The columnist who decided, somewhere between an English degree and a Chicago MBA, that the most interesting thing in the room is usually the argument she disagrees with.
Most weeks, Megan McArdle's Washington Post column does something quietly unfashionable. Before she tells you why she thinks the policy is wrong, she builds the case for why it might be right - then knocks it down on the merits. It is a habit that has survived five newsrooms, a book about failure, and a political climate that rewards the opposite instinct.
Today the byline shows up in more places than ever. She remains an opinion columnist at the Post, where she has written since 2018 about the tangle of business, economics and public life. In 2025 she added a contributing-writer slot at The Dispatch and picked up a microphone, co-hosting the center-politics show "Central Air" with Josh Barro and Ben Dreyfuss and launching a Post podcast, "Reasonably Optimistic." The optimism is not a pose. It is the working theory.
What ties it together is a refusal to round off the hard edges. McArdle reads as a libertarian, but David Brooks once noted she applies those premises in a non-doctrinaire way - which is a polite way of saying she will follow an argument somewhere her own side would rather she didn't. She trained in English literature and then in finance, and she writes like someone who learned to love a good sentence before she learned to love a spreadsheet, and then refused to give either one up.
The plan in 2001 was not journalism. McArdle had just finished her MBA at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, with a job lined up that promptly evaporated. What she had instead was an administrative role tied to the World Trade Center site and, in November of that year, a blog called "Live from the WTC." She wrote it under the pen name "Jane Galt," a wink at Ayn Rand. A year later she renamed it "Asymmetrical Information," and the handle has followed her ever since - she still posts on X as @asymmetricinfo.
She wrote for two years independently and blogged for five before anyone paid her for it. That is the part that gets skipped in the tidy version of the story: the long stretch where the writing was the reward and there was no audience guaranteed on the other end. By the time The Economist hired her in 2003 to write for its website, she had already done the unglamorous apprenticeship that most people quit.
In 2006 she founded The Economist's "Free Exchange" blog. In 2007 she moved to Washington and joined The Atlantic full-time, carrying "Asymmetrical Information" with her, and by 2010 she was its business and economics editor. Then Newsweek and The Daily Beast in 2012, Bloomberg View in 2013, and the Washington Post in 2018. The masthead kept changing. The questions did not.
In 2014 McArdle published "The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success." The thesis runs against the grain of every triumph-narrative on the bestseller table: the people and institutions that do best are not the ones that avoid failure, but the ones that fail fast, admit it cleanly, and recover without drowning in shame.
It is a personal argument as much as a policy one. This is a writer who blogged unpaid for years, watched a post-MBA job vanish, and built a career out of the detour. The book reads bankruptcy law, parole hearings and venture capital through the same lens: how a system treats failure tells you whether it can learn. For a self-described libertarian, it doubles as a defense of the messy, error-tolerant machinery of markets.
She builds the opposing case before dismantling it. The point isn't to be fair for its own sake - it's that an argument that survives the strongest objection is the only one worth printing.
English lit by training, finance by choice. She reaches for data without losing the sentence - the rare columnist equally at home with a regression and a metaphor.
Reads as libertarian, refuses to be predictable. She follows premises where they lead, even when her own side would prefer she stopped a paragraph early.
Her Post podcast title is also her disposition. She treats failure as information and the future as negotiable - a working theory, not a slogan.