Moe Tkacik, one of my favorite writers, launches a new econo-media/DC blog, precisely the sort of thing I would labor not to read were she not writing it. Yet its RSS is already in my GoogleReader.

Anyway, if you’re not familiar, she’s a fantastically complex writer, to the point where I started biting her style in 2008 and learned I couldn’t pull it off. Tkacik belongs to a rare clique of writers, thinkers and journalists: the University of Pennsylvania class of 1999. (It was 1999, right?) Now it can be told. Her class included such luminaries as Marisa Katz of the Washington Post‘s opinion section; Yochi Dreazen, the national-security correspondent for National Journal; and the Center for a New American Security’s Andrew Exum. They may not actually have graduated in the same class, or even in 1999, but they all overlapped at Penn, and my commitment to journalistic rigor on this subject is such that I will simply assert as fact that they are part of the Penn ’99 class while I await a callback from a defense contractor for a Wired post about Craigslist. Maybe if I had polished my game up in high school I would have been a Penn alum myself, but that’s what life is for: endless regrets.