James Fallows

Beautiful evening in Bangalore; big schooners of draft Kingfisher beer on the garden-veranda of a luxurious hotel in the center of the city. Evening falls. To perfect the experience and make sure we are not bothered by mosquitoes attracted to the ornamental pond nearby, a helpful touch from the hotel management: our own chemical fogger.

Kingfisher with an overlay of aerosol insecticide -- hard to beat!

Here is something that is common knowledge in the publishing business but that few “normal” readers know: that the average article in a good magazine is much, much more carefully edited than almost any book. Yes, books can last forever while magazines go away after a week or month. But in a high-end magazine – like, well, the Atlantic, or the New Yorker, or the New York Review of Books, or one of a dozen others that invest in good copy editors and fact checkers – you’re far less likely to find typos, grammar errors, careless repetitions and contradictions, or simple made-up facts than you'll find in books. For example: during a recent voyage-of-the-damned style long-haul overnight air trip, from Bangalore to Shanghai via Kuala Lumpur, I decided to read a book about aviation.

More »

To the family of Army 1st Lt. Andrew Bacevich, killed at age 27 this week in Iraq, deepest sympathies. There is nothing others can say to ease this blow, except: we are sorry for the loss of your son, and brother, and nephew — and send you support and sympathies in this time of loss. From a coldly logical point of view, news of this death is no worse than the steady flow of news of other deaths, American and otherwise, coming out of Iraq. But for many people it is worse, based on the widespread knowledge that Lt. Bacevich’s family includes his father, retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich.

More »

India and China are so fundamentally different in so many ways that it is amazing that Americans often talk about them as a twinned pair. The Rising Asian Titans, The Billion-Strong Powers, the countries whose people will take our jobs, etc. They’re similar only in the grossest ways - big populations, economies that are rapidly growing, many many citizens who are poor and a few who are very rich. As for the differences, there are a zillion for later exploration, and one that is stunning the instant you set foot in India (where I have been before, but not recently). The difference is, children

More »

In the summer of 1988, my wife and I traveled through Burma mainly at night. We rode in the back of an open-bed pickup truck that held, in addition to us, half a dozen 10-gallon jerrycans full of gasoline. This was just after the military crackdown that left large numbers of students, civilians, and even monks dead and that cemented control over the country by the notorious junta later known as “SLORC” – the State Law and Order Restoration Committee. We had made a deal with a moonlighting Army officer to drive us north from Rangoon to Mandalay and Pagan and the upcountry regions. To minimize contact with the authorities, he drove only in the dark; to minimize wear and tear on his truck, he kept the headlights off. Our children, ages 11 and 8, were at a two-week summer camp on an island in Malaysia, where we then lived. When we finally got out of Burma and collected our children, it occurred to us to ask ourselves: What were we thinking??? What we thought about frequently while in Burma was its living-in-ruins effect. Rangoon’s downtown had a surprisingly intact array of stately colonial-era structures – none of them demolished, since there had been essentially no economic activity in the country for 40+ years, but none of them painted, repaired, or maintained in that time either. Nearly twenty years later, the old buildings are still standing, and a few look better than before. The venerable Somerset Maugham-era Strand Hotel, a frozen-in-time rattletrap when we stayed there, with an ancient dining-hall staff who spoke with English accents and spent evenings watching Heckle & Jeckle cartoons on Burmese TV, is now spiffed-up and elegant. One or two modern office towers have appeared. But this image suggests what is still the general effect. Shoeless squatters playing soccer in what was some kind of Socialist- architecture compound near the famed Shwedagon Pagoda.

More »

The three things that Burma (Myanmar, to its military regime) has to export are: drugs, gems, and rain forest timber. Most Western countries have applied a range of trade sanctions and import-prohibitions against Burmese goods. China has not and is Burma’s main trade partner. I don’t know what the drug- or gem-export business looks like, and I’m not likely to get pictures of shipments as they occur. But recently in the port area of Rangoon (Yangon), I got an idea of how the timber trade looks. Here are supplies waiting for shipment:

More »

Through the controversy over the eight U.S. Attorneys who were fired, I've been personally most interested in a potential ninth name on the list, since the ramifications involve the Congressman from Redlands, California, my home town. Details on this at the end of this post. But there is a new development involving the original eight attorneys that potentially dwarfs in outright evil anything said, suggested, or suspected in the whole saga up till now. Indeed, the implications would be so appalling, if true, that for now I find it hard actually to believe the worst. Here are the facts: Five and a half years ago, Thomas Wales was murdered in Seattle. He was shot, through the window of his home, as he sat working at his computer late at night. This was Tom Wales:

More »

A few days ago in Shanghai: 5pm. Threatening skies all day, walk out of a building into the kind of gusty wind that, back in Washington, would make me think, A thunderstorm is about to break. It rains hard for a minute, but mainly there’s grit. Suddenly my eyes are full of it, it’s on my teeth and the back of my throat (maybe I should hawwwwwkkk and spit?), I can feel it when I breathe. The sky is a yellowish color I’ve heard about as a pre-tornado warning. Sandstorm! At least a little one, enough to make me wonder about the dreaded blasts from the desert toward Beijing. The view of the ochreish sky when I got home.

More »

New programs ease the frustration of working with others online.

We can make it three for three — sort of — among Atlantic “voices” on the folly of being obsessed with whether someone has an academic credential, versus whether that person can actually do the job. I dealt with and respected Marilee Jones, the now-cashiered admissions director at MIT, during my various stints of writing about the (folly of the) college admissions process. Her message boiled down to: Oh, calm down, which is exactly the message students applying to college should hear.

More »

Which is a difference between him and White House counselor Dan Bartlett.

More »

This is Mike Gravel campaigning now: This is Mike Gravel as I had thought of him until the instant I saw the recent Democratic debate:

More »

The Atlantic Monthly: 150 years old this year! The Atlantic.com: online since 1993! The new, improved, expanded Atlantic Online: ready for unveiling in the next few days! Part of the new, improved, expandedness is the incorporation of blogs by various staff members, including me. So the new, improved, barely-expanded address for this little chronicle is http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com. A switchover process is beginning. Over the next week or two archived posts, links, categories, and other material from this site will be transferred to the new one. Eventually (as happened with the mighty AndrewSullivan.com, when he joined the Atlantic) all outside links to this site itself will automatically be redirected to the appropriate part of the Atlantic's site. Until then new posts will appear in both places. Unfortunately it turns out that RSS feeds can't be transferred automatically. So anyone interested can go to the Atlantic's site and set up a new RSS feed here. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, which -- as I look out the window here in Shanghai and see a man hauling a laden oxcart down the street, with himself in the role of ox -- is in the big view not that bad. Thanks to people who have contacted me via this site, and special thanks to those who over the last decade have helped me cobble together an evolving web presence: David Rothman, Chet and Ginger Richards, Jonathan Kibera and Tom Fallows, and most recently, with this current WordPress site, James Cham. I am very grateful to all. See you at TheAtlantic.com, and thanks for your interest. Jim Fallows -- oops, I mean "JamesFallows.TheAtlantic.com."

The Atlantic Monthly: 150 years old this year! The Atlantic.com: online since 1993! The new, improved, expanded Atlantic Online: ready for unveiling in the next few days! Part of the new, improved, expandedness is the incorporation of blogs by various staff members, including me. So the new, improved, barely-expanded address for this little chronicle is http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com. A switchover process is beginning. Over the next week or two archived posts, links, categories, and other material from this site will be transferred to the new one. Eventually (as happened with the mighty AndrewSullivan.com, when he joined the Atlantic) all outside links to this site itself will automatically be redirected to the appropriate part of the Atlantic's site. Until then new posts will appear in both places. Unfortunately it turns out that RSS feeds can't be transferred automatically. So anyone interested can go to the Atlantic's site and set up a new RSS feed here. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, which -- as I look out the window here in Shanghai and see a man hauling a laden oxcart down the street, with himself in the role of ox -- is in the big view not that bad. Thanks to people who have contacted me via this site, and special thanks to those who over the last decade have helped me cobble together an evolving web presence: David Rothman, Chet and Ginger Richards, Jonathan Kibera and Tom Fallows, and most recently, with this current WordPress site, James Cham. I am very grateful to all. See you at TheAtlantic.com, and thanks for your interest. Jim Fallows -- oops, I mean "JamesFallows.TheAtlantic.com."

Welcome to the new, expanded Atlantic web site!

This coming week, a revamped version of The Atlantic Online will be unveiled. Our magazine, the oldest in the country, was also one of the first to have a full-fledged web presence. The Atlantic Monthly is beginning its 151st year of operation, and TheAtlantic.com is in its 15th year.

This new version will feature online contributions – ok, blogs – by various staff members. I'll be one of them, and the occasional entries I've been making at JamesFallows.com will move here. The full new address is http://JamesFallows.TheAtlantic.com. Over the next week or two, the entries, archives, and links from my existing site will migrate here. (The "Monthly Archive" links, to the right, are connected to existing archives; for the moment, the "Categories" links connect only to new entries on this site.) Eventually – following the model of the big brother of our staff sites, AndrewSullivan.com, which recently shifted its enormous presence to AndrewSullivan.TheAtlantic.com – my old site's home address will automatically be redirected to this one.

The only switch we apparently can't do automatically is RSS feeds. Anyone who would like to re-up can click here to create a new RSS feed. Sorry we can't make this happen on its own. Life is cruel.

I'm proud to have written for The Atlantic since 1975, when I was a free-lancer in Austin (while my wife was in grad school at the University of Texas), and even prouder to have been on its staff for all but three of the years since 1979. Most of what I've done, and will continue to do, is "normal" writing for the "real" magazine. But, especially while based in China, I plan to augment that with pictures and dispatches for our web site, plus entries more suitable for this medium than for the magazine itself. I'm guessing that I will post entries about 1/100th as often as the other big-time bloggers assembled here, but I figure: any more might exhaust our readers, and certainly would exhaust me.

Sincere thanks for your interest in the magazine, and in our site.

Background note on change-over plans from my own previous site is here.

Matthew Wald has long covered the aviation-disaster beat (among other topics) for the New York Times. Through his stories he has struck me as being very, very conscious of all the things that can go wrong in the air. A healthy appreciation of the risks of flight is actually a desirable trait in pilots, but I had assumed that when he thought about pilots, especially amateur pilots, he would be in the "why would anyone take such a risk?" camp. His story today in the New York Times is actually quite fair and calm sounding, which makes its conclusion the more sobering.

More »

Two and a half years ago, after interviewing many, many people involved in shaping Iraq-war policy, I wrote the following in the Atlantic (and then in Blind into Baghdad):

There is no evidence that the President and those closest to him ever talked systematically about the "opportunity costs" and tradeoffs in their decision to invade Iraq. No one has pointed to a meeting, a memo, a full set of discussions, about what America would gain and lose.

More »

I got on an elevator on the 17th floor of an office building in Shanghai, headed for the lobby. It stopped at the 16th floor, where a conference was apparently just breaking up. Thirteen other people, all Chinese, got in -- as many as the elevator would hold. The door closed, people stood shoulder-to-shoulder-blade -- and ten kept talking on their mobile phones. Floor by floor in the descent, the volume went up, as each person spoke with ever-increasing loudness to compensate for the (ever-increasing) ambient noise. The good news for China: mobile phones work everywhere --

More »

The news of David Halberstam's death is a surprisingly shocking blow. In general, a man's passing at age 73 cannot seem wholly unnatural or out of sequence. But it was hard to think of Halberstam as being as anything but young. He was as full of ambition and energy and enthusiasm and spark as anyone I know, of any age.

More »