So the “recovering English major” who had once dreamed of writing fiction applied to business school at the University of Chicago. Her experience there hurried along her “transition from ultraliberal to libertarian.” The organization was, she says, “the most deceptive, evil place I’ve ever worked.” And that’s not all: “PIRG acted like PIRG accuses other employers of acting.” The entire thing, she writes on her blog, was a scam designed “to collect your name so that they can sic telemarketers on you several times a year.”Įven as she had begun redefining her political views, though, McArdle, upon graduating from Penn in 1994, still didn’t know what to do with her life. That changed during her junior year, when McArdle signed on to work as a canvasser for the Public Interest Research Groups, the nonprofit founded by Ralph Nader that raises money for causes like the Sierra Club and the Human Rights Campaign. My friends were going to protest the Gulf War, so I went to protest the Gulf War.” My friends were in all these groups, so I joined them too. Her political activism wasn’t “intellectually serious,” she says now. “The cop was aiming at someone else,” she admits. McArdle relished the excitement of protesting once, she recalls, she was nearly hit by a policeman during a 1991 protest organized by ACT-UP. She followed in their footsteps, becoming a campus activist in college at the University of Pennsylvania. Growing up on the Upper West Side, McArdle was “a lady of the left, doyenne of popular protests and die-ins.” Her father was a political appointee in Ed Koch’s mayoralty, and an aunt was “high up” in the Clinton administration.

The devotees of the party out of power are insane.” She took her pseudonym from the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged, solely to irk a frequent commenter on a New York Times Internet forum who smeared anyone to the “right of Chairman Mao” as a “Randroid.” Her most famous utterance, known in the blogosphere as “Jane’s Law,” takes a “pox on both their houses” stance: “The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. She’s the “black sheep” of her “rabid Democrat” family. McArdle has something of a contrarian streak. A libertarian who “doesn’t care about the income tax,” she may well be the world’s only liberaltarian.” Although her experience in journalism was limited to a stint as gossip columnist for her business school’s newspaper, she landed her first “real” job as a journalist with the Economist, where she covers American economic policy. McArdle, aka Jane Galt (or more recently “McMegan”), the proprietress of the popular group blog Asymmetrical Information, is an oddity in more ways than one. Over six feet tall with fair skin and delicate features, she resembles “an overgrown elf,” she says.

Ross and phoebe trapped in a closet