James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States, and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book, China Airborne, was published in early May. More
James Fallows is based in Washington as a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has worked for the magazine for nearly 30 years and in that time has also lived in Seattle, Berkeley, Austin, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and Beijing. He was raised in Redlands, California, received his undergraduate degree in American history and literature from Harvard, and received a graduate degree in economics from Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. In addition to working for The Atlantic, he has spent two years as chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, two years as the editor of US News & World Report, and six months as a program designer at Microsoft. He is an instrument-rated private pilot. He is also now the chair in U.S. media at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, in Australia.
Fallows has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award five times and has won once; he has also won the American Book Award for nonfiction and a N.Y. Emmy award for the documentary series Doing Business in China. He was the founding chairman of the New America Foundation. His two most recent books, Blind Into Baghdad (2006) and Postcards From Tomorrow Square (2009), are based on his writings for The Atlantic. His latest book, China Airborne, was published in early May. He is married to Deborah Fallows, author of the recent book Dreaming in Chinese. They have two married sons.
The countdown clock on the highway in from Beijing Capital Airport says 379 days before the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony. Or maybe 378. In any case, just over a year to deal with situations like this:
View to the south, July 26, 8:30am, from apartment building in the Chaoyang Park neighborhood of Beijing. The obscured buildings in the "distance" are perhaps 100 yards away.
Another View From My Window {tm} shot after the jump.
(Edited to bring the main point up top: I've had enough of Vista, for now, and am "downgrading" to Windows XP. Here are the reasons.)
I've been using personal computers for nearly 30 years, and writing about them for more than 25. Yes, I know that some things I wrote back at the dawn of the Reagan administration now look fairly droll. Ooooh, you type and words appear on the screen! Aaah, the power of a full 48k of RAM!
In fact, I feel pretty good about the shelf-life of what I said back before either Windows or the Macintosh existed (and when Barack Obama was in college and Rudy Giuliani was a Washington bureaucrat). I'll put it this way: I challenge anyone to sit down and write something about the tech environment of this moment (the impact of broadband, of mobile devices, of social software, whatever) that will stand up as well in 2032!
But in what I've written about technology through this time I have made two important bad calls. Until recently, only one.
The pattern is too strong to be ignored: traditional conservatives (Heritage) and libertarians (Cato) have done a better job of of thinking about how a free society can defend itself without giving up its freedom than the Democratic or Republican establishment has. Unlike Democrats, they're not so worried about looking "weak" that they have to posture about every conceivable threat. Unlike the Administration -- well, they're sane.
Two well-known examples: Cato, for sponsoring the work of John Mueller, of Ohio State. (His influential 2004 essay, "A False Sense of Insecurity," is here in a large PDF file.) And, oddly enough, AEI, which apparently harbors an actual conservative among its neo-cons and "surge" enthusiasts. This is Veronique de Rugy, who has looked very critically at the homeland-security- industrial complex. I won't even get into Ron Paul....
A recent entry in the honor roll: James Jay Carafano, a West Point graduate who works at Heritage. His new essay, concerning the potential terrorist threat from small airplanes, is the first I've seen that both acknowledges there is some threat and proposes reasonable, proportionate steps to deal with it. Perhaps I'm biased because Carafano calls for elimination of the stupidest "homeland security" measure of all: the creation of a Potemkin air-defense zone called ADIZ, covering thousands of square miles around Washington. Even beyond my bias, this is a very good analysis.
Update: Ah, now this makes more sense. Veronique de Rugy is no longer at AEI but instead at a non-neocon, "classical liberal" plus libertarian stronghold, George Mason University's Mercatus Center. Phew!
As mentioned earlier, Cambridge MA is barely big enough to contain two public-affairs academics of different specialties and generations but the same name: the battling Ben Friedmans of Harvard and MIT. "Battling" just a jazzy epithet here; I assume they're on good terms.
Ben the Younger, of MIT, reports:
Once I got invited to Harvard to speak to a small group. Beforehand I was introduced to an elderly gentleman who told me that he was very excited to hear me speak because he really liked Day of Reckoning (copyright 1988, when I turned 10). I was tempted to tell him that it was very hard writing a book about the national debt with only a fourth grade education, and that I had to skip a lot of recess.
This Friedman reports that the codger (maybe in his 40s? just guessing) politely stayed and enjoyed the speech, even though it concerned why America had become too obsessed with terrorism.
Next week Charles Ferguson's documentary No End in Sight opens in DC and New York, followed in August by "select other cities." It is worth making time to see this film.
The trailer can be viewed on YouTube here. (At least for me, in China, this loads much faster than the same trailer at the movie's official site).
It gives a taste of the film's energy and overwhelming accumulation of fact. Also, many people will be tempted, as I was, to pause the trailer 16 seconds in, to stare in shock at how George W. Bush looked before this war began. That clip, from his 2003 State of the Union address on the eve of war, shows a man who could be the carefree young nephew of our current haggard president.
Biases to disclose: I know, like, and admire the film's creator, Charles Ferguson. I talked with him when he was planning the film, and I have a tiny cameo role as one of his interviewees.
My deeper bias might seem to work against the film. It covers almost exactly the same terrain, including many of the same sources and anecdotes, as did my book Blind Into Baghdad. But rarely have I seen a clearer demonstration of how much more powerful the combination of pictures, sound, music, real-people-talking, etc can be than words on a page. (Update: I'm not denigrating print, to which I've devoted my professional life -- and which, indeed, is the medium through which big ideas about the world are generally changed. But there are times when the experience of seeing, for instance, chaos on the streets of Baghdad transcends any mere verbal description of it.)
I don't know whether the highly-publicized Sicko is any good: hasn't shown up in the pirate-video stores here yet. But if you're looking for an auteur-produced, both intellectually and emotionally powerful, public-affairs-related documentary film, I say: try this one first.
Today's reason: no confusing mixed messages!
Hmmm, what would be the right word for a rate of economic growth so fast that it's almost unsafe, so fast... .that it might even damage your skin? What is that word I'm looking for..
It's important to keep your Benjamin Friedmans straight.
Benjamin M. Friedman, who must be in his early 60s, is an eminent professor of economics at Harvard and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and, yes, the Atlantic. He has helped lead us to clear thinking about economics and related political/cultural matters.
Benjamin H. Friedman, who must be in his late 20s, is a PhD candidate at MIT who has done some very valuable work at a tender age. An essay three years ago in MIT's publication "Breakthroughs" was one of the earliest attempts, anywhere, to say: wait a minute, how much are we willing to give away or throw away in the name of being "safe"? (The essay is "Leap before you look" and is on page 29 of this 6MB PDF file.) The logic is now familiar: just as a person can avoid many "risks" by never leaving the house or answering the phone, so a society can be "secure" by keeping everyone under scrutiny all the time. The only problem is, what makes life worth living disappears. Again, many people say this now: fewer did in 2004.
As far as I know, the two Benjamins are not related.
Benjamin "MIT" Friedman has recently pointed out another "leap before you look" step in the quest for security:the impending Congressional mandate, reported here by our sister publication Government Executive, to require the government to scan all cargo containers before they are shipped to the United States.
The struggle goes on (as recounted here and in these subsequent posts):
Fifty gigabytes here, fifty gigabytes there, pretty soon you're talking about real disk space!
It turns out that there is a reason I wasn't sure whether it was James Thurber, in The Years with Ross. or Brendan Gill, in Here at the New Yorker, who had discussed the origins of the "New Jesus" label at the New Yorker magazine. (New Jesus is the role in which Gen. David Petraeus is now being cast.) They both did, in different ways. Thurber described how Harold Ross, the founding editor, had seized on each promising new hotshot as the new Genius who would save them all. By the time Brendan Gill got to the magazine, the term had been converted to the new Jesus. Gill says:
I sensed that, young and old, many a writer had sat in the cubicle before me and had vanished forever into that Sheol where all Ross's failed "Jesuses" might be imagined as dwelling... ("Jesus" was the office corruption of "genius," the epithet that Ross applied to every promising reporter he discovered in the early days of the magazine and upon whom he would immediately thrust the fugitive honor of the managing editorship.)
Here at the Atlantic, of course, we speak of hotshot arrivals as the "New Ralph Waldo Emerson," he being one of our founders 150 years ago...
One memoir of life at the New Yorker under its founding editor, Harold Ross -- maybe it was James Thurber's The Years with Ross, maybe Brendan Gill's Here at the New Yorker -- described the concept of the "New Jesus." Everyone who has ever worked in an office will recognize the idea. The New Jesus is the guy the boss has just brought in to solve the problems that the slackers and idiots already on the staff cannot handle. Of course sooner or later the New Jesus himself turns into a slacker or idiot, and the search for the next Jesus begins.
As has been widely noted, Gen. David Petraeus is getting the full New Jesus treatment. It's underway to an extent I can barely remember happening before. OK, maybe one exception: When Coach Joe Gibbs was brought back to "save" the Washington Redskins three years ago, under their lamentable owner, Dan Snyder. The subsequent travails of Coach Gibbs illustrate the standard New Jesus cycle.
Petraeus is a serious man, but the expectations being heaped on him are simply laughable, and it's worth noting the proportions this phenomenon has taken on.
I hate to say anything bad about the Wall Street Journal on the day when, it appears, the Bancroft family has decided to view one of the world's great newspapers as "just another asset" to be liquidated to Rupert Murdoch.
So perhaps the Journal's editorial page is trying to soften the blow and prevent golden-age nostalgia by reminding us that it has no standards at all.
This from Christina Larson, author of a very good piece in the current Washington Monthly (about environmentalism in China), on the Monthly's blog site:
Reporting this spring in China, I became convinced that the western impression of Big Brother Beijing needs serious revision. Yes, China can at times crack down with terrible ferocity. But when it comes to routine maintenance and oversight, the ordinary business of running a government (read: ensuring Beijing's laws are followed in the hinterlands), the central government often stumbles.
This touches on one of the ways in which day-by-day experience in China differs most substantially from the general impression in America. Parts of daily life here are thoroughly, and if need be brutally, controlled. There is to be no political challenge to the Communist Party. Each year tens of thousands of protests, mainly in the countryside, are put down by force. Recently the government has squashed protests over environmental disasters and the one-child policy.
But that is not how it looks or seems for most people most of the time. (No, I haven't seen "most" of China. But I have been a lot of places in the last year and this impression is consistent.) To the extent Americans imagine something like Stalin's Soviet Union, or the old East Germany, or Hitler's Germany in the 1930s, or Orwell's 1984. it just is not like that day by day. The world has never before seen quite this combination of repression and laissez faire, even chaos. Its full implications, good and bad, will take a long time to understand. The main point is: it's different from what most Americans think.
A hero of my book Free Flight was a civil servant named Bruce Holmes. He was a career pilot – he’d paid his way through graduate school at the University of Kansas by flying cropdusters for a commuter airline, towing banners, hauling caskets for funeral homes, etc – and a career civil servant, for NASA. For at least two decades he has prided himself on being an “entrepreneurial bureaucrat.” In effect this meant that he put existing big companies in touch with little startups, and both of them with government regulators, in hopes of fostering the growth of a new small-airplane industry. I often think of him as a counterpart to Tim Berners-Lee* – the man who, by creating standards for the World Wide Web, helped countless other people to become filthy rich.
Here is Bruce Holmes, in a more-bureaucratic-than -entrepreneurial-looking NASA portrait:
The more I think about it, the more I marvel (as in previous item) at Sec. Chertoff's "gut feeling" comment. It's very much in the spirit of the wonderful "Demotivational" posters offered by Despair.com:
Think if Sec. Chertoff had been on hand at other big moments in history:
Audio here from my interview yesterday (from Shanghai) with Liane Hansen of NPR, looking back on my Sept 2006 Atlantic article arguing that the best way to hold down the threat and consequences of terrorism was to declare the "War on Terrorism" over. (Original article here; related Atlantic material here and here.) The question arose, of course, in light of Michael Chertoff's "gut feeling" that another strike might be imminent.
I didn't think to put it this bluntly over the radio, but Sec. Chertoff's comment ran about as contrary to all prevailing thought on dealing with terrorism (except, perhaps, the thoughts of GW Bush and RB Cheney) as is possible to do.
Audio here from a story this week on the public radio show "The World." The story is about the rapid growth of internet use in China and the implications thereof. It draws on a new study from the Pew Internet Project and includes an interview with the study's author and Pew's China bureau chief, Deborah Fallows, who is in the other room as I type.
As previously mentioned here, here, and here, my new ThinkPad T60 has had a rocky relationship with the new Windows Vista operating system that came pre-installed. (Plot summary: Vista seemed mysteriously to gobble 50 to 60 gigabytes of the hard disk's capacity, leaving barely enough for the computer to function well.)
Thanks to all who wrote in with suggestions. It turns out that the problem was not a big traffic jam in TEMP directories (which I'd cleaned out long ago); nor a CHKDSK-style issue of corrupted or misallocated file space; nor some formatting oversight that had left much of the disk unavailable for storage. It seems not even to be related to space claimed by Vista's built-in indexer. I think I have now fully turned that feature off (which is not easy), but at worst its index files accounted for "only" a gig or two of lost space.
So what was going on?
This week Boeing unveiled its "Dreamliner," the 787, to bulging order books and widespread acclaim.
Yes, it could seem strange to include a $160-million-per-copy airliner as part of the revolution that may lead to more convenient air travel via smaller, less expensive airplanes. But the Dreamliner qualifies as an honorary part of the "Free Flight" movement in two ways:
Courtesy of CRI English.com, a look at the mascot for the upcoming 17th Qingdao International Beer Festival:
A sign of my own progress toward sadder-but-wiser status: last year, I was gung-ho to get up to see Qingdao and sample Chinese beer at its finest. Qingdao itself is very interesting. But as for the festival, now I realize that.... it's the same old Chinese beer, just in larger volume and in somewhat cheesier surroundings than normal:
But who knows -- everything is changing and "improving" so rapidly here in the New China, I may just have to give it another chance.
(Yes, I know that the signs are for Budweiser -- not technically Chinese but, in context, perfectly at home amid watery Chinese beers.)
Noting with sympathy the plight I described recently -- a 110-gigabyte hard drive drying up like the Aral Sea with each hour's use of Windows Vista -- several readers helpfully wrote to suggest utilities that might solve the problem.
Two in particular: SequoiaView, and TreeSize Professional. Both offer free demos; both are quick and easy to install; both look elegantly designed.
But, no dice.
The tech-industry veteran Linda Stone on how to pay attention
In his reprise as governor, he's been as ruthlessly practical as he's been reflective,…
James Fallows talks with space entrepreneur Eric Anderson about the next wave of space exploration.
