Break out the booze, boys, it's time to celebrate!
Megan McArdle is now on book leave!
McArdle's book will explain how failure leads to success, a field in which she has considerable experience. We look forward to the chapters on choosing the right womb, honing interview techniques by making girls cry in the rest room, and the use of shopping therapy to squash any inconvenient twinges of conscience. We expect that the central metaphor will be how five year olds must be able to play with spaghetti or we will end up with 80% less corporate innovation.
The only remaining question is, who will replace the irreplaceable McArdle? Who could ever fill her stylish yet affordable shoes?
The Atlantic is happpy to announce that an empty shirt will take the place of Megan McArdle, who is on book leave. We do not know whether she is writing or reading one.
31 comments:
Wait, does this mean The Atlantic will have an editor for its Business and Economics section for the next few months?
The possibilities are endless!
@Susan loved it but-->"Who could ever fill her stylish yes affordable shoes?"
YET, not yes
lmao at dude with the folded arms
@Ken good one
Maybe she will just be searching for a place to leave a book.
~
She better hope the Atlantic doesn't realize they can get the same poor quality product at half the price while she is gone...
If ever a book needed a good fisking when it came out, this is it.
Thanks, Anatole David
I'll have to order the book from the library when it comes out. Say, didn't Glenn Greenwald write a bunch of books without giving up his blog for months?
And, more important, how many months are we talking about? Knowing McArdle's work ethic, pace and volumn of writing, it could be six months. Yet she will not need to bother with time-consuming things like research or thought, which is bound to save a few months.
And is the Atlantic paying her while she's gone? And does she have a deal with Kindle, which partners with The Atlantic?
Assuming the book is completed with the same tenacious discipline she showed for part II of her Warren article, this might be the last we see of her for decades.
We can hope, anyway.
MEGAN MCARDLE
Megan McArdle is a senior editor for The Atlantic who writes about business and economics. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and The Economist. She is currently on leave.
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Megan was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra-dry skim-milk cappuccino. Her checkered work history includes three start-ups, four years as a technology project manager for a boutique consulting firm, a summer as an associate at an investment bank, and a year spent as sort of an executive copy girl for one of the disaster-recovery firms at Ground Zero รข�¦ all before the age of 30.
While working at Ground Zero, Megan started Live From the WTC, a blog focused on economics, business, and cooking. She may or may not have been the first major economics blogger, depending on whether we are allowed to throw outlying variables such as Brad Delong out of the set. From there it was but a few steps down the slippery slope to freelance journalism. She has worked in various capacities for The Economist, where she wrote about economics and oversaw the founding of Free Exchange, the magazine's economics blog. She has also maintained her own blog, Asymmetrical Information, which moved to The Atlantic, along with its owner, in August 2007.
Megan holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. After a lifetime as a New Yorker, she now resides in northwest Washington, D.C., where she is still trying to figure out what one does with an apartment larger than 400 square feet.
apologies if it double posted, can you remove the second? that's currently what's up as her description.
clearly she's trolling
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/hello-and-goodbye-for-now/253968/
just so we have the goodbye post
And they have Katherine Mango-Mango filling in with what could be an entry in the parody contest.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/youre-fat-and-you-know-it-why-government-anti-obesity-efforts-fail/253987/
That stupid mango person from reason is her replacement?
Susan's snark will be able to cut diamonds if she pays her any attention.
Also holy jesus that spaghetti video.
"Turns out that kindergarteners can complete a task better than most adults, because the kids don't operate under resource or management constraints which are present in literally every business or research project in the history of human endeavor. That's what makes it such an applicable metaphor."
And it's so fucking easy to make her point with actual, you know, intellectual concepts. She must know Hayek backwards and forwards because you don't get your glibertarian hack card without passing a Hayek test, right? His concept of "partial knowledge" is fairly applicable to why the kids succeed: each of them realizes something different about the design, and a trial-and-error process acts as a clearance mechanism to assemble all the individual realizations into a project that combines all of them at once. And the benefit of this explanation is that you don't have to rely on something as idiotic as "kids don't yet have the cognitive or social development to activate the constraints that all projects have to work within" to make your point.
And for fucks sake she drops like six different elite status-marker jokes ("the kids don't think yet that this will go on their Harvard transcript") in the space of two minutes. I literally can't believe this isn't some kind of put-on or live-action trolling.
It's almost too good: her book is called Permission to Suck.
Here's her agent's tweet.
Mangu-Ward will have to get her own stalker; I'm hoping to catch up on Atlas Shrugged and other non-McArdle material.
No!
Deal: Megan McArdle's PERMISSION TO SUCK, about how risk aversion is sapping America of its core strengths, to @VikingBooks.
I can't believe it.
My god, the possibilities for snark....
More from Roy Edroso. (He's quoting a trade newsletter called Publishers Lunch.)
I don't know if anybody else took the "Write like McMegan" contest seriously enough to write anything, but if you did you can email me - downpup@yahoo.com & I'll publish it if you don't have your own bog.
Right now, Mangu-Ward is running away with it, mostly because half her readers thought it was Megan's, but also because of the recipe she included.
Permission To Suck? Really? Wow, it's already a train wreck. Why wouldn't she just go with Permission To Fail? That's probably closer in meaning to her central theme anyway. Putting aside the obnoxiousness of the double entendre, does she not comprehend that there's a huge difference between failing and sucking?
Katherine Mangu-Ward?!? And Permission to Suck?!? Oh, my.
Re Mangu-Ward: I believe that Susan called it.
I swear by God that I will never go without new clothes again!
*writes book on failure*
That's funny. She's never asked for permission before.
Now guest writer & Ubermensch Derek Lowe shares his wisdom on innovation, although:
I've never worked on anything myself that's made it to market, for example.
Bring on the real Derek Lowe, before he loses 20 for the Indians this year.
Somebody has paid that Silver Spoon Asshole to write a book?
A book with words, a table of contents, and a cover?
A book with a singular idea or set of ideas and the well-researched, substantiated facts to support the premise?
That's like giving an Academy Award - not an Emmy, an Academy Award - to Snooki for career achievement as an actress.
Hell, I'd submit that the Silver Spoon Asshole at The Atlantic is really Snooki in drag.
Snooki has provided more value than McMegan. She's also monetarily worth more, therefore even by McMegan's definition, she's better.
Also, I do not dread Snooki having a child.
Derek Lowe is the ass who feeds Megan all her pharmaceutical knowledge. Of course, she only hears from him and no one else. I don't see how this could be a problem.
Naturally, she doesn't understand why she's been accused of stenography when it comes to Campos and Lowe.
I love the way Avik Roy says that if women don't have to pay for contraceptives they'll get the expensive designer contraception instead of the cheap WalMart contraception. Because being proscribed birth control is like buying a pair of shoes or a handbag.
Susan, I have to confess I have stolen your snark:
"Writing one, or reading one?"
for use in this case on other blogs.
Hey, where's the FMM crowd, you know, brad, M. Bouffant, NutellaOnToast? Guys, c'mon, join Susan on the stage, this is your moment to declare Mission Accomplished.
I, for one, shall miss Ms. McArdle's musings, particularly on a day like this. Who else will report on the plight of Apple fanboys and fangirls waiting in line for the new version of their favorite gadget?
ZRM, just think of it as an homage!
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