored in philosophy at a time when the idea of America was upended, first by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and then by the fiasco in<b> <\/b>Iraq, whose invasion Yglesias initially supported. He took a shine to the writings of Willard Van Orman Quine <b>\u2014<\/b> \u201ca negative philosopher\u201d who was \u201cprimarily concerned to criticize others<i>,\u201d <\/i>according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy \u2014 and cultivated his own \u201cwell, actually\u201d ethic as he entered the world of journalism. Harold Meyerson, editor at large of The American Prospect, recalls a 23-year-old Yglesias being aggressively contrarian in editorial meetings. \u201cI have trouble fitting Matt into an intellectual frame \u2014 except skepticism,\u201d Meyerson says. \u201cAnd skepticism is always necessary as a corrective. But it doesn\u2019t make an ideology.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">Yglesias has always been anchored on the left, even when he tugs toward the center. But a philosophy major\u2019s use of reason, when divorced from nuance and emotion, can curdle into something classist, inhumane, obnoxious.<b> <\/b>In 2013, at Slate, Yglesias responded to the collapse of a garment<b> <\/b>factory in Bangladesh by writing that it was \u201centirely appropriate,\u201d economically, for that nation to have lower safety standards than the United States. Nearly a decade on, some people on Twitter still won\u2019t let him forget that post. Yglesias still defends the core argument while admitting<b> <\/b>that it was \u201cobviously a bad piece that was poorly timed and poorly framed.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">Benjamin L. McKean, who overlapped with Yglesias at Harvard, used the factory collapse as a touchstone of injustice in his 2020 book \u201cDisorienting Neoliberalism.\u201d He suggests that Yglesias\u2019s misfire on the topic stems from a contrarian impulse. \u201cAnd I think there\u2019s something similar about supporting the invasion of Iraq<i>,\u201d <\/i>says McKean, now an Ohio State professor of political science,<b> <\/b><i>\u201c<\/i>which also had unimaginable human costs, through a kind of intellectualizing of why the downsides won\u2019t be such a big deal.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">Put more simply:<b> <\/b>\u201cI like to provoke,\u201d Yglesias told podcaster Joe Rogan in December 2020, while publicizing his latest provocation, a book titled \u201cOne Billion Americans,\u201d which made a nationalist argument for beating China at the population game to maintain American supremacy (an \u201cendearingly crackpot idea,\u201d Jacob Bacharach wrote in his <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/159306\/emptiness-matthew-yglesias-biggest-idea-billion-americans-book-review\" rel=\"noopener\">bark-stripping review<\/a>, \u201cdesigned for an educated, business-class airport set who have heard of the Aspen Ideas Festival\u201d).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">A provocation is a kind of <i>fast<\/i> boring. But instead of tunneling to a truth, in some cases, Yglesias is hitting a nerve, often needlessly.<b> <\/b>Hours after the May mass killing at a school in Uvalde, Tex., he tweeted: \u201cFor all its very real problems, one shouldn\u2019t lose sight of the fact that the contemporary United States of America is one of the best places to live in all of human history \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">Technically true. But \u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201c[W]hat the f— man,\u201d New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, who also got his start at The American Prospect, replied in a tweet.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cReal people are experiencing actual anguish right now,\u201d tweeted Yglesias\u2019s former Slate colleague Dana Stevens, \u201cand don\u2019t need your middle-of-the-road \u2018Well, actually\u2019 garbage.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">In 2020, Yglesias caught blowback for something he didn\u2019t write, but merely co-signed: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/lifestyle\/style\/the-harpers-letter-cancel-culture-and-the-summer-that-drove-a-lot-of-smart-people-mad\/2020\/07\/23\/9df5d6e4-c84c-11ea-b037-f9711f89ee46_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_60\" rel=\"noopener\">a letter \u201con justice and open debate\u201d<\/a> in Harper\u2019s magazine that decried cancel culture.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">Progressive luminaries such as Noam Chomsky, Gloria Steinem and Cornel West also signed their names, bemoaning \u201cthe intolerant climate that has set in on all sides,\u201d but so had people with a history of transphobic rhetoric, such as the author J.K. Rowling. In the insane final act of the Trump presidency, in the horrifying first year of the pandemic, after a summer of pain and violence following a policeman\u2019s murder of George Floyd, plenty of people did not want to be scolded by elitists like Matt Yglesias, who had also pushed back on the \u201cdefund the police\u201d movement and on young, all-or-nothing climate activists. His signature on the letter<b> <\/b>triggered a backlash among younger, more liberal staffers at Vox who viewed the letter as a punch-down from the powerful.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cMatt was one of the kindest people at Vox: extremely kind and supportive as a colleague,\u201d says Aja Romano, a culture reporter for Vox. \u201cBut it was always sort of difficult to align that with the things he would say online.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy drop-cap\">Vox, which Yglesias co-founded in 2014 with The Washington Post\u2019s Melissa Bell and Ezra Klein, was an attempt to forge the Yglesian model of policy analysis into a media kingdom. The experiment failed in that respect, Yglesias says. \u201cWe thought we had ideas around explainers and different ways of thinking about journalism that could genuinely disrupt and dominate, changing the way journalism works,\u201d he wrote last month on his Substack. \u201cThat didn\u2019t happen.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">Shortly after the Harper\u2019s letter, Yglesias decamped to Substack. He saw a financially feasible opportunity to return to his blogging roots, unfettered by the guardrails of a media institution or the \u201cwoke\u201d culture of its newest disrupters.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cHe didn\u2019t seem to be able to be his true self at Vox,\u201d says Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie, who helped to recruit Yglesias. \u201cIt seemed obvious to me that Substack would be good for him, not only financially,\u201d but also \u201cfor his soul.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">Rather than trying to change the media landscape, Yglesias is back to tending his own garden.<b> <\/b>His audience is relatively small (by internet standards) but highly invested (by internet standards). And in Biden\u2019s Washington, his old friends, acquaintances and sources are now in positions of power.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cPeople who were unimportant when Obama was president are more important now,\u201d Yglesias says. \u201cA whole generation of pundits has sort of faded from the scene. And, you know, others have risen in their place.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">People grow up, in other words.<b> <\/b>A person\u2019s principles parallax with the priorities of the Left, or of society at large. Coalitions fracture and realign. The Overton Window keeps shifting. The insurgents of yesteryear attain status, and maybe a status quo.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cMatt\u2019s just a very contrary person, but I think he has a lot of integrity, which has been a core element of his personality since college,\u201d says journalist Timothy B. Lee, who worked at Vox and has known Yglesias for nearly 20 years. \u201cAnd so, in the 2000s, that meant being more liberal than most pundits. Now it\u2019s the opposite. But he has the same approach.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">Like Washington columnists of yore, Yglesias is in a rolling, off-the-record conversation with many major and minor players in politics: academics, executives, pollsters, strategists, Hill staffers, members of Congress, fellow panelists at conferences and fellow travelers on international junkets \u2014 people from whom Yglesias wants to learn, who want to pull him this way or that, or who want to vent what they can\u2019t say in public but hope Matt will say for them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cWhen I talk to members of Congress or people in the administration,\u201d Yglesias says, \u201cI feel like they\u2019re, like, talking to their therapist about their frustrations with intra-coalitional dynamics.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">In September the treasury secretary called Yglesias to chat. Why? Janet L. Yellen\u2019s communications staff did not respond to inquiries about why. But Yglesias then wrote a post extolling \u201cmodern supply-side economics\u201d and concluding that, when it comes to the wobbly economy, the Biden administration seems \u201cto be going in the right direction.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">Is this wisdom? If so, is it conventional or unconventional?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">Perhaps it\u2019s instructive to think about two topics that bookend his public life.<b> <\/b>At age 21, Yglesias was laying out the logician\u2019s case for the invasion of Iraq, because how could the most powerful, informed men on Earth be so stupid? In May of this year, Yglesias declared that<b> <\/b>Bankman-Fried \u201cis for real,\u201d because why else would wealthy people risk their money?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cUnfortunately I think, like most people, I just kind of took it at face value,\u201d Yglesias says now, about Bankman-Fried\u2019s endeavor. \u201c\u2018Well, if his company has a $20-billion valuation, there must be something to it.\u2019 Even if I don\u2019t understand what a cryptocurrency exchange is.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">This is Matt Yglesias coddling the powerful, his critics would say, and exposing a gullible dilettantism. And yet plenty of people view him as<b> <\/b>an early, sensible and stalwart voice for incremental progress on key issues of the 21st century, such as marijuana reform and same-sex marriage.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cHe\u2019s got a pretty pragmatic view of\u201d criminal justice reform and \u201cdefund the police,\u201d says Texas Southern University professor Howard Henderson, an expert on culturally responsive criminal justice research. Sometimes the \u201cvoice of reason doesn\u2019t necessarily come from the community, or from the criminal justice activists, or the police themselves. \u2026 Sometimes you need people like Matt to actually throw out these ideas in a manner that\u2019s approachable and debatable.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cI think Matt has had a huge, singular effect on the housing debate, in ways that are harder to see now because his views are so widely shared,\u201d says Klein, a longtime friend, referring to Yglesias\u2019s decades-long promotion of <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.vox.com\/policy-and-politics\/2018\/9\/24\/17896482\/building-more-stuff-housing-gentrification-cities\" rel=\"noopener\">YIMBYism<\/a> to confront the nation\u2019s housing crisis. \u201cMy most significant disagreement with Matt, typically, is that I think the world is less logical than he is, and so arguments that are extremely convincing and internally very tight often don\u2019t track the frustratingly messy ways that people and institutions work.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">Blowback to many of Yglesias\u2019s opinions is \u201crooted in Matt being of D.C., and really understanding the place, and a lot of people who just don\u2019t get it wishing it were different,\u201d says Matthew Lewis, a liberal activist who\u2019s worked in spaces that Yglesias has long written about, such as housing and climate. \u201cLook, the Senate is a place that exists.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">And Matt Yglesias is a person who exists in this world, with all its intellectual absolutism and strategic compromise. It\u2019s a world where progress happens through, well, a slow boring of hard boards.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cPeople often talk to me because they want to draw more attention to some kind of internal disagreement\u201d<b> <\/b>on the hard boards of<b> <\/b>policy<b> <\/b>and politics, Yglesias says. \u201cAnd the only way for me to do that is for them to explain to me what\u2019s going on. And, you know, sometimes it can be a process.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">He offers an example having to do with carbon sequestration, and who\u2019s advocating what, and why, as the Earth burns up. Sometimes, to grasp a complex and spiraling world, it helps to fixate on something so specific that it will make your eyes glaze over.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">\u201cI\u2019ve been learning lately,\u201d he says, \u201cabout something called Class VI wells.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" data-qa=\"article-body\">\n<p data-qa=\"drop-cap-letter\" data-el=\"text\" class=\"wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css font-copy\">What are Class VI wells? Matt Yglesias can tell you. He will sound like he knows what he\u2019s talking about. And it\u2019ll be one big bore.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<section class=\"dn-ns hide-for-print\" data-testid=\"mostRead\" subscriptions-section=\"content\"\/><\/div>\n<p>[ad_2]<br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/news.google.com\/__i\/rss\/rd\/articles\/CBMiY2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS9saWZlc3R5bGUvMjAyMy8wMS8xMS9tYXR0LXlnbGVzaWFzLXNsb3ctYm9yaW5nLWluLWJpZGVucy13YXNoaW5ndG9uL9IBAA?oc=5\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[ad_1] Comment on this story Comment Matt Yglesias can talk about supervolcanoes and about Habsburg…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36130,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36129"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36131,"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36129\/revisions\/36131"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}