When blogging about books in D.C., you tend to receive more press releases about political non-fiction than any other genre — so much that it starts to make you cynical. Most of the books read like armchair quarterbacking with an unhealthy dose of rhetoric. But Matthew Yglesias‘ book, Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats, manages to break out of that mold. Yglesias, an associate editor at The Atlantic and one of the most recognizable names in the blogosphere, has put together an intelligent analysis of foreign policy that really stresses the shortcomings of both parties, instead of glossing over problems on the left and villifying the right. The independent voter in us loves that kind of stuff. We were able to chat with Yglesias recently about the book, the presidential election and what’s next.

You mentioned in your introduction that you always thought your first book would be about blogging. What ultimately made you decide to write this book, about foreign policy, instead?

I should clarify — I always thought my first book would be about blogging because that’s what other people seemed to be interested in having me write about. But to me it always made more sense to try to write a book about one of the topics I cover on my blog and in my magazine writing which, especially before the book process itself made me somewhat sick of the subject, was focused a lot on the substantive and political issues around U.S. foreign policy. Why that focus? Well, because I felt like I had a point of view on these questions that was pretty widespread (albeit in different forms) among both a lot of rank-and-file liberals and a lot of expert analysts but that had come to be terribly underrepresented in the media, so it was a gap I thought I could fill.