Megan McArdle has managed, after only five months of effort, to get an automobile registered in the District of Columbia.  Whilst not driving for said period, she managed to crack a mirror and run a red light. I’m beginning to understand her preference for biking and public transit. Photo via Flickr user shawnblog under Creative [...]

Responding to recent shenanigans at Craig’s List, Megan McArdle provides some rules of thumb for those seeking to rent an apartment in one of D.C.’s tonier neighborhoods.  Money quote: In Georgetown, Dupont, or Logan, you should expect to pay at least $2,000 for a one bedroom that you can turn around in; and similar in [...]

A Media Bistro announcement in my inbox informs me that, Gawker.com video editor Richard Blakeley postponed the [monthly Media Meshing] party to next week to accommodate holiday hangovers, but he exclusively told The Press List that December’s Meshing will be the last. Blakeley says he’s doing away with the popular event because the economic crisis [...]

In Saturday’s post “Talk Radio Killed Conservativism?” I observed parenthetically that “most of the best analytical blogs are on the center-left” and promised to elaborate. It’s something that has struck me for quite some time (see, for example, February’s “Rational Conservative Blogs“) and that was brought to mind again with two links at Matt Yglesias’ [...]

One would think that a biracial president named “Barack Obama” who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia would feel a certain freedom from the need to demonstrate his bonafides on the diversity front. Not so much, it seems. Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee — once the chief economic adviser to candidate Barack Obama — may be [...]

The following headline appeared in Berliner Zeitung a while back and was captured by Idle: Megan McArdle and Alex Massie both found it slightly more amusing that I do but I thought it worth sharing, if a bit too risky for New Atlanticist.

Megan McArdle argues that those saying we should bail out General Motors and save its workers just like we did the banks and insurance companies miss the point of the bailout. Whereas a collapse of the financial sector had the ability to take down the rest of the economy with it, that’s just not true [...]

Megan McArdle and Mark Kleiman go round and round on recent National Journal and NYT reports that the Obama campaign was routinely accepting credit card donations from fake donors while the McCain campaign was rejecting them automatically using simple software applications.   Kleiman points out that the reporters in question were technically committing wire fraud, Megan’s [...]

Joe Wurzelbacher, a/k/a “Joe the Plumber,” took up an inordinate amount of time at last night’s debate, to the annoyance of many.  CBS reports that: McCain and Obama mentioned Wurzelbacher 26 times during the 90 minute debate. By contrast, Iraq came up six times, and the word “economy” was used 16 times. As Megan McArdle [...]

The next episode of OTB Radio, our BlogTalkRadio program, will record and air live tonight from 7-8 Eastern. Dave Schuler will be my co-host and we’ll be joined tonight by the lovely and talented Megan McArdle. We’ll talk about tonight’s debate, the campaign in general, the continuing fallout in the financial sector, and related matters. [...]

Checking out Megan McArdle‘s site a bit ago, I noted a startling new look. Atlantic editor James Bennet confirms: Yes, we have most definitely redesigned The Atlantic.com, as part of a broader effort that includes a redesign of the print magazine. Today’s relaunch provides a first look at our new nameplate–our revived nameplate, really. To [...]

The next episode of OTB Radio, our BlogTalkRadio program, will record and air live tonight from 7-8 Eastern. Dave Schuler will co-host with me tonight. We’ll have as our special guest Megan McArdle, the world’s tallest female econoblogger. We’ll be talking, again, about the mess in the financial markets, the various bailout plans, the presidential [...]

An interesting meme is developing among smart commenters from across the political spectrum that the House’s failure to pass the bailout bill demonstrates the soft underbelly of our political system itself. Ezra Klein: Above all, though, this is a failure of politics. Like with global warming, with health care, with the national debt, with immigration. [...]

The Bush administration is “working on a sweeping series of programs that would represent perhaps the biggest intervention in financial markets since the 1930s, embracing the need for a comprehensive approach to the financial crisis after a series of ad hoc rescues,” Deborah Solomon and Damian Paletta report for WSJ. At the center of the [...]

John Tierney and Megan McArdle argue that we should let athletes use whatever performance enhancing drugs they want since some will cheat regardless of the rules and because our definition of “fair” competition evolves over time. The response to that, though, is obvious: many of these drugs are dangerous and legitimating them all but mandates [...]

Regarding the situation in Georgia, Megan McArdle writes: Another way to look at the question is: are we going to allow Russia to reassemble the old Russian empire? At its heart, that’s what this is about. Maybe we should; maybe it’s none of our business who Russia decides to invade, or what puppet governments they [...]

Megan McArdle offers a defense of Americans from the charge that Americans are only interested in Olympic sports in which Americans are strong medal contenders, noting that we’re a large country with established team sports loyalty and so forth.  It’s all true. More fundamentally, though, I reject the premise that Americans’ America-centric view of sports [...]

A debate about the relative desirability of city and suburban living is spreading through the blogosphere at a surprising clip, given the timelessness of the topic.   It began, as best I can determine, by Duncan “Atrios” Black (a PhD economist) explaining that there are tradeoffs to having a big yard. [I]f everyone has a big [...]

John Cochrane‘s July 12 fisking of a letter from his University of Chicago colleagues protesting the creation of a Milton Friedman Institute has finally made its way around the interwebs to yours truly via Steve Bainbridge.  (Megan McArdle and Tyler Cowen had weighed in previously but they fell through the cracks of my RSS reading.) [...]

Bryan Caplan discusses the phenomenon of “ectogenesis,” whereby babies would be conceived via artificial insemination and then grown in an artificial incubation tank rather than the mother’s womb.  He asks, 1. If this technology were safe and effective, what fraction of prospective parents would pay an extra $10,000 to avoid pregnancy? 2. If insurance covered [...]

A Sunday NYT piece about the BlogHer convention begins, FOR two days last week, many of the men’s bathrooms at the Westin St. Francis Hotel here were turned into women’s bathrooms. The stalls on the second floor were lined with note cards featuring nurturing messages like “You are perfect.” Nearby, women were being dusted with [...]

Sometimes, Freud told us, a cigar is just a cigar.  Sometimes, though, it’s a cracker. Apparently, there’s a huge wave (that’s media speak for at least two similar incidents) of people using Roman Catholic communion wafers for something other than their intended spiritual purpose.  Earlier this month, it a University of Central Florida student: Webster [...]

Megan McArdle argues that drivers who exceed the speed limit in their cars have no right to get angry at bikers who run stop signs and red lights, weave in and out of traffic, and otherwise ignore traffic laws.  Plus, because bikes are smaller and slower, they’re not going to cause any harm: The reason [...]

Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman camped out overnight in front of a Washington, DC Apple store in order to be among the first to get one of the new iPhones.  Megan assures us that this is a mere sociological exercise for her: “I feel no desperate urge to get my hands on one of the [...]

Blogger Brian Beutler was shot in DC’s Adams Morgan neighborhood Monday night, Greg Sargent reports for TPM. Brian Beutler, a well-known progressive blogger, was shot and seriously injured during a mugging last night in Washington, D.C. One bullet damaged Beutler’s spleen, and he had it removed during surgery this morning at the Washington Hospital Center. [...]

Megan McArdle has generated a surprising amount of discussion with a late-afternoon post arguing that “unless the group is overwhelmingly female, the dynamic of any mixed group always defaults to male, with women fading back into supporting conversational roles.”  Further, she contends, “Men gain status by standing out from the group; women gain status by [...]

Megan McArdle has some interesting thoughts on the Supreme Court’s decision today overturning DC’s handgun ban. As she readily admits, you can get better legal analysis elsewhere. This, however, is a unique contribution to the debate: There is a distressing lack of attention to the female market in gun companies. I want something with accuracy [...]

Tim Lee, guesting at Megan McArdle’s place, dismisses the romanticism of such things as Howie Kurtz’ lament about the dying of the newspaper industry. The “wholesale abandonment of newspapers” is simply a reflection of the fact that the web now provides a wealth of new technologies for delivering news and information. Websites are more comprehensive, [...]

Megan McArdle suggests that it might be a good thing if conservatives and libertarians get stomped in November and go “into the wilderness for a little while, where they can get their heads together without having to worry about the intellectual compromises of actual politics.” The Corner‘s Andrew Stuttaford is befuddled by the suggestion: “As [...]

A federal prosecutor has filed cyber-bullying charges against Lori Drew, a very mean woman who used a fake MySpace identity to harass a teenager. A Missouri woman was indicted [May 15] on federal charges for fraudulently using an account on the social networking website MySpace.com to pose as a teenage boy who feigned romantic interest [...]

James Wimberly writes in favor of drastically limiting copyright terms. [T]he 21-year limit of Queen Anne’s Act (footnote) provided adequate incentives for authors; the 95 years or life-plus-75 years of contemporary IP law is a giveaway to a clever lobby of wealthy engrossers of the commons. If you don’t believe me, check out Justice Breyer’s [...]

Megan McArdle has written a series of posts (here, here, and here) arguing that reports published by ideologically driven think tanks are necessarily biased, in that scholars are selected for conformity to the heterodoxy, funding is subject to continuing to agree with said worldview, and the gathering of so many like-minded people into a single [...]

Will Wilkinson reports that he didn’t buy as many things as he would have liked on a recent trip to Turkey because the cultural proclivity to haggling left him cold. He suspects this experience is generalizable. [P]robably hundreds of my dollars stayed in my pocket because I didn’t have good information about the quality of [...]

Over the last couple of days, Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Ross Douthat, Daniel Larison, and Megan McArdle have confessed that chain restaurants such as Outback, Cheesecake Factory, and Olive Garden aren’t all that bad, generating a surprisingly fierce round of responses in their comment sections. Most of these places serve reliable food in large quantities [...]

When I first started the blog, a little over five years ago, most of us wrote constant posts about blogging. Mostly, I suspect, this was just a function of the novelty of the medium, as evidenced by the plethora of mainstream media stories on blogging during the same period. Both trends have settled down to [...]

Megan McArdle heartily endorses Kindle: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device which, for $400, lets you carry your entire library around with you and read it whilst hanging onto a rail and propped up on one arm (unless you happen to be in a bathtub). It does sound like a handy invention, especially for frequent travelers [...]

Megan McArdle is “physically sick” that the DC Madam has committed suicide, driven to do so by a state using its resources to hound a woman engaging in consensual commerce rather than tracking down violent criminals. James Poulos wonders why he should care that a lawbreaker has killed herself. Emotionally, I’m much closer to James [...]

Megan McArdle argues that war crimes are an inevitable part of war and therefore, “when you choose war, you choose war crimes–and that this is true regardless of why you are choosing the war.” Her Atlantic colleague Andrew Sullivan says this is “preposterous, uninformed, ahistorical,” noting that, “The United States has managed to go to [...]

A bunch of DC area libertarians apparently decided to celebrate Thomas Jefferson’s birthday by congregating at his memorial at midnight and dancing to the sounds of their iPods for ten minutes. No, I don’t get it either. At any rate, as Julian Sanchez and Radley Balko report, the constabulary showed up, ordered everyone to move [...]

Matt Yglesias argues, persuasively, that John McCain’s “biography tour” is a strange campaign strategy, especially given that the candidate with the more impressive military background has lost almost* every presidential election since 1960. He then goes off on a tangent: What I’ll say on behalf of this strategy is that it’s the best way I [...]

A “significant” number of people are willfully destroying their homes before complying with eviction notices as a means of exacting “revenge” on banks for foreclosing on them. This, in turn, has created a black market cottage industry where bankers bribe people with cash payments for leaving peaceably. Megan McArdle doesn’t understand the pointless destruction, observing [...]

Megan McArdle has posted her semi-annual essay explaining that, if you want to persuade people with your arguments, you should probably refrain from calling them names and starting from the premise that they are evil, stupid, or both. I’ve written a handful of those myself, at least once or twice building from one of Megan’s. [...]

Megan McArdle argues, not unreasonably, that “if the Yankees want a $1.3 billion stadium, they should pay for it themselves.” Instinctively, I agree. Practically, however, it’s not that simple. Big league sports franchises are an incredibly scarce resource and municipalities are willing to bid for the advantages, psychic and real, that attach to having one. [...]

The Eliot Spitzer saga has reopened the debate as to why prostitution should be illegal. Reason‘s Kerry Howley has written several posts on the subject arguing that, while anti-prostitution laws are sold under the guise of protecting women, they’re really just a form of “slut shaming” aimed at limiting women’s sexual freedom. Anti-prostitution laws add [...]

Samantha Power says Hillary Clinton is a monster who’ll stoop to anything to win the nomination. HILLARY Clinton has been branded a “monster” by one of Barack Obama’s top advisers, as the gloves come off in the race to win the Democrat nomination. In an unguarded moment during an interview with The Scotsman in London, [...]

John McCain recently “declared that ‘there’s strong evidence’ that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that was once in many childhood vaccines, is responsible for the increased diagnoses of autism in the U.S.” Jake Tapper reports. Megan McArdle terms the assertion “nonsense on stilts” and observes that there is now robust scientific evidence to the contrary. Pondering [...]

Andrew Sullivan is not amused by Hillary Clinton’s whining about how hard it is to run as a women and how she wishes there were a level playing field. Using some colorful language, he reminds us of the enormous advantages being Mrs. Bill Clinton has afforded her political career. There’s an old saw, employed perhaps [...]

Commenting on Ed Morrissey’s decision to shut down his blog and start posting at Hot Air, John Cole remarks, “It is a shame, too, because Ed was who I was using as my barometer for rational conservatives. Now all I have left are James Joyner and Daniel Larison.” While I appreciate the compliment, there must [...]

Megan McArdle explains why she prefers Barack Obama to John McCain despite the former’s protectionism and “his insanely bad economic ‘patriot act.’” I might not vote for Obama; I will not vote for McCain. There are some things more important than the economy, and free speech is among them. Yes, I don’t like Obama’s stance [...]

The New York Times today fronts a long exposé on John McCain, which the campaign describes as a “hit-and-run smear campaign,” under the headline “For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk.” The piece alleges that McCain did favors for a female lobbyist nine or more years ago and insinuates that they were romantically [...]