Megan McArdle Profile picture
Columnist at the Washington Post. Opinions my own. Email me: Megan.McArdle -at- https://t.co/0v35DOybb0 Buy my book, The Up Side of Down https://t.co/awicv1MdkX
Bill Jackson III (Taylor’s Version🧣🕛💃🏼💜) 🖥 Profile picture Unbridled Spirit ⭐⭐⭐ Profile picture Michael Barger Profile picture County Assembly Profile picture fche Profile picture 13 subscribed
Mar 13 8 tweets 2 min read
For whatever reason this post from 2022 went re-viral just as I was reading about various plans to make data more portable and it reminded me of how nerds simply cannot wrap their mind around the fact that most people simply do not want more granular control over their tech. Many years ago, I unwisely embroiled myself in the Linux wars, making the same point over and over: end users do not want a more flexible, customizable system. They want to trade power for simplicity and convenience.
Feb 16 21 tweets 4 min read
Bunch of people assuming that the reason I am harping on the Biden age issue is that I want him to lose to Donald Trump. This is wrong; I'm voting for Biden, or whoever the non-Trump candidate is.

So why am I talking about it? Three reasons. First, Biden's obvious decline is a Thing That is True. My job is Saying Things That Are True (And Explaining What Follows). "Why are you saying this thing that is true?" is a dumb question to ask a journalist. It is particularly distressing when it comes from other journalists.
Jan 5 12 tweets 2 min read
Conservatives who are reveling in Claudine Gay schadenfreude might pause to notice that Harvard eventually realized that protecting an insider who had violated institutional norms was destroying the institution, and course-corrected, while the GOP is still saddled with Trump. This makes an excellent lead-in to my column on that very topic: how progressives trying to fend off conservative attacks on academia instead ending up aping their opponent's worst mistakes: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/…
Oct 6, 2023 29 tweets 5 min read
Well, Trump has endorsed Jim Jordan for Speaker, which should make things interesting, and provides a nice hook to discuss my column on why the Democrats made a mistake helping Gaetz oust McCarthy. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/… As you might imagine this was very unpopular with my readers, who made various versions of the same arguments I was tackling in the column: that Republicans are bad, that they don't deserve Democratic help, that voters need to understand how bad they are.
Oct 4, 2023 16 tweets 3 min read
Why your theory of how to punish Republicans out of acting bonkers is incorrect, a thread. Here is the mental model of many people on Twitter today: "GOP is acting bonkers! They are demanding bad things! They reneged on their budget deal! They coddle Trump! We must punish them until they stop this outrageous behavior! Thus, help Gaetz vote out McCarthy!"
Sep 20, 2023 26 tweets 5 min read
So @AlyssaRosenberg and I both wrote columns today about work by @kearney_melissa and @BradWilcoxIFS about the importance of family structure to kids.

SPOILER ALERT: It's really important. Specifically, two parent families are important--which in the US, means marriage. @AlyssaRosenberg and I agree on a lot, but she focused on policy and framing--how liberals might build on the victories of the gay marriage movement by talking about access to marriage rather than what feels like finger wagging, and what sorts of policies they might pursue.
Jul 3, 2023 5 tweets 1 min read
A lot of people are misreading this story, believing that this means the case was based on a lie.

To be clear: the lawsuit was filed BEFORE this request, and does not rest on it, because the state of Colorado helpfully stipulated that it would do exactly as Lorie Smith feared. It was not critical to the lawsuit, and if the plaintiff had made it up, I doubt she would have selected a random web designer in San Francisco, rather than just, you know, making up a name. Seems more likely that it was a prank.
May 25, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
I take the point but I think there's a valid concern that DeSantis is hammering hardest on the notes which play to a small minority of primary voters who want to rehearse old grievances, rather than those that appeal to a broad selection of voters. Was DeSantis right about re-opening schools? Yes, and blue states were wrong wrong wrong. But is rehashing policy arguments from 2021 really the ticket to the presidency in 2024?
May 16, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
New study on a sample of 1000 transitions that began under the US military's health system finds a 30 percent detransition rate.

Expect this to be a bit of a Rorschach, for reasons I will explain in the next tweet.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35452119/#full… For gender critical folks, this is strong evidence that detransition is not, as previously suggested, rare. One third of your study subjects going off hormones is 4-30x higher than the numbers usually bandied about.
May 10, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
One way to think about the mistake that I think Bud Light made giving money to Dylan Mulvaney is to talk about a more effective ad, like Olay's Mulvaney collaboration. Many of Mulvaney's followers moisturize, and might well use Olay. However, many of them probably already do use Olay products. What if instead they had decided to do a partnership with Stephen Crowder? I mean, *there's* an untouched demographic for Olay!
May 10, 2023 16 tweets 4 min read
I wrote about the Dylan Mulvaney/Bud Light fracas a few weeks ago, but I confess I'm surprised how durable the backlash has proven; a month in, sales still seem to be down about 20%.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/… A point that I originally made, but cut for space, is that Mulvaney was simply a very odd choice by marketing execs. Not because she's trans, but because her "wacky Audrey Hepburn" persona doesn't doesn't fit any plausible target demographic.
Feb 15, 2023 10 tweets 2 min read
Yesterday I wrote about what I've called an Oedipus Trap: a situation where it would be so psychologically devastating to discover that you'd made a mistake--even completely innocently--that you will do everything in your power to avoid recognizing it. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/… One sign that you're caught in an Oedipus Trap: instead of defending your beliefs or actions, you lash out at anyone who asks even the gentlest questions. Because answering means addressing the possibility you're wrong, which is psychologically unbearable even to contemplate.
Feb 14, 2023 9 tweets 2 min read
Important Tyler Cowen column: don't imagine a perfect land tax regime, but instead envision what the eighth-best regime we'd actually get might look like. Is that really superior to what we have now? bloomberg.com/opinion/articl… Related column from me: critics of (very real) problems of NIMBY homeowners tend to imagine alternatives in which more people rent. Which would be good ... only they imagine those renters acting like current renters. They won't.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/…
Feb 14, 2023 20 tweets 4 min read
My latest column has been more than a year in the making. Its subject: lobotomies.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/… Why lobotomies, you ask? Because I came across a reference to its most avid practitioner, American doctor Walter Freeman, insisting until his death--in the 1970s--that it was a good operation.
Jan 12, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
My hottest take right now is that iceberg lettuce is good, actually. You all know it is true but you are just afraid to admit it.
Dec 29, 2022 10 tweets 2 min read
Whether or not you think this is a good idea, we should be clear that airlines run on thin margins and the net effect of this requirement would be higher ticket costs. There's a real argument that we should all pay a little extra for, effectively, flight cancellation insurance rather than a few of us paying a lot in hassle when the flight is cancelled or significantly delayed/altered. But it's not a free transfer from the airlines to us.
Dec 16, 2022 19 tweets 3 min read
In the spring, when Musk's Twitter saga was in its earliest chapters, he promised more transparency and fairness at Twitter. Now he's demonstrating why that's harder than it sounds. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/… Because I'm going to get asked: this column was in the works yesterday, before Twitter started banning journalists. In fact, I'd written an entire column and was ready to relax when I turned to Twitter and saw that Aaron Rupar was suspended.
Dec 9, 2022 11 tweets 2 min read
I think one thing we're seeing on this issue is something that you frequently see with experts: the sense that "everyone knows" something which is, in fact, extremely non-obvious to most people. First time I noticed this was in the early 2000s, where a former-equity-analyst-turned-journalist of my acquaintance blithely said that "Everyone knows that equity research ratings are fake."

This was in fact something I, as an MBA, knew: "buy" meant hold, "hold" meant "sell".
Nov 22, 2022 7 tweets 2 min read
Incidentally, as an aside to this thread, I want to point you to David Skarbek's fascinating work on *why* prison gangs are divided by race, which probably isn't what you think. amazon.com/Social-Order-U… That is, it is not a simple reflection of America's racial caste system, nor is it because white criminals are likely to be especially racist because they're overall bad people.

(I mean, maybe they are, but that doesn't explain the white gangs).
Nov 22, 2022 12 tweets 3 min read
There are severe problems with these data sets, as I noted last spring. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/… One of the biggest confounders is that prison gangs tend to be sorted by race (although there can be subgroups, like nortenos and sudenos in the CA prison system). The white gangs adopt white supremacist imagery.
Nov 18, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
I'm skeptical, but I suppose there's a possibility that Twitter does not crash in the coming days--and if so, that will indeed have reverberations throughout Silicon Valley. One possibility is that there is a method to Musk's madness: he thinks Twitter's corporate culture is so broken that the company cannot be reformed with its current employee base. Turnaround CEOs sometimes want most of the employees to quit so they can rebuild anew.