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1. Matt Yglesias Twitter
2. Matt Yglesias Twitter
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4. Matt Yglesias Vox

The journalist Matthew Yglesias, a co-founder of Vox, announced today that he is leaving that publication for the paid-newsletter platform Substack, so that he can enjoy more editorial independence.

The publication had a more public controversy with Yglesias after he signed an open letter endorsing free speech in July. Some colleagues took to Twitter to publicly condemn the letter and Yglesias’ decision to sign it, while others openly backed his choice. (RELATED: People At Vox Are Mad That Other People At Vox Support Free Speech). Vox and Matt Yglesias enter the shot-chaser hall of fame with this ‘update’ on using masks Posted at 7:35 am on April 4, 2020 by Greg P. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter.

The move may prove a good fit for Yglesias, who began his career as a highly successful independent blogger before blogging at The Atlantic and then elsewhere. But his absence as a staffer (a Vox spokesperson noted that he will continue to host a podcast, The Weeds) will make the publication he co-founded less ideologically diverse at a moment when negative polarization makes that attribute important to the country.

Passion and Perspective from Matthew Yglesias. Thursday Thread I never replaced my bike when it got stolen a while ago, but now that going places is a thing again I was thinking of getting a new one. We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. — Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 12, 2020 I won’t explain the whole Lee Fang controversy but very briefly, he’s a far left writer for the Intercept who made the mistake of saying on Twitter that people on the left were taking Martin Luther King Jr.’s comments about riots out of context.

Matt Yglesias Twitter

Like Andrew Sullivan, who joined Substack after parting ways with New York magazine, and Glenn Greenwald, who joined Substack after resigning from The Intercept, which he co-founded, Yglesias felt that he could no longer speak his mind without riling his colleagues. His managers wanted him to maintain a “restrained, institutional, statesmanlike voice,” he told me in a phone interview, in part because he was a co-founder of Vox. But as a relative moderate at the publication, he felt at times that it was important to challenge what he called the “dominant sensibility” in the “young-college-graduate bubble” that now sets the tone at many digital-media organizations.

[Conor Friedersdorf: The perils of ‘with us or against us’]

“There was an inherent tension between my status as a co-founder of the site and my desire to be a fiercely independent and at times contentious voice,” he wrote in his first post on Substack, adding on Twitter, “I’m looking forward to really telling everyone what’s on my mind to an even greater extent than I do now.”

In our interview, Yglesias explained why pushing back against the “dominant sensibility” in digital journalism is important to him. He said he believes that certain voguish positions are substantively wrong—for instance, abolishing or defunding police—and that such arguments, as well as rhetorical fights over terms like Latinx, alienate many people from progressive politics and the Democratic Party.

“There’s been endless talk since the election about House Democrats being mad at the ‘Squad,’ and others saying, ‘What do you want, for activists to just not exist? For there to be no left-wing members of Congress?’” Yglesias told me. “But there’s a dynamic where there’s media people who really elevated the profile of [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and a couple of other members way above their actual numerical standing.”

Many outlets, he argued, are missing something important. Kirby: triple deluxefree downloaddownload page. “The people making the media are young college graduates in big cities, and that kind of politics makes a lot of sense to them,” he said. “And we keep seeing that older people, and working-class people of all races and ethnicities, just don’t share that entire worldview. It’s important to me to be in a position to step outside that dynamic … That was challenging as someone who was a founder of a media outlet but not a manager of it.”

One trend that exacerbated that challenge: colleagues in media treating the expression of allegedly problematic ideas as if they were a human-resources issue. Bagong blog post. Earlier this year, for instance, after Yglesias signed a group letter published in Harper’s magazine objecting to cancel culture, one of his colleagues, Emily VanDerWerff, told Vox editors that his signature made her feel “less safe at Vox.”

Yglesias had been personally kind and supportive of her work, she wrote, but as a trans woman, she felt the letter should not have been signed by anyone at Vox, because she believed that it contained “many dog whistles toward anti-trans positions,” and that several of its signatories are anti-trans. The letter’s authors reject those characterizations.

I asked Yglesias if that matter in any way motivated his departure. “Something we’ve seen in a lot of organizations is increasing sensitivity about language and what people say,” he told me. “It’s a damaging trend in the media in particular because it is an industry that’s about ideas, and if you treat disagreement as a source of harm or personal safety, then it’s very challenging to do good work.”

The issue, Yglesias believes, is not limited to Vox. “We saw that in the way the New York Times people characterized their opposition to Tom Cotton’s op-ed,” he said, and “we saw it in what Emily VanDerWerff wrote about me––and Vox to its credit has not [been] managed in that way exactly, but it is definitely the mentality of a lot of people working in journalism today, and it makes me feel like it’s a good time to have an independent platform.’

[Read: A deeply provincial view of free speech]

The New York Times’ Opinion editor, James Bennet (a former editor in chief of The Atlantic), was forced out over the publication of the Cotton op-ed. The Times Opinion staffer Bari Weiss left the newspaper soon afterward, alleging in her resignation letter that “if a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome.” The two had been charged, in part, with offering Times readers a greater diversity of opinions. Whether the Opinion section will still carry out that mission remains uncertain.

Several years ago, I wrote about an experiment that the Harvard social scientist Cass Sunstein conducted in two different communities in Colorado: left-leaning Boulder and right-leaning Colorado Springs. Residents in each community were gathered into small groups to discuss their views on three controversial topics: climate change, same-sex marriage, and affirmative action. Afterward, participants were asked to report on the opinions of their discussion group as well as their own views on the subjects. In both communities, gathering into groups composed of mostly like-minded people to discuss controversial subjects made individuals more settled and extreme in their views.

“Liberals, in Boulder, became distinctly more liberal on all three issues. Conservatives, in Colorado Springs, become distinctly more conservative on all three issues,” Sunstein wrote of his experiment. “Deliberation much decreased diversity among liberals; it also much decreased diversity among conservatives. After deliberation, members of nearly all groups showed, in their post-deliberation statements, far more uniformity than they did before deliberation.”

Compelling evidence points to a big cost associated with ideological bubbles, I argued: They make us more confident that we know everything, more set and extreme in our views, more prone to groupthink, more vulnerable to fallacies, and less circumspect.

For that reason, ideological outliers within an organization are valuable, especially in journalism. Early in my career, I covered the trend toward epistemic closure in conservative media, including talk radio, warning that it would have dire consequences. Even so, I didn’t imagine the role that epistemic closure would play in fueling the ascent of a president like Donald Trump or the alarmingly widespread acceptance of conspiracy theories like QAnon.

[From the June 2020 issue: The prophecies of Q]

The New York Times, New York, The Intercept, Vox, Slate, The New Republic, and other outlets are today less ideologically diverse in their staff and less tolerant of contentious challenges to the dominant viewpoint of college-educated progressives than they have been in the recent past. I fear that in the short term, Americans will encounter less rigorous and more polarizing journalism. In the long term, a dearth of ideological diversity risks consequences we cannot fully anticipate.

Substack seems poised to grow because it offers some writers independence and financial benefits. It will arguably function as a corrective against growing intolerance of heterodoxy, even as it accelerates a trend toward ideological outliers parting ways with traditional publications, and makes those publications more monolithic. Mainstream media organizations should work to maintain ideological diversity during this shift, even if that causes tensions among the staff members least tolerant of ideas they don’t share.

Matthew Yglesias (/ɪˈɡleɪsiəs/; born May 18, 1981^[1]) is an American blogger and journalist who writes about economics and politics.^[2][3] Yglesias has written columns and articles for publications such as The American Prospect, The Atlantic, and Slate. In November 2020,^[4] he left his position as an editor and columnist for the news website Vox, which he co-founded in 2014, to publish through Substack.

Early life and education[edit]

Yglesias's father Rafael Yglesias is a screenwriter and novelist, and he has a brother named Nicolas. His paternal grandparents were novelists Jose Yglesias and Helen Yglesias (née Bassine). His paternal grandfather was of Spanish-Cuban background, and his three other grandparents were of Eastern European Jewish descent.^[5]

Yglesias went to high school at the Dalton School in New York City, and later attended Harvard University, where he studied philosophy.^[6]

Career[edit]

Yglesias started blogging in early 2002, while still in college, focusing mainly on American politics and public policy issues, often approached from an abstract, philosophical perspective. Yglesias was a strong supporter of invading Iraq, Iran and North Korea, calling the countries on his blog 'evil' and stating that 'we should take them all out,' although he was critical of the term 'axis of evil.'^[7][8] He later called his attitudes about the war a mistake.^[9]

Yglesias joined the American Prospect as a writing fellow upon his graduation in 2003, subsequently becoming a staff writer. His posts appeared regularly on the magazine's collaborative weblog TAPPED.^[10]

From June 2007 until August 2008, he was a staff writer at The Atlantic Monthly, and his blog was hosted on the magazine's website, The Atlantic. In July 2008, he announced that he would leave The Atlantic Monthly for the Center for American Progress where he wrote for its blog, ThinkProgress, because he missed 'the sense of collegiality that comes from working with like-minded colleagues on a shared enterprise' and thought he could 'help advance their mission.'^[11] On November 21, 2011, he left ThinkProgress to work as a business and economics correspondent at Slate's Moneybox.^[12][13]

On or before 2010, Yglesias coined the term 'pundit's fallacy' to denote 'the belief that what a politician needs to do to improve his or her political standing is do what the pundit wants substantively.'^[14][15][16]

Bugzilla markdown manager. This page was last modified on 17 February 2014, at 08:19. With Purposeful Grimace and Terrible Sound.

Andrew Sullivan, a fellow blogger, takes nominations on his blog for the Yglesias Award, an honor 'for writers, politicians, columnists or pundits who actually criticize their own side, make enemies among political allies, and generally risk something for the sake of saying what they believe.'^[17][18]

Yglesias has stated that he voted for Mitt Romney when he ran for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002.^[19]

Yglesias deleted his past Twitter feed in November 2018, after controversy over tweets which defended the motivation of protesters who gathered outside the house of Tucker Carlson. The tweets also expressed a lack of empathy for Carlson's wife, which caused outrage.^[20][21][22]

Yglesias authored the political nonfiction book One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, released on September 15, 2020.^[23] It was inspired by Doug Saunders' Maximum Canada.^[24]

Vox[edit]

In February 2014, he left Slate and joined Vox Media to co-found Vox with Ezra Klein and Melissa Bell.^[25] On November 13, 2020, Yglesias announced that he would no longer be writing for Vox.com.^[26] Yglesias moved to Substack for editorial independence.^[27]

Matt Yglesias Twitter

Works[edit]

• The Rent Is Too Damn High, Simon and Schuster, March 2012, ASIN B0078XGJXO
• Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats, Wiley, April 2008, ISBN978-0-470-08622-3.^[28]
• 'Long Philosophical Rant about Spider-Man 2', Ultimate blogs: masterworks from the wild Web, Editor Sarah Boxer, Random House, Inc., 2008, ISBN978-0-307-27806-7
• 'The Media', The 12-Step Bush Recovery Program, Gene Stone, Carl Pritzkat, Tony Travostino, Random House, Inc., 2008, ISBN978-0-8129-8036-3
• One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, Portfolio Penguin, September 2020, ISBN978-0-593-19021-0.

Matthew Iglesias Twitter

References[edit]

1. ^Matthew Yglesias [@mattyglesias] (April 17, 2021). 'They say the nanobots take two weeks to be fully operational' (Tweet) – via Twitter.
2. ^Reeve, Elspeth (March 22, 2013). 'Matt Yglesias' $1.2 Million House Stokes Class Envy in Conservatives'. The Atlantic. Retrieved November 8, 2014.
3. ^Avard, Christian (July 22, 2008). 'Matt Yglesias: A Case for Liberal Internationalism'. The Huffington Post. Retrieved October 3, 2016.
4. ^@mattyglesias (November 13, 2020). 'Hey folks, some personal news' (Tweet) – via Twitter.
5. ^'The Myth of Majority-Minority America'. slate.com. May 22, 2012. Retrieved November 29, 2015.
6. ^'Matt Yglesias Bio'. TheAtlantic.com. Archived from the original on November 15, 2020. Retrieved July 20, 2012.
7. ^'MATTHEW YGLESIAS'. Archived from the original on November 15, 2020. Retrieved August 19, 2020.
8. ^'HYPER-HAWKISH TNR EDITORIAL'. Blogspot. Archived from the original on November 15, 2020. Retrieved June 4, 2016.
9. ^'Four Reasons for a Mistake'. August 19, 2010. Retrieved December 4, 2020.
10. ^Special Plans: The Blogs on Douglas Feith & the Faulty Intelligence That Led to War, Editor Allison Hantschel, Franklin, Beedle & Associates, Inc., 2005, ISBN978-1-59028-049-2
11. ^Matthew Yglesias: Big Thinktank MattArchived November 15, 2020, at the Wayback Machine
12. ^'Observer.com'. Archived from the original on August 3, 2020. Retrieved November 21, 2011.
13. ^'Slate'. Archived from the original on November 15, 2020. Retrieved November 21, 2011.
14. ^Yglesias, Matthew (August 2, 2010). 'The Pundit's Fallacy'. ThinkProgress (blog). Archived from the original on November 15, 2020. Retrieved January 23, 2018.
15. ^'This week in the pundit's fallacy'. Democracy in America (The Economist). May 1, 2012. Archived from the original on November 15, 2020. Retrieved January 23, 2018.
16. ^Krugman, Paul (May 24, 2012). 'How to End This Depression'. The New York Review of Books. Archived from the original on November 15, 2020. Retrieved January 23, 2018.
17. ^Sullivan, Andrew. 'The Daily Dish Awards'. The Daily Dish. The Atlantic. Archived from the original on February 11, 2007. Retrieved March 20, 2017.
18. ^Sullivan, Andrew. 'Biden's Culture War Aggression'. The Weekly Dish. Substack. Retrieved March 1, 2021.
19. ^'Archived copy'. Archived from the original on July 18, 2013. Retrieved September 1, 2012.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
20. ^'Foreign Policy's Twitterati 100'. Foreign Policy. August 12, 2009. Archived from the original on November 15, 2020. Retrieved April 29, 2019.
21. ^Byers, Dylan (April 14, 2015). 'Twitter's most influential political journalists'. Politico. Archived from the original on November 15, 2020. Retrieved April 29, 2019.
22. ^Prengel, Kate (November 8, 2018). 'Matty Yglesias Has Deleted His Entire Twitter Feed'. Heavy.com. Archived from the original on November 15, 2020. Retrieved April 29, 2019.
23. ^'One Billion Americans'. One Billion Americans. July 19, 2020. Archived from the original on November 15, 2020. Retrieved August 20, 2020.
24. ^Saunders, Doug (September 11, 2020). 'Imagine a world with a billion Americans in it. No, really'. The Globe and Mail. Archived from the original on November 15, 2020. Retrieved September 21, 2020.
25. ^Klein, Ezra (January 26, 2014). 'Vox is our next'. Archived from the original on February 20, 2017. Retrieved February 25, 2017.
26. ^'The Weeds Podcast'. www.vox.com. Archived from the original on January 15, 2020. Retrieved November 13, 2020.
27. ^Friedersdorf, Conor (November 13, 2020). 'Why Matthew Yglesias Left Vox'. The Atlantic. Archived from the original on November 15, 2020. Retrieved November 13, 2020.
28. ^Wiley product page for Heads in the SandArchived January 27, 2008, at the Wayback Machine

Matt Yglesias Vox

External links[edit]

• Matthew Yglesias on Twitter