I've often thought of Matthew Yglesias as an intelligent and occasionally wonkish blogger, which is why I can't quite figure out why he
recently wrote that he's "so accustomed to the idea of lying about one’s reading habits" that he assumes 100% of people do it, and then adds, for good measure, that "college (at least as we did it at Harvard) largely consists of lessons on how to pretend to have read various books." Just as I
once said of Ezra Klein, the amazing thing here is that, even having worked at The Atlantic and at a DC think tank, Yglesias evidently doesn't have a set of friends or colleagues such that he would find it embarrassing to publish such sentiments.
Yglesias keeps it real. Books are a status symbol. One of my roommates always talked about Ulysses by James Joyce, then told me he's never read more than a few pages at a time and views it more as abstract art than narrative. I named my kid after William Faulkner and I've only read one and a half of his books, and most of the time I had no idea what was going on with the characters. But I could tell that Faulkner had enormous insight into human nature. Anyway, it sounds like you're just hatin' on Yglesias, and you're doing it wrong.
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