Matt Bai (Author of All the Truth Is Out)

Matt Bai窶冱 Followers (22)

Matt Bai

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Nonfiction, Politics, Biographies & Memoirs

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This is the place on the site where I answer those often asked questions: "Who do you think you are?" or "Just where do you get off窶�?"

You can get the official version of my bio here.

For more than seven years, I've written on national politics for the New York Times Magazine. You can access most of my work on the 2004 and 2008 campaigns and other topics here. My work for the magazine was featured in both the 2005 and 2006 editions of "The Best American Political Writing."

I窶冦 also the author of "The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics," published by the Penguin Press, which is now in paperback. The book, which took me several years to report and write, is an inside account of the new progressive movement in America and a This is the place on the site where I answer those often asked questions: "Who do you think you are?" or "Just where do you get off窶�?"

You can get the official version of my bio here.

For more than seven years, I've written on national politics for the New York Times Magazine. You can access most of my work on the 2004 and 2008 campaigns and other topics here. My work for the magazine was featured in both the 2005 and 2006 editions of "The Best American Political Writing."

I窶冦 also the author of "The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics," published by the Penguin Press, which is now in paperback. The book, which took me several years to report and write, is an inside account of the new progressive movement in America and an analysis of the state of Democratic politics in the years before Barack Obama. The New York Times named it one of the best books of 2007.

In 2006, I contributed a personal essay to an anthology called "I Married my Mother-in-Law and Other Tales of In-Laws We Can't Live With窶蚤nd Can't Live Without." I recommend the anthology, and not just because I'm in it.

I grew up in Trumbull, Connecticut, a nice little town just outside of Bridgeport, the city where both of my parents were born. Those who have ever driven through Bridgeport will understand how I came to care about politics and industrial decay. In fact, I've never lived more than a few miles from a housing project, which probably explains my skepticism toward both Darwinian social policy and the notion that expansive government can fix everything. I went to Tufts and Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, where the faculty generously awarded me the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship.

Early in my career, just out of college, I was a speechwriter for what is now the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, where I wrote for the great Audrey Hepburn during her last years. (I窶况e still never seen one of her movies, but she was a lovely person.) I started my journalism career at the Boston Globe, where I covered crime and breaking news, and then spent five years traveling the country as a national correspondent for Newsweek, which was a terrific opportunity. (I also did a disastrous little stint at Rolling Stone, which included no articles and a lot of weirdness, but I'm contractually prohibited from talking about that.) There are probably several states in the country from which I still haven窶冲 reported, but I can't easily think of them.

When I窶冦 not traveling, I live a life of domestic tranquility in Washington with my wife, Ellen, and our two small children, Ichiro and Allegra. For hobbies, I enjoy woodworking and mountain climbing. Actually, that's not true at all; I couldn't build a birdhouse, and, after a brutal game of touch football and a whole mess of knee surgery, I can barely climb a Jungle Gym. My main hobby, outside of reading history and fiction, is watching the Yankees. In this arena, at least, I am entirely partisan. ...more

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Matt Bai's Blog

Matt Bai isn't a ﾅｷｱｦﾓ鯊ﾖ Author (yet), but they do have a blog, so here are some recent posts imported from their feed.

TEA PARTIERS AND JOHN LEWIS

A bunch of tea party types have written in to complain about my characterization, in a column this past weekend, of Rep. John Lewis being verbally assaulted last spring. The general jist here is that i'm lazy and liberal and just repeating the same old lies. I'm not actually going to post any of those notes, because so far none of them pass the basic threshold of civility. But anyone who's checked

Combine Editions
Matt Bai窶冱 books

Average rating: 3.98 · 1,598 ratings · 238 reviews · 10 distinct works 窶� Similar authors

	All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid 4.01 avg rating — 1,414 ratings — published 2014 — 18 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics 3.69 avg rating — 163 ratings — published 2007 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Front Runner 4.19 avg rating — 21 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	NEWSWEEK JUNE 28, 1999 AMERICA GOES HOLLYWOOD LIZ TAYLOR 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The New York Times Magazine (Newt Gingrich...The Anti-Obama , Natinalizing The banks , Reread Cheever, March 1 , 2009) 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The New York Times Magazine (Obama vs The White Guys , Working-Class Vote , Autistic Teenagers , Price of Oil, October 19 , 2008) 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The New York Times Magazine October 10, 2004 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Newsweek (vol. cxxxv) by Jonathan Alter (ﾅｷｱｦﾓ鯊ﾖ Author) (Contributor), Tom Masland (Contributor), Robert J. Samuelson (Contributor) 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	John Ashcroft Newsweek January 22, 2001 by Howard Fineman, Michael Isikoff, Ellis Cose 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The New York Times Magazine, August 21 2005 by Peter Maass, William Safire (Series Editor), Tom Schierlitz (Photographer) 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Quotes by Matt Bai (?)

“(窶廬f you think education is expensive, wait until you find out how much ignorance costs,窶� Hart was fond of saying.)”
― Matt Bai, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

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“I tremble for my country when I think we may, in fact, get the kind of leaders we deserve.”
― Matt Bai, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

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“And, just as consequential, the post-Hart climate made it much easier for candidates who weren窶冲 especially thoughtful窶背ho didn窶冲 have any complex understanding of governance, or even much affinity for it窶杯o gain national prominence. When a politician could duck any real intellectual scrutiny simply by deriding the evident triviality of the media, when the status quo was to never say anything that required more than ten words窶� worth of explanation, then pretty much anyone could rail against the system and glide through the process without having to establish more than a passing familiarity with the issues. As long as you weren窶冲 delinquent on your taxes or having an affair with a stripper or engaged in some other form of rank duplicity, you could run as a 窶弋ea Partier窶� or a 窶徘opulist窶� without ever having to elaborate on what you actually believed or what you would do for the country.”
― Matt Bai, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

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