Matthew Yglesias

Based on Wikipedia: Matthew Yglesias

The Blogger Who Helped Invent Modern Political Media

In 2002, a twenty-year-old Harvard philosophy student started a blog about American politics. This was not, in itself, remarkable. Thousands of people were doing the same thing. What was remarkable was where that blog would lead: to co-founding one of the most influential news organizations of the digital age, to becoming one of the most widely-read political writers in America, and to pioneering a new form of independent journalism that now generates over a million dollars a year.

Matthew Yglesias is one of those rare figures who helped create the very medium in which he works. Before the term "content creator" existed, before Substack newsletters became a viable career path, before political blogging was anything other than a hobby, Yglesias was writing about policy and politics in a way that would come to define an entire genre of online commentary.

A Literary Dynasty

Writing runs in the Yglesias blood. His father, Rafael Yglesias, is a screenwriter and novelist. His grandfather Jose Yglesias was also a novelist, with roots stretching back to Cuba and the Galicia region of Spain. His grandmother Helen Yglesias, born Helen Bassine, was yet another novelist—the daughter of Yiddish-speaking immigrants from the portion of Poland that was then controlled by the Russian Empire.

The other side of his family pursued different but equally intellectual paths. His maternal grandfather, Jules Joskow, founded National Economic Research Associates, a consulting firm that applies economic analysis to legal and regulatory questions. His uncle Paul Joskow became a prominent economist. Both of his maternal grandparents were also of Eastern European Jewish descent.

Yglesias grew up in New York City and attended the Dalton School, one of the most prestigious private schools in Manhattan. From there he went to Harvard, where he studied philosophy and served as editor in chief of The Harvard Independent, the university's weekly news magazine. He graduated magna cum laude in 2003—which means "with great praise" in Latin, indicating he finished in roughly the top five percent of his class.

The Early Days of Blogging

When Yglesias started blogging in early 2002, the internet was a very different place. Facebook did not exist. Twitter would not be founded for another four years. YouTube was three years away. The dominant forms of online media were personal websites and message boards, and "blog" was still a strange new word—a contraction of "web log" that sounded vaguely technological and slightly ridiculous.

What set Yglesias apart from other political bloggers was his approach. Where many bloggers offered hot takes and emotional reactions, Yglesias brought a philosopher's sensibility to his analysis. He was interested in abstractions and first principles. He wanted to know not just what was happening, but why it mattered, and what framework we should use to think about it.

This approach caught the attention of professional media outlets. Upon graduating in 2003, Yglesias joined The American Prospect as a writing fellow, eventually becoming a staff writer. His posts appeared on TAPPED, the magazine's collaborative blog—one of the first attempts by a traditional publication to integrate blogging into its operations.

The Atlantic Years and a Move to Advocacy

In June 2007, Yglesias made the leap to The Atlantic Monthly, one of America's oldest and most prestigious magazines, founded all the way back in 1857. The Atlantic had launched an ambitious digital initiative, hosting blogs from prominent writers on its website. For Yglesias, this was a major step up in visibility and prestige.

But he stayed only about a year. In July 2008, he announced he would leave The Atlantic for the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank closely aligned with the Democratic Party. His new home would be ThinkProgress, the organization's blog.

This was an unusual move. Most writers try to maintain at least the appearance of objectivity, even if their perspective is well-known. By joining an explicitly political organization, Yglesias was making a different bet: that readers would value his analysis regardless of institutional affiliations, and that the sense of working with "like-minded colleagues on a shared enterprise"—his words—would improve his work.

The move also reflected something important about how political media was changing. The old model of the neutral, objective journalist was giving way to a new model of openly partisan but intellectually honest commentary. Readers were increasingly sophisticated about media bias. They preferred writers who were upfront about their perspective to those who pretended not to have one.

An Award in His Name

There is an honor in the world of political commentary called the Yglesias Award. Matthew Yglesias did not create it, and he does not bestow it. It was established by Andrew Sullivan, another pioneering blogger who was in many ways Yglesias's counterpart on the center-right.

The award goes to "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." It is, in other words, an award for intellectual honesty over tribal loyalty—for the willingness to say unpopular truths to your own team.

That this award bears Yglesias's name tells you something important about his reputation. He has always been willing to take positions that put him at odds with his ideological allies. This tendency would eventually lead him to leave his own creation.

The Founding of Vox

In November 2011, Yglesias left ThinkProgress for Slate, where he covered business and economics. But his most significant career move was still ahead.

In February 2014, Yglesias left Slate to co-found Vox with Ezra Klein and Melissa Bell. The three had a vision for a new kind of news organization, one that would focus on explaining complex topics rather than just reporting the news. They called it "explanatory journalism."

The idea was simple but powerful. Most news coverage assumes readers already understand the context. A story about a Supreme Court decision might explain what the Court ruled, but not why it matters or how the legal doctrine evolved over decades. Vox would fill in that context, helping readers understand not just what happened but why it happened and what it meant.

Vox launched in April 2014 and quickly became one of the most influential media organizations of the digital era. It spawned imitators across the industry. The explanatory approach that seemed novel in 2014 is now standard practice at major news organizations.

A Departure and a New Beginning

On November 13, 2020, Matthew Yglesias announced he was leaving Vox—the organization he had helped create just six years earlier.

His explanation was revealing. He wanted more freedom than he had at Vox to challenge what he called the "dominant sensibility" in the "young-college-graduate bubble." He felt that the views of "older people, and working-class people of all races and ethnicities" were being underrepresented in media discourse, and that the culture at Vox made it difficult to push back against certain progressive orthodoxies.

The immediate trigger seemed to be tensions with colleagues over the Harper's Letter, an open letter published in July 2020 that warned about a climate of ideological conformity in American intellectual life. Yglesias had signed the letter. A former colleague, Emily St. James, had publicly disagreed with his decision to do so.

In explaining his departure, Yglesias said something that crystallized his view of journalism: "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."

Slow Boring: A Return to Independence

Yglesias moved to Substack, a platform that allows writers to publish newsletters directly to subscribers. He called his newsletter Slow Boring, a name with intellectual pedigree. It comes from Max Weber's famous 1919 essay "Politics as a Vocation," in which the German sociologist described politics as "a strong and slow boring of hard boards."

Weber meant that political change is difficult and requires patience. It is not accomplished through dramatic gestures or revolutionary fervor, but through the steady, grinding work of building coalitions, winning arguments, and gradually shifting the boundaries of what is possible. This is, essentially, Yglesias's theory of political change as well.

The newsletter has been extraordinarily successful. As of 2024, Yglesias was one of the highest-earning Substack writers, reportedly making at least 1.4 million dollars per year. His Twitter account became one of the most commonly followed by staff in the Biden administration—in 2021, it was among the most-followed accounts by 150 Biden staffers with public accounts.

In the same month he launched Slow Boring, Yglesias also joined the Niskanen Center as a senior fellow. The Niskanen Center is a think tank that defies easy ideological categorization. It was founded in 2014 and named after William Niskanen, a libertarian economist who advised President Reagan. But the organization has evolved toward what it calls "moderation" and what others might call "heterodox centrism"—a willingness to borrow good ideas from across the political spectrum.

One Billion Americans

In September 2020, just before his departure from Vox, Yglesias published his second major book: "One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger."

The premise is provocative: the United States should pursue policies that would roughly triple its population to one billion people. Yglesias argues that population growth through immigration and pro-natalist policies would strengthen America's economy, enhance its global power relative to China, and allow for more dynamic and innovative cities.

The book drew inspiration from "Maximum Canada" by journalist Doug Saunders, which made a similar argument for Canadian population growth. But Yglesias extended the concept to the much larger American context, arguing that the United States has vast underutilized capacity—empty land, depressed cities, infrastructure that could support far more people than currently use it.

The book was not universally well-received. Some critics found the premise absurd. Others raised environmental concerns. But it exemplified Yglesias's approach to policy writing: take an unfashionable position, make the strongest possible case for it, and force readers to grapple with assumptions they did not know they held.

The YIMBY Movement

If there is one policy cause most closely associated with Matthew Yglesias, it is housing. He has been a long-time advocate of the YIMBY movement—an acronym that stands for "Yes In My Back Yard," a deliberate inversion of the more familiar NIMBY, or "Not In My Back Yard."

NIMBYism refers to the tendency of homeowners and local residents to oppose new construction near their homes. They might support housing construction in the abstract, but not on their block, not in their neighborhood, not where it might affect their views or parking or property values. This creates a collective action problem: everyone wants more housing, but everyone also wants to block the specific housing that would actually get built.

YIMBYs argue that this opposition to development is a major cause of the American housing crisis. By restricting new construction, cities have created artificial scarcity that drives up prices. The solution, they say, is to allow more building—more apartments, more townhouses, more density—even if existing residents object.

Yglesias was writing about these issues long before YIMBY became a buzzword. His 2012 book "The Rent Is Too Damn High" made the case for housing liberalization years before the movement coalesced. His former Vox colleague Ezra Klein has credited Yglesias with having a "huge, singular effect" in popularizing this position.

The Neoliberal Label

What exactly are Matthew Yglesias's politics? The question is more complicated than it might seem.

In 2011, The Economist described his views as "left-leaning neoliberalism." In 2017, Vice listed him among political writers labeled "neoliberal shills" in left-wing Twitter communities. In 2019, Yglesias appeared on something called The Neoliberal Podcast and embraced the "chief neoliberal shill" label.

But what does "neoliberal" actually mean? The term has become so contested that it sometimes seems to mean nothing more than "economic positions I disagree with." Originally, it referred to a school of thought that emerged in the mid-twentieth century, advocating for free markets, free trade, and limited government intervention in the economy. Think of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who implemented policies based on these ideas in the 1980s.

Today, the term is most often used as an insult by people on the left who feel that the Democratic Party has been too friendly to business interests and too hesitant to embrace social democratic policies like universal healthcare or strong labor protections. When leftists call Yglesias a "neoliberal shill," they mean he is too centrist, too market-oriented, too willing to compromise with capitalism.

Yglesias's embrace of the label seems partly ironic and partly sincere. He does believe in the value of markets and trade. He has advocated returning to the "more corporate-friendly, growth-oriented approach of the Clinton and Obama eras." He has celebrated cheap goods as "the key to prosperity." But he also supports policies that would be anathema to Reagan-era conservatives, like expanded immigration and more housing construction.

The Iraq War and Intellectual Humility

Perhaps the most revealing thing Matthew Yglesias has written is a 2010 reflection on his early support for the Iraq War.

In college, Yglesias had supported the American invasion of Iraq. On his personal blog, he had written that the Arab-Israeli conflict could only be resolved by weakening Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, which could be accomplished by invading Iraq. He had suggested that if other Arab governments became hostile, "we can just topple them." He had advocated that the United States "take out" Iran and North Korea as well.

These are, to put it mildly, not the views of the Matthew Yglesias known today. So what changed?

In his 2010 reflection, Yglesias identified three reasons for his "mistake." First, he had a "predisposition in favor of military adventurism" based on an erroneous belief that the United States was "unduly constrained" in using force. Second, he trusted elite figures—Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Tony Blair—who he thought were "credible" sources. Third, he discounted the possibility that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, assuming the Bush administration would not "be engaged in a massive, easily-debunked-after-the-fact lie."

But the most interesting part of his reflection was this: "Being for the war was a way to simultaneously be a free-thinking dissident in the context of a college campus and also be on the side of the country's power elite." In other words, supporting the war allowed a young liberal to feel intellectually rebellious (most of his Harvard classmates probably opposed it) while also aligning with the serious, respectable people in Washington.

This is, Yglesias concluded, "a series of erroneous judgments about how to think about the world and who deserves to be taken seriously and under which circumstances." It was a failure of epistemology—of knowing how to know things.

The Pundit's Fallacy

Around 2010, Yglesias coined a term that has entered the vocabulary of political commentary: "the pundit's fallacy."

He defined it as "the belief that what a politician needs to do to improve his or her political standing is do what the pundit wants substantively." In other words, pundits tend to believe that their preferred policies are also the most politically effective policies. Conveniently, this means politicians should always do what the pundit is already arguing for.

The fallacy is not that the pundit's preferred policies are wrong. They might be right. The fallacy is assuming that good policy and good politics are always aligned—that voters will reward politicians for doing the thing the pundit thinks is best.

This is often not true. Voters may have different priorities than pundits. They may not understand the policy well enough to appreciate its benefits. They may punish politicians for the short-term costs of policies that will pay off later. The pundit's fallacy blinds commentators to these complexities, leading them to give advice that is substantively sensible but politically disastrous.

Controversies and Criticisms

A career spent expressing opinions publicly inevitably generates controversy, and Yglesias has had his share.

In 2013, after a garment factory collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing over a thousand workers, Yglesias wrote a column arguing against "a unified global standard for safety." He suggested that Bangladesh should have lower safety standards than rich countries because higher standards would be too expensive for a poorer economy. "The current system of letting different countries have different rules is working fine," he concluded.

The backlash was swift and severe. Critics in The Daily Beast, Time, The Guardian, and other outlets accused Yglesias of callousness toward the value of human life in developing countries. In The Guardian, Maha Rafi Atal wrote that Yglesias was "conflating the cost of a life with the cost of living, confusing a person's human worth with their socio-economic status."

Yglesias stood by his position but clarified that he thought the problem was enforcement of existing laws rather than the laws themselves. He also issued a correction, having initially described the building collapse as a fire.

In 2018, Yglesias sparked another controversy when protesters demonstrated outside the home of Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Yglesias tweeted: "I honestly cannot empathize with Tucker Carlson's wife at all—I agree that protesting at her house was tactically unwise and shouldn't be done—but I am utterly unable to identify with her plight at any level."

The expressed absence of empathy drew fierce criticism. Yglesias deleted his entire Twitter history in response.

The Left and Its Critics

In recent years, Yglesias has increasingly positioned himself as a critic of the American left—or at least, of certain tendencies within it.

In November 2023, he wrote about Israel's war in Gaza, arguing it was a "just war" and that the humanitarian disaster was "an inevitable consequence of waging war in a place with the population density of Philadelphia or Chicago." He denied that Israel was "deliberately targeting a civilian population center as a means of psychological warfare."

Nathan J. Robinson, editor of the progressive magazine Current Affairs, responded sharply. He pointed to reports in the Israeli publication +972 Magazine indicating that Israel was deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure to increase pressure on Hamas, and had loosened constraints on civilian casualties. Robinson accused Yglesias of being "condescending and smug" toward leftists, noting his dismissive references to "the socialist niece who posts obsessively about Genocide Joe."

In August 2025, this tension came to a head in a Twitter exchange with Matt Bruenig, a left-wing policy writer. Yglesias said that "leftists don't really care about the issues they talk about, whether it's Palestine or anything else, the whole goal is to build factional power over the long term." When Bruenig pointed out that leftists had been organizing on Palestine long before it became relevant to Democratic factional politics, Yglesias called them "idealistic young dupes." Bruenig suggested these explanations were inconsistent with each other.

In September 2025, responding to criticism from the left, Yglesias denied failing to recognize that progressives can shift public opinion. He pointed to his early support for causes like same-sex marriage and YIMBY housing policies "at a time when these positions were unpopular." He argued that the popularity of YIMBY policies among progressive leaders like Senator Elizabeth Warren and New York State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani demonstrates the value of "heterodox and critical thinking, and the importance of challenging one's ideological peers."

The Man Behind the Blog

Matthew Yglesias is married to Kate Crawford, whom he met in 2008. They have one son together. Crawford serves as editor of Slow Boring, making the newsletter something of a family enterprise.

Beyond his political writing, Yglesias has revealed some unexpected interests. In 2008, his essay "Long Philosophical Rant about Spider-Man 2" was selected for an anthology called "Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web." The piece apparently brought his philosophy training to bear on questions raised by the superhero film—the nature of heroism, perhaps, or the ethics of great power and great responsibility.

His first book, "Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats," was published in April 2008. The title alone captures something of his style: provocative, bipartisan in its criticism, and willing to argue that everyone is wrong in their own particular way.

A Theory of Politics

What unifies Matthew Yglesias's work is a theory of how political change happens—and how it doesn't.

He believes in incrementalism, in the slow boring of hard boards that Max Weber described. He is skeptical of revolutionary fervor and suspicious of those who prioritize ideological purity over practical results. He thinks that politics is fundamentally about building coalitions, persuading people who disagree with you, and making progress at the margins.

This puts him at odds with a significant portion of the American left, which has grown increasingly convinced that the system is rigged, that incremental change is a trap, and that only bold, confrontational politics can achieve justice. To these critics, Yglesias represents everything wrong with establishment liberalism: smug, comfortable, unwilling to fight.

But Yglesias would argue that his critics have confused fighting with winning. It is easy to strike poses, to make demands, to express moral outrage. It is harder to actually get things done. And in his view, the track record of confrontational leftism is not particularly impressive. The policies that have actually improved people's lives—expanding health insurance, legalizing same-sex marriage, building more housing—have come through the slow, unglamorous work of coalition-building and persuasion.

Whether you find this convincing probably depends on your own theory of politics. But there is no denying that Matthew Yglesias has been one of the most influential voices in shaping how a generation thinks about policy and political change. From his Harvard dorm room to the founding of Vox to his one-man media empire at Slow Boring, he has helped invent the very medium in which he works—and continues to provoke, irritate, and occasionally persuade millions of readers along the way.