Matt Yglesias’ Return to His Roots
The one-time Juiceboxer is still annoying the mainstream media.
WaPo’s Dan Zak explores “The boring journey of Matt Yglesias.”
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 “Game of Thrones.” He can talk about all these things and, perhaps more importantly, he can sound like he knows what he’s talking about.
“So even very small improvements in the welfare of chickens has an incredible sort of aggregate impact,” Yglesias said on a podcast last February, concluding a mini-monologue on poultry with this: “It’s actually very, very important if we can make chickens’ lives slightly better.”
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 “incredible” and “very,” then hedges like “sort of” and “slightly.”
The affect is one of solution, of authority, of “aha!”
The effect is vaporous, curious, “huh?”
When enthusiastic or challenged in conversation, Yglesias’s speaking voice can reach a cartoonish tenor reminiscent of Jiminy Glick. His writing voice, however, remains flat.He is a “logic machine”at the keyboard,according to friends. He is a parody of artificial intelligence, according to haters.
“It’s the best time there’s ever been to be somebody who can write something coherent quickly,” Yglesias says, over coffee. “I find it relaxing to work. I put things out. People yell at me. I will write again the next day.”
Yglesias, 41, has been writing online nonstopsince 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’s struck gold on the newsletter platform Substack, where at least 13,000 people each pay Matt Yglesias an average of $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 peoplewith his contrarian stabs at wit. But his Substack is a place where a fractiousworld is rendered logical, where self-proclaimed moderates and rationalists find refuge from so-called purists and radicals.
There’s an audience for that kind of thing, especially in Washington, especially at a time when the powerful feel rebellious for thinking centrist thoughts.
The whole feature is that sort of thing: backhanded listings of Matt’s accomplishments and thinly-disguised bemusement that anyone would be interested in what he has to say. Much less that important people are.
“I don’t always agree with Matt, but he always makes you think with his unique and sharp insights,” 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, “offers ‘unconventional wisdom:’ He’s not afraid to break with others and put his views out there — a perspective that is hard to find in a dialogue dominated by conventional wisdom.”
For others — especially those who say Yglesias punches left— his wisdom amounts to sleight of hand.
“I 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,” says Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project, which saw right through Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced cryptocurrency exchange founder whom Yglesias had previously touted.
“He’s basically a panhandler who’s driving outrage on Twitter, and benefits from how he engages with the performance of discourse,” says Melissa Byrne, an activist for student-loan cancellation, which Yglesias dismissed as a political liability for Democrats. (“This was dumb on my part,” he wrote in November, after the party outperformed midterm expectations.)
I’ve followed Matt’s writing for going on 20 years now and, not surprisingly, disagree with him often. But he’s never been in the outrage business. He’s often contrarian, to be sure, but he’s always struck me as someone genuinely interested in trying to understand the world and who instinctively rejects ideological straitjackets.
But enough serious people take Yglesias seriously to negate the many people who don’t. 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’s posts on policy — particularly one on Build Back Better negotiations in February — have reportedly circulated among White House staff.
“There’s a broad sense that he’s a public intellectual, and they take his ideas like they’ll take other ideas,” says a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discussoutside influences on the administration. “He’s not super influential, but he’s a prominent normie liberal, just like Joe Biden is a normie liberal.”
Among the political newsletters on Substack’s leader board, which is stocked with Gen-X reactionaries to what Yglesias has called the “Great Awokening,” he is No. 8 in readership, between the conniptions of Glenn Greenwald and the braying of Andrew Sullivan. Yglesias’s is one of a fewSubstacks that earn north of $1 million per year in subscription revenue. Yglesias named his Substack “Slow Boring,” after a 1919 lecture by the German sociologist Max Weber titled “Politics as a Vocation,” wherein “boring” is not an adjective of dullness but a gerund of diligence.
“Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards,” Weber said at the dawn of the Weimar Republic. “It takes both passion and perspective.”
That Yglesias, like Greenwald and Sullivan, had enough of a brand to sell a lot of Substack subscriptions doesn’t mean he’s Greenwald or Sullivan. Indeed, it’s weird to lump him in with them, given his vastly different worldview.
For two decades, Yglesias has been boring. A million boring posts, across many platforms, into many hard boards — into the brains of like-minded liberals, under the skin of policy experts and the extremelyonline. He has bored right through the 21st century and emerged exactly where he began: blogging for himself. Except now he’s making bank, and he seems less liberal than he once was.
What changed: Matt, or everything around him?
Maybe both? Matt was an undergraduate when he started; now he’s a middle-aged man with a wife and school-age child. Indeed, he’s older now than I was when we were both starting out as bloggers and my worldview has changed considerably over that period. It would be sad, really, if his hadn’t.
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 andpoker games. Now he’s 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 “reactionary centrism,” according to the internet.
Reactionary centrism is a contradiction in terms. The Weber quote that he chose to name his Substack after explains his worldview: politics is slow, hard work; one simply can’t wave a magic wand at problems. He’s the guy who coined the “Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics” way back in 2006:
A lot of people seem to think that American military might is like one of these power rings. They seem to think that, roughly speaking, we can accomplish absolutely anything in the world through the application of sufficient military force. The only thing limiting us is a lack of willpower.
What’s more, this theory can’t be empirically demonstrated to be wrong. Things that you or I might take as demonstrating the limited utility of military power to accomplish certain kinds of things are, instead, taken as evidence of lack of will. Thus we see that problems in Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t reasons to avoid new military ventures, but reasons why we must embark upon them.
Others, notably Brendan Nyhan, have applied the concept to other arenas, including the Presidency. Matt reflexively rejects easy answers most of the time. (He’s also the guy who repeatedly touted minting a trillion dollar coin as a way of sidestepping the debt ceiling fight, so he’s not immune.)
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 — and that much depends on not alienating their coalitions with far-left slogans and hobby horses.
“The 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?” Yglesias says. “What is the plan to win?”
As an erstwhile Republican who doesn’t wish to yield more power to the crazies who now dominate that party, this makes sense to me. Is Manchin exasperating as hell? He is. Is there a better alternative for keeping that seat in Democratic hands? There is not.
He’s aged into his curmudgeonliness, though friends say he’s also mellowed. He and his wife, Kate Crawford, have a 7-year-old son. They are Slacking constantly, becauseCrawford 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 — a Democrat in the South — for not supporting same-sex marriage.
“The candidate was mad that [Matt] had written something that was, frankly, correct, but also a little rude,” Crawford says. Correct but rude: “I feel like that’s Matt in a nutshell.” A Jewish Democrat running for Congress in Alabama hadto pick his battles to win and, in 2008, same-sex marriage was not the hill to die on.
“Twenty-seven-year-old Matt was very annoyed by this sort of pragmatism and hypocrisy,” Crawford says. “And I think 40-year-old Matt would be pretty sympathetic to it.”
That he’s matured in his understanding of the practicalities of politics would seem a good thing, no? Aside from more experience and being in a different place in his life, he’s gone from being a minor league blogger for activist outlets to write for The Atlantic and Slate and then co-founded Vox and is now back to writing under his own masthead but for big bucks.
“He didn’t seem to be able to be his true self at Vox,” says Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie, who helped to recruit Yglesias. “It seemed obvious to me that Substack would be good for him, not only financially,” but also “for his soul.”
Rather than trying to change the media landscape, Yglesias is back to tending his own garden.His audience is relatively small (by internet standards) but highly invested (by internet standards). And in Biden’s Washington, his old friends, acquaintances and sources are now in positions of power.
“People who were unimportant when Obama was president are more important now,” Yglesias says. “A whole generation of pundits has sort of faded from the scene. And, you know, others have risen in their place.”
People grow up, in other words.A person’s 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.
“Matt’s 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,” says journalist Timothy B. Lee, who worked at Vox and has known Yglesias for nearly 20 years. “And so, in the 2000s, that meant being more liberal than most pundits. Now it’s the opposite. But he has the same approach.”
He’s the same guy. But he’s also become much more connected and influential.
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 — people from whom Yglesias wants to learn, who want to pull him this way or that, or who want to vent what they can’t say in public but hope Matt will say for them.
“When I talk to members of Congress or people in the administration,” Yglesias says, “I feel like they’re, like, talking to their therapist about their frustrations with intra-coalitional dynamics.”
In September the treasury secretary called Yglesias to chat. Why? Janet L. Yellen’s communications staff did not respond to inquiries about why. But Yglesias then wrote a post extolling “modern supply-side economics” and concluding that, when it comes to the wobbly economy, the Biden administration seems “to be going in the right direction.”
Is this wisdom? If so, is it conventional or unconventional?
¯_(ツ)_/¯
Perhaps it’s instructive to think about two topics that bookend his public life.At age 21, Yglesias was laying out the logician’s 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 thatBankman-Fried “is for real,” because why else would wealthy people risk their money?
“Unfortunately I think, like most people, I just kind of took it at face value,” Yglesias says now, about Bankman-Fried’s endeavor. “‘Well, if his company has a $20-billion valuation, there must be something to it.’ Even if I don’t understand what a cryptocurrency exchange is.”
So, I’ve been openly scoffing at crypto for years. But Matt’s reaction here wasn’t exactly crazy.
This is Matt Yglesias coddling the powerful, his critics would say, and exposing a gullible dilettantism. And yet plenty of people view him asan early, sensible and stalwart voice for incremental progress on key issues of the 21st century, such as marijuana reform and same-sex marriage.
“He’s got a pretty pragmatic view of” criminal justice reform and “defund the police,” says Texas Southern University professor Howard Henderson, an expert on culturally responsive criminal justice research. Sometimes the “voice of reason doesn’t necessarily come from the community, or from the criminal justice activists, or the police themselves. … Sometimes you need people like Matt to actually throw out these ideas in a manner that’s approachable and debatable.”
“I 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,” says Klein, a longtime friend, referring to Yglesias’s decades-long promotion of YIMBYism to confront the nation’s housing crisis. “My 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’t track the frustratingly messy ways that people and institutions work.”
Which is ironic in that Matt is criticized from the left for being too concerned with pragmatics and not enough of a true believer. But, yes, he’s a philosopher by training whereas Klein and I are political scientists. It makes sense that he would be more wedded to the power of logic.
Blowback to many of Yglesias’s opinions is “rooted in Matt being of D.C., and really understanding the place, and a lot of people who just don’t get it wishing it were different,” says Matthew Lewis, a liberal activist who’s worked in spaces that Yglesias has long written about, such as housing and climate. “Look, the Senate is a place that exists.”
And Matt Yglesias is a person who exists in this world, with all its intellectual absolutism and strategic compromise. It’s a world where progress happens through, well, a slow boring of hard boards.
“People often talk to me because they want to draw more attention to some kind of internal disagreement”on the hard boards ofpolicyand politics, Yglesias says. “And the only way for me to do that is for them to explain to me what’s going on. And, you know, sometimes it can be a process.”
He offers an example having to do with carbon sequestration, and who’s 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.
“I’ve been learning lately,” he says, “about something called Class VI wells.”
What are Class VI wells? Matt Yglesias can tell you. He will sound like he knows what he’s talking about. And it’ll be one big bore.
Again, I just don’t see the problem here. He’s genuinely curious about how the world works and spends an inordinate amount of time trying to learn new things. But being a generalist means not having the same depth on any of the issues as the experts. Yet, because he’s got such a big following, his views matter more than theirs. Which is naturally galling.
The mainstream press has been ragging on him for years because he and his fellow Juice Boxers skipped ahead in line, building an online brand and becoming pundits without putting in years on the police beat first. There was a big New York Times feature (“Washington’s New Brat Pack Masters Media“) on Matt, Ezra Klein, Brian Beutler, and Dave Weigel way back in 2011.
In only a few years, these young men and others like them have become part of the journalistic establishment in Washington. Once they lived in groups in squalid homes and stayed out late, reading comic books in between posts as more seasoned reporters slogged their way through traditional publications like The Hill and Roll Call. Now the members of this “Juicebox Mafia,” as they were first called by Eli Lake of The Washington Times, in a reference to youth, have become destination reading for — and respected by — the city’s power elite. Indeed, arguably they are themselves approaching power-elite status (as well as, gasp, age 30).
“I look at those guys and call them Facebook pundits,” said Tammy Haddad, the venerable Washington hostess and cable news veteran. “They’ve risen up the media food chain. They’re acknowledged by the White House. They measure their success in a different way than the Old Guard in this city used to.
[…]
Betsy Rothstein, editor of the media Web site FishbowlDC, has relentlessly accused the Juicebox Mafia of arrogance (Mr. Klein has blocked her site from his Twitter feeds). “Their sense of themselves is so inflated,” Ms. Rothstein said. “I sometimes think they do good work, but if you’re in their pack, even if what you say makes no sense, you’re golden. I think their popularity is a myth.”
And Douglas Brinkley, the Rice University professor and historian who is working on a biography of Walter Cronkite, expressed nostalgia for an earlier, more in-the-trenches generation of correspondents who didn’t rely on Twitter posts and linking to generate content. “I’m not making a judgment,” Professor Brinkley said. “What I don’t like is that before, people would start in foreign bureaus all over the world before making their way to Washington. You would be pushing into your deep 20s and have a really deep global background. What you’ve seen is a devaluation of serious journalism in favor of reporters who are able to create a brand identity.”
I’m not sure the journalism is any less serious than it once was. But the importance of establishing a brand identity has only increased since then.
The real problem with Yglesias is he’s basically the pundit version of The Dan Brown Effect: he writes on subjects that he doesn’t understand at all, and relies on the fact his readers don’t either to keep them from realizing how much of what he says is nonsense.
Ironically given the timing of thus post, yesterday’s bond discussion where he overlooked that a basis point is 1/100 of a percentage point is a great example
@Stormy Dragon:
While I agree, I think it is important to acknowledge that Yglesias has to produce something “deep” every couple of days on an extremely broad range of topics. Obviously, no one can do this.
And while it is clear that Yglesias badly overrates himself, he is also a product of the current media environment that rewards these personal brands. (Perhaps because readers want “a guy they know and can trust?”) I think that is the biggest takeaway of all this.
And to be fair, Yglesias really isn’t the worst offender, I think.
@Stormy Dragon: I would go even further and say that he presents as a pretty informed guy who wants to be more informed, then writes things that have 101-level blunders and never addresses them.
That he’s turned “pragmatist” is no surprise, as he’s aged into a life of leisurely connectedness where he can twist the latest political or social talking points into an article without having to go into any depth. He and Malcolm Gladwell sit in the same bucket for me: yeah, he could be thought-provoking if he applied himself, but at this point the laziness of the output is just eye-roll-inducing. He’s not worth getting frustrated or angry at or about, because (and I admit I don’t regularly read his stuff, just see it second-hand) his commentaries mostly seem to lack depth, research, and understanding.
@ptfe:
I think this, along with the comparison to Gladwell, are spot on.
I want to like Yglesias. I wish he would stick to a much narrower range of topics and go deeper on them.
I used to read Yglesias but came to believe he wasn’t that smart, and especially said dumb stuff around money + economics. Then he got a money + economics gig taking over Slate’s Moneybox. I just stopped reading him then. It sounds like he’s still just as bad at it.
I read Yglesias from his earliest days and definitely appreciated his perspective, but when I briefly subscribed to his Substack when it started, I was disappointed. It came across as performatively contrarian and, yes, lazy. Not Meghan McArdle level of smug, self satisfied, half-assery, but definitely heading in that direction. I let the subscription drop after I would have had to pay.
And this… well this is just another way of saying, “I don’t put much thought or work into my output, like a lot of other people, and you really shouldn’t take what I say seriously.” Because while it’s fine not to understand what a crypto-currency exchange is, it should mean you don’t pontificate about it, not that you get a free pass when your deep thoughts turn out to be turds.
My little irrelevant opinion: they’re all lumped in as rebellious for rebellion’s sake, like many smart teenagers are. Being smart does not necessarily equate to common sense — what Granny called “horse sense.” Smart contrarion teens with common sense later grow into solid adults. The rest keep that teen brain and end up making people like Yglesias, Sully, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan rich.
Based on my friends in this cohort, it comes from the insecurity of lacking strong family figures to tell you when you’re full of sh*t, why these performatively contrarion fanboys trend towards incel-types with daddy and mommy issues. Black folk call it Uncle Logic. In honor of that once uncle who cannot contribute to a smart conversation *except* disagreeing just to disagree to try to prove his intelligence. (“Uncle Tony is drunk again!”)
They think reflexive contrarionsm is the same as critical thinking. It’s not. Critical thinking often starts with skepticism but requires reality-testing that skepticism.
@MarkedMan:
Half-assed contrarionism runs the ideological gum. The common thing is they are just as reactionary and prone to confirmation bias as us all, yet they irritatingly, smugly insist they are serving original, objective analysis. Really, they just reflexively disagree with prevailing orthodoxies.
Yes, some conventional wisdom is trash. Some is in the gray area. Some is just plain right. Can’t tell which is which unless you reality test your skepticism. When you don’t, like Taibbi and Greenwald, you stupidly INSIST (!) Putin won’t attack Kyiv as Putin is massing troops and weapons.
I also find these clowns mostly harmless, it’s just amusing they have so many rabid NPCs. But I started following politics by reading Charles Krauthammer, so I just don’t get why folks prefer mediocre minds. Whatever. It’s lucrative, so good for them. Make that P.T. Barnum money.
I’ve seen people like Tom Friedman, Malcom Gladwell, Yglesias and such used in those awful corporate training seminars, you know that type which use all the latest buzzwords and vapid concepts to essentially try to make people work harder longer and cheaper while thinking they are doing something heroic.
It think these types of HR and sales people are the prime target audience for “I can explain the world to you in a short essay” type pundits.
I think he writes pretty well and he covers topics that a lot of people dont, or if they are covered it is from a very left or right POV. Never a favorite and I wouldn’t pay to read him but when people cite him I usually read and think he has stuff to offer. Besides which he seems to piss off people on both sides of the political divide which makes me think he is at least sometimes on the right track.
Steve
@ptfe:
@Matt Bernius:
I’m not familiar with Yglesias, but I know Gladwell’s work well. At one point I think I referred to Gladwell, and other like him, as intellectual candy. Lately I’m thinking of them more as intellectual junk food.
By now I think the best thing about Gladwell’s podcast is that it led me, through his podcast production company and network, to Jill Lepore’s “The Last Archive,” and Tim Harford’s “Cautionary Tales.”
The thing with reflexive contrarianism is that if you do it enough (or all the time) you will eventually get a hit and seem prescient or genius because “no one else was smart enough to see that.” But do that enough and people start expecting you to do your “no one else sees it” schtick on the regular, and then instead of burying your mistaken takes in an avalanche of new ones people start to notice, and you end up where these guys are now. Contrarian takes are valuable, but as someone said up thread, they need to be reality tested, just like all other takes do. “Novel” doesn’t necessarily equal “genius.”
@Erik:
Years ago I read “The Bear Book”, nominally about how to invest during a Bear market. What I remember from it was the history of those who predicted Bear markets successfully. If I remember correctly, it was mostly people who consistently predicted a Bear market regardless of the circumstances. They were spectacularly right once, and lived off of that fame for the rest of their lives.
Yglesias reminds me of my experience reading The Economist: I was always impressed with their articles discussing news in remote corners of the globe, until I would read an article in an area I had some experience of (like the Japanese space program) and would have to conclude that they were full of crap.
(I still read The Economist; I just take the commentary in with a bigger grain of salt.)
Yglesias is one of the few Substacks I pay for.
I also often disagree with him, but he’s one of the few prominent voices that values pragmatism. His left-of-center pragmatic views are much more compelling on the merits than is the case of the typical activist and those with a binary Manichean worldview. It’s those people who compare him to Greenwald or Sullivan because they consider anyone who isn’t a reliable team player to be a heretic. After all, how could anyone of intelligence or good moral character possibly have legitimate views that differ from the tribe?
I like the fact that he makes good arguments that force you to think about and address them. He’s probably done more to get me to take progressive ideas more seriously than anyone else, and the reason is because he makes good and reasonable arguments in support of them.
One thing I noticed about the shoplifting stories is that no journalist seemed to be interested in figuring out where the stuff was being sold. That’s actually a story, and probably a good one. But the norm for journalism is taking official sources (political insiders, cops, CEOs, industry trade groups) and then expanding on what they are being told without ever questioning the premises.
It’s not the fault of Matt Yglesias. But his ‘logic’ is more or less the logic of someone who doesn’t know that much about the world, and who doesn’t question why he was being rewarded by a system which has never encouraged him to ask questions. He’s actually good at it, I think, and he does have a sense of irony about himself which sets him apart from a Substack lunatic like Glenn Greenwald.
@grumpy realist:
That was my experience with McArdle. Any time she talked about something I actually knew about she was wrong. Not just a little, but egregiously of the “Of course, we all know that a penny is worth more than a dime because it is bigger” type of wrong. And she never, ever corrected herself and rarely responded to those who pointed our here errors. On those rare occasions she did, it was in the most shallow way. I haven’t read her since her Atlantic days and doubt I’ve missed a thing. But she’s riding the Billionaire’s Boy Club Libertarian Gravy Train and knows accuracy is not what her partrons are looking for. Having landed a steady gig at the WaPo she seems to have done quite well with her schtick.
@Matt Bernius:
Interesting, I think he’s very different from Gladwell. Yglesias is much more interested in and deeply immersed policy than Gladwell, who does stories about things like the Norden Bombsight. Yglesias is more of a DC policy wonk, while Gladwell is more about telling interesting stories. If you compare the podcasts they do, for instance, the style and content are miles apart.
@Andy:
I sure as heck hope you are not putting me in that category. As I said, I used to read him and actually looked forward in his early days, but his Substack columns struck me as formulaic and lazy.
As for Greenwald, I never read him and I liked Sullivan in his Atlantic and The Dish days. When he started his Substack I subscribed for the first year but it lacked what made him interesting in the first place: surrounding himself with people who made good arguments against his positions and then legitimately and honestly grappling with them. His Substack seemed to be just an endlessly smug circle jerk of people with like minds. And honestly, Sullivan’s world view has always been pretty narrow and limited without outside intervention. Ivy League, Catholic, Gay, Male. That seems to be the extent of his world and he doesn’t seem to have any interest in understanding things that lay outside that.
@Andy:
The guy is getting personal phone calls from Janet Yellin and praise from the WH Chief of Staff. He’s not a heretic. The fact that he can brand himself as such to his audience is part of the current delusional condition. At the very least try to get a grip…
@MarkedMan:
I am definitely not putting you in that category, and I apologize if I gave that impression.
It was more of a general statement, as I’ve seen very frequently that Yglesias’ harshest critics on the left also happen to be the people with partisan Manichean worldviews who get angry at any criticism of progressives or Democrats. Of course, the right has never liked him, but it seems like the center-right people at least respect him at this point.
There are, it is sad to say, many political hobbyists who really do think that honest disagreement is not possible and that disagreement is akin to disregard for the truth because, after all, nobody could ever be so dumb as to honestly disagree. I do not think you are remotely in that category.
Greenwald’s stick is that regardless of anything else, he is against the US national security and intelligence apparatus. That is the frame for his worldview. As a former cog in that apparatus, I do not agree with many of his arguments, but he’s at least consistent and has, on occasion, broken important information that the public should know. The world needs people like him to help keep the spooks and federal law enforcement accountable.
I subscribed to Sullivan initially, but I think he got too wrapped up in culture war stuff, and I could not justify spending the money for weekly content when people like Yglesias are putting stuff out daily (as an aside, I’ve pared back many of my substack subscriptions and wish there was a bulk plan. Also, I do contribute to the Patreon here at OTB). Sullivan does respond to reader criticisms though and has admitted when they are right, which is good to see. I suppose he does live in a narrow world with the attendant blind spots, but I don’t see that as a problem since that is the case with practically everyone, including me. I prefer not to shut out such viewpoints; at least, I try not to.
@Modulo Myself:
I don’t think he’s ever branded himself a heretic – quite the opposite. That was my word and analysis regarding some of his most strident critics on his left and among other journalists.
And yes, many people are upset that he has influence among policymakers. It’s worth considering why that upsets people.
Yglesias is a bright guy who has occasional insights and covers topics – urban development, mass transit etc – which are interesting to me but often ignored. That’s all I ask of any pundit.
I don’t read much from Substack, but what I do shows me the value of editors. James post yesterday spoke about the late Blake Houndsell’s value as an editor.
If I accept Substack as basically a blog, that’s OK. But if I’m paying Yglesias what amounts to a magazine subscription, I expect better quality. (Reminding myself to check and see if I’ve thrown anything in the pot here lately.) The road to success as a pundit is not to be right, but to find a market niche and tell that niche what they want to hear. Now that he’s a small business, Yglesias will be worrying more about marketing than depth of analysis.
Speaking of pundits who play to a market niche, NYT recently had a conversation between David Brooks and Brett Stephens The Party’s Over for Us. Where Do We Go Now?. Tell me you never had a clue about the Republican Party and actual existing conservatism without telling me you never had a clue.
@gVOR08:
Truer words were never spoken. I can think of an awful lot of writers whose quality went way down once they reached the level of success that they could win every argument with their editor and still get published.
One of the examples of why I found Yglesias tiresome nowadays after being a fan 15-20 years ago involved a Substack piece (I think) on urban density. 15 years ago, as a young guy, he argued that the cause of high housing costs in cities was all the zoning regulations against density and the NIMBYism that prevents change. At the time I thought the argument was interesting if a little simplistic, but certainly worth discussing. The thing is, he’s never gotten any more in depth since then. There is a legitimate reason why single family home owners fear their neighborhood becoming more rental oriented. Anyone who’s lived long enough has probably seen some of the extremes, for example what happens when a University expands into an urban area and the surrounding homes get bought up by speculators who rent every bedroom out individually to 20 year old college students getting wasted and throwing parties. The remaining homeowners watch their property values, i.e. their biggest source of capital, decline year after year. So, to me, the discussion needs to get more sophisticated. What types of changes retain property values but promote density? But Yglesias has never moved on. He has the same rote solutions at 40 that he did at 25.
@MarkedMan:
I think there are two edges to that sword. For example, a lot of the standard opinion content I read in newspapers and places with a lot of editing ends up being unsatisfying because so much of the meat gets cut out due to space requirements. Of course, there is the problem with editors choosing headlines for pieces they didn’t write, which can often be bad.
Mostly, though, there is simply a lot of very good content and ideas that that would never make it past an editor at a major news organization. Where are those ideas, or deeper dives for something discussed in a brief op-ed, supposed to get aired?
In my view, both are invaluable and part of the same ecosystem. And it should be pointed out that a lot of us spent a significant amount of time here at OTB and other blogs, reading and commenting on content that doesn’t have independent editor control, probably because much of the stuff our hosts write here is interesting and useful but would never get published in a major paper.
@MarkedMan:
Grand ideas about zoning changes and redesigned neighborhoods and affordable housing tend to run into granular objections. Take my street. It’s very narrow, as in cars often have to back up or scoot into driveways for cars to pass. Add two dozen apartment units on the street and movement goes from annoying to impossible. There’s no public transportation worth mentioning, certainly nothing on my street. Much the same conditions pertain throughout Silver Lake. So, right away, all us good liberal Silver Lake Democrats are going to object on reasonable, practical grounds.
The nearest shopping center – Whole Foods, CVS and a bank – is a dystopian struggle for parking places. Add more residents? Even more cars driving in endless loops looking for a spot?
I don’t think my neighborhood is unique.
So, where do we build these apartment buildings? Somewhere else. And somewhere else would also like to see affordable housing somewhere else. And that’s before we get into the mare’s nest of regulations that make building anything in LA nearly impossible. We’ve considered building an ADU (auxiliary Dwelling Unit) on our lot, but the wait for approval is a full year.
@Michael Reynolds: That’s one reason London traffic is so abysmal. All those large Victorian mansions which got cut up as flats to house multiple small households. Which, if each household has a car, you can see why parking is abysmal….
(Heck, it’s the same here where I live in the suburbs of Chicago. The streets around here turn into parking lots after 5 pm)
Most cities weren’t designed for “each household has a car for each adult”.
@MarkedMan:
The arguments about density would make sense if very dense cities had affordable housing. But they don’t. And Yglesias (and most of the YIMBYs) seem genuinely stumped as to why a place like Silver Lake with its great old homes would wish not to have developers build a series of cookie-cutter buildings called The Oswald, The Stuart, The Beacon, and The Grove, and which will still depreciating visibly in about five years.
@Michael Reynolds:
Yep, there are a lot of practical issues with YIMBYism.
I directionally agree with Yglesias on the subject and think it’s good he’s done more than probably anyone to popularize it and get people talking about and considering zoning reform, but at the end of the day, I’m just skeptical it will result in significant changes.
Plus, the reality is that most people like the status quo and want things that are at odds with each other, like wanting cheap single-family housing in a nice area with good amenities and schools that isn’t far from your job.
@Michael Reynolds: Open question for you–and a genuine question, not the “gotcha” it’s gonna sound like”: Where will the tennant(s) of your ADU be parking their car(s)?
@Michael Reynolds:
@grumpy realist:
A lot comes down to design.
You can’t expect the urban infrastructure, from the widths of streets to the electric grid, designed for the use of, say, 10,000 people in 2,500 single-family homes, to be able to support the needs of 75,000 in a mix of houses and apartment buildings.
The neighborhood where I live is almost all apartment buildings. The traffic is bad in rush hour, and holidays, around the areas that connect to other places. At our street there’s never any traffic. At that, it’s two wide lanes in an irregular oval with entrance and exit at one end and a roundabout at the other.
There’s one large shopping mall, a hospital, two smaller malls, four supermarkets, a Price Club, a Sam’s Club, around 50 movie screens, some car dealerships, three office supply stores, one Home Depot, and lots of restaurants, in a three kilometer radius. The one big drawback is that the whole area is designed for moving around in cars. So walking from one place to another is not a good idea.
But that’s how you know you’re in the suburbs and not the city.
@Modulo Myself: But they will be luxury apartments!
By the way, have you ever seen a new apartment building going up that wasn’t “luxury”?
@Kathy: I hate to go all future-y but this is a case where self driving cars are going to have a huge impact on city design. They don’t even need to be self driving – self parking would be enough. If you want a covered parking spot in NYC it will be, what, $600/mo or more? That same parking spot in NJ would be half that or less. And, heck, the reason you want a covered spot in the first place is for convenience and security as you enter and exit with packages in rain and snow and sketchy neighborhoods. If your car could drop you off and then head into NJ and part in an uncovered lot for $50/month how many people would take advantage of that? It would open up an awful lot of space for things other than parking cars…
@MarkedMan:
Yeah, I think they will be a game-changer in many ways. I would love one, and hope they arrive in time for me to use when I’m elderly and don’t want to drive anymore.
@MarkedMan: “If your car could drop you off and then head into NJ and part in an uncovered lot for $50/month how many people would take advantage of that?”
One Friday afternoon I had to get from midtown Manhattan to Newark for a flight. Granted, it was the Friday before a holiday weekend, so rush hour started a little early, but the 17 mile Uber ride took a little south of two hours, most of it spent trying to get into one of the tunnels that run under the Hudson.
What happens if we then double that amount of traffic by adding thousands of self-driving cars owned by people looking for a parking place? And what happens to the morning rush when my SDC is fighting with all the commuters to get back into Manhattan?
There may be some problems that self-driving cars can help with, but at heart, they’re just more cars. Meanwhile I manage to avoid paying $800 a month to park my car in the simplest way possible — I don’t have one.
@MarkedMan:
I’d say getting to another state, parking, then unparking and making the trip back, is full autonomous driving.
@Andy:
Look for the St. Elon Self-Driving Act of 2025, which will cross the desk of president Florida Man, as approved by the all-GQP House led by Speaker Marge Gazpacho Green, and the all-GQP Senate under Majority Leader Running Man.
TL;DR: all Uber, Lyft, etc. drivers are to be permanently bonded to their cars* for the lifetime of the car, and leased long term by the approved rideshare companies to wealthy individuals. This will deliver on the promise of autonomous cars that drive themselves, and create jobs.
*What conscription provision? You can opt out if you pay a $100,000 fee every year. That’s not conscription!
@MarkedMan: Forgive my cynicism, but I would guess about half of the people who will be able to afford self-driving cars (and those (most likely plug in electric) cars may need to be able to self-dock at the charger, too), so let’s be generous and say about 10 or 15% of the total population.
@wr: “Meanwhile I manage to avoid paying $800 a month to park my car in the simplest way possible — I don’t have one.”
That plan worked well for me while I lived in Korea, too. Still, the bus (one of 7 routes, actually) came by the street I lived on the back side of every 10 minutes–except for the rush hours, at those times, two busses normally came. I don’t know whether this plan could work in America–busses let anyone who has fare get on after all, and most of the busses were really old and crowded all the time.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
That shouldn’t be a problem in the long term, as adoption and competition drive prices down, eventually. This has happened with almost everything since the 1860s or so, from light bulbs to cars to flat screen TVs to the tiny computers we call phones for some reason.
What might change this is the fee-based model. It might be more profitable to lease cars rather than sell them, especially as now they’ll require upgrades. We see some of this too in the barriers some manufacturers put up to prevent product repairs by third parties or the people who own their products. Consolidation won’t help, either.
I can see manufacturers restricting ownership of their vehicles this way, forcing repairs at the dealership and such. Hey, the car can drive itself to the dealership at the appointed time, whether you want it to or not.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
It’s a legit question. In our particular case the ADU would be for the adult kids, who’d either be using one of our cars (my wife’s EV, not my Merc, goddammit) or Lyft. We wouldn’t rent it out, that would mean human contact right here where we live. They’d want to use the spa. Shudder.
But that’s sidestepping the larger question, the answer to which is that renting out an ADU enriches the existing property owner which will substantially reduce opposition, but also I think on all of my street there are maybe three dozen homes, most of which are perched precariously over the obviously less worthy people one level below. Yards have a tendency to be vertical. So all-in I doubt we could muster half a dozen ADU’s, excluding garages of course.
And I don’t by any means dismiss additional motives hiding behind legitimate concerns.
@MarkedMan:
I believe Knight Industries is at work on such a vehicle. Calling it the Two Thousand, if memory serves.
@Michael Reynolds:
There was a significant downside with that car: the designers decided to model the voice interface on founding father John Adams for some reason no one understood.
@wr:
I, like all geniuses, leave the details to lesser minds 😉
@Stormy Dragon:
https://mobile.twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1613386518391058435
I really like Matt Yglesias. Not because he’s always right, but because he is operating in good faith, except when he is trolling people two steps to the left of me (which is even better than operating in good faith. I believe he once said that you will know when the Democrats are finally actually listening to the Latinx community when they stop referring to them as Latinx*, for instance)
There’s also a lot of an attitude that I am very familiar with in software engineers “I’m reasonably bright, there’s an 80% chance that I can figure this out at least roughly” except with a willingness to actually believe he could be wrong (which often doesn’t come out in short tweets, admittedly).
He’s a generalist who seldom mistakes himself for an expert. Very different from Malcolm Gladwell.
——
*: of course, if he were slightly less straight cisgender male, he might realize that there is a portion of the various Latino communities who like the word “Latinx” — a lot of the young, queer, bilingual Latinos/Latinas/Latines. He’s not great on gender. But, it’s a good line, if that actually was him. I sounds like him.
@Kathy:
If that’s where the jobs are, you have the traffic and the energy problems whether the people live in the city or are commuting in.
Energy use in the day is going to scale with how many people are in the city (roughly), with changes in evening energy use only.
Meanwhile traffic is going to be even worse if people are commuting from further away, as there’s a lot less mass transit in the suburbs.
@MarkedMan: Density doesn’t have to mean rental. In a lot of areas, it just means reducing minimum lot sizes and setbacks to allow row houses or town houses, which are not inherently more or less likely to be rented vs owned than other houses.
But, echoing what Kathy said above, even if I disagree with her partially, a city that was build for X people is going to struggle at 3*X. We see things breaking — housing costs out of control, large homeless populations, traffic, energy, sewers… it’s not sustainable.
We either need to redesign our cities to accommodate more people (greater density, and work out those problems), limit the growth of our cities (either a Logan’s Run option, or create more jobs in neighboring areas and essentially build more cities of current scale) or watch the current problems get worse and worse.
(Problems of density might be helped by smaller people. If I’m tossing in Logan’s Run as a solution, I guess I also have to toss in shrinking people either through genetic engineering, or a breeding program, or a childhood malnutrition program.)
Fun fact: a lot of the zoning for single-family houses on large lots was created to keep poor people out of middle class neighborhoods, once more of those poor people looking to move in we’re of a darker hue. It was white flight matched with a desire to put in a moat. It also was helped by suburbs not being part of the city itself, so you have different governments and suburbs can live off the economic activity of the city without contributing to the city.
@MarkedMan: “I, like all geniuses, leave the details to lesser minds ”
If you ever run for president, you’ve got my vote!
“Unfortunately I think, like most people, I just kind of took it at face value,” Yglesias says now, about Bankman-Fried’s endeavor. “‘Well, if his company has a $20-billion valuation, there must be something to it.’ Even if I don’t understand what a cryptocurrency exchange is.”
Note that taking things at face value is the definition of bad journalism.
Also, during Matt’s adult lifetime he’d seen the first dot com crash, the 2008 Great Financial Collapse and numerous collapses in the crypto industry itself. And Musk was tearing down his reputation during these last few months.