One of the low-key eyeopening things in my life has been seeing the “juicebox mafia” class of media journalopundits get into baseball just as dorky as George Will

(and the ones getting into basketball worse)

2006: “Look at all these pompous NYT and WaPo pundits whose only understanding of the world outside their elite bubble comes from brief smalltalk with the peasant class. No wonder they don’t understand anything!”

2014: “We don’t talk to anyone outside our bubble but it’s ridiculous to think you could understand things by asking people, anyway.”

This is one of the best and most fairminded treatments of the subject I’ve seen.

Of all the “Juicebox Mafia” first wave of big-name bloggers I thought Matt Yglesias was the best writer but recently I’m almost thinking that was a bit of a handicap because it left him stuck as just a writer.

I think he FINALLY realized that the “sharing the consensus wisdom of 2002 Harvard with 2006 Internet” shtick was played out as that stuff filtered into the general population (under his influence, among others), which was nice but going on to the density stuff seemed bizarre - drilling down on one “wonk” topic and writing a fucking *book* struck me as a career step down from where he was (though maybe understandable given influence from the familymembers who made their name as writers back when books were a thing).

(Also he had a kid and that might have slowed him some - it’s always a shame and a waste when writers start treating their families as more important than their writing and their audience. The correct role model is Rousseau.)

And contrasted to, say, Ezra Klein working his way up the value ladder and building his empire at the Post and then Vox, it was a little underwhelming.

But for all that, looking at this you remember he’s still got it, his voice is the house style of Vox, only he can actually do it well.