James Fallows

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.

 
Fallows welcomes and frequently quotes from reader mail sent via the "Email" button below. Unless you specify otherwise, we consider any incoming mail available for possible quotation -- but not with the sender's real name unless you explicitly state that it may be used. If you are wondering why Fallows does not use a "Comments" field below his posts, please see previous explanations here and here.

Defining the "op-ed book" (David Frum edition)

Technology
Imagine my surprise when, in a wee-hours bout of jet lag on the first evening back in Shanghai, I picked up a copy of the International Herald Tribune. No, the surprise was not the radical shift in media experience: the previous morning, in Washington, I had waded through the thick heap of that one day's New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, feeling like an explorer cutting through the jungle with a machete. Now, I had one slim, precious little document in my hands, which I felt I had to guard carefully and every one of whose articles I intended to pore over. Rather the surprise was what my poring-over revealed.

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Oddest advertising slogan in America? (this week)

Technology
In the olden days -- that is, last month, before my hiatus in the US -- listening to NPR broadcasts on the internet meant using either the Real or the Windows Media player, or iTunes. Now NPR appears to have its own proprietary NPR Audio Player. It works fine, and -- good for NPR -- has space for a billboard-ad sponsor, bringing at least some revenue to the network. Right now the sponsor is the British tourism agency, which is flogging the motto: "Be a BRIT different." Huh??? Did any native speaker of, well, American, get a look at this campaign before it went live?

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Worst pilot in America?

Technology
Many pilot-enthusiast forums (including my favorite, the Cirrus Owners and Pilots Association site) are buzzing about this audio file, which indeed is quite incredible, plus incredibly embarrassing. Basic plotline: at Sanford airport, just north of Orlando, a commercial jetliner tells air traffic control that it has a problem. The plane is coming in for a landing, with 100+ people aboard, and the pilots can't be sure whether the nose wheel has come down.

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Happy flying, Charles Simonyi

Technology
I had two things in common with Charles Simonyi when I lived in Seattle in 1999 and 2000: an interest in flying, and a friendship with Michael Kinsley, who introduced us at lunch one day in a dining hall on the Microsoft campus. The distance in all other ways was vast. Simonyi was one of the company's true titans, second only to the incomparable BillG on the general-esteem scale. According to a recent article in Technology Review, Gates himself calls Simonyi "one of the great programmers of all time." I was a lowly short-term contractor at Microsoft, going to work each day adorned with the "orange badge of shame," the orange-colored ID for temp workers, as opposed to the blue badge for "real" employees. For six months I was on the team preparing the next upgrade to Word -- a program Simonyi had invented. From the (very nice) house my wife and I had rented in Seattle's Leschi district, on the slopes of the west bank of Lake Washington, we could see Simonyi's (futuristic and stupendous) destination-spa/home being finished on the opposite shore. Simonyi has frequently dated Martha Stewart. I have been more fortunate in my love life.

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Wolfowitz = McNamara, chapter 402

Technology
From John Cassidy's (very good) profile of Paul Wolfowitz as head of the World Bank, in the New Yorker:
Wolfowitz refused to talk about Iraq specifically, but he told me that he still believes in the vision of a moderate, democratic Middle East.
Jeez louise. How much inner peace does it suggest about a person -- the most famed intellectual in the Bush administration -- if he refuses to talk about the event for which he will always be principally known? ("John Hinckley refused to talk about shooting President Reagan specifically, but he told me that he still believes in his vision of a happy future with Jodie Foster.")

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Wolfowitz = McNamara, Chapter 402

Magazine April 2007

"Jeez louise. How much inner peace does it suggest about a person if he refuses to talk about the event for which he will always be principally known?"

Tech column from May issue of the Atlantic now up

Technology
Tech column on Central Desktop, Basecamp, NoteShare, etc, now posted on the Atlantic's site. Subscribers only. Subscribe! Traveling around the U.S. to see friends and family, desperately loading in provisions for the next long stint in China (which begins with DC-SF-Shanghai flight tomorrow), taking a while off to be sick, talking with colleagues about next largish article from China, and other duties can keep a man off the internet, as they have done me for me through the last week. But soon enough the stimulation of landing at Pudong airport, fighting through the crowds and peering through the haze, and thinking: a lot of interesting things are going on.
Issue April 2007

Win in China!

Magazine April 2007

A reality-TV show is teaching the Chinese how to succeed in business.

Issue April 2007

Total (Onscreen) Immersion

Magazine April 2007

Issue April 2007

One-Button Translation

Magazine April 2007

Newly sophisticated “machine translators” let you browse foreign Web sites in real time.

Colbert interview links

Technology
Here is the main index page for recent Colbert interviews, and here is a direct link to the one I did with him (or he did on me, or whatever) last night. Another direct link: here.

Life is interesting (Gotham edition)

Technology
Staying at the unbearably hip Hudson Hotel in NYC. Too hip to need normal-sized rooms; too hip to need more than two light bulbs per room (three, counting a little desk light) or fridge or other features standard at, say, Hawthorne Suites. Ah, variety in life. But hip enough to have the front entrance jammed with beautiful people in their 20s.

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Colbert-ology, or what you know if you've seen the show live..

Technology
... as I did, a couple of hours ago, for what will be broadcast a couple of hours from now. * Extremely nice-seeming guy (out of persona), which is another way of saying: phenomenal acting job the instant the in-persona segments begin. * Larger and sturdier-seeming guy in person than on TV, reversing the normal "gee, you look different in person" effect. The normal rule is that famous people look smaller in real life than you're expecting, with a few obvious exceptions

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Issue July/August 2004

Colbert-ology

Magazine July/August 2004

What you know if you've seen the show live...

Back in the U.S.A.

Magazine March 2007

What you first notice if you're in America after six months in China...

The theater of "security," part 1037

Technology
United Air Lines, San Francisco-Dulles, oversold plane, passengers fighting to avoid being bumped. My wife and I luckily end up with really nice seats. In keeping with our larger attitude these first few days back from China, we are actively grateful for every comfort. While waiting for the flight we end up sitting in the area where all the flight attendants are congregating and chatting about their schedules. From this vantage point, 30 minutes before boarding time, we see two people who are obviously this flight's air marshals walk down the jetway toward the plane. To ensure the safety of the traveling public, I won't give further details, except to say:

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The hot frogs ask: Et tu, Al?

Technology
I finally took the unwise step of searching Google News for recent uses of the (totally fictitious) boiled-frog cliche. Sigh. Of the many examples, these two were most dispiriting:

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What you first notice if you're in America after six months in China...

Technology
It is obvious, but: The wealth. The things. The overall abundance. (And, yeah, well, that you can speak English.) Plus, how clean the air is, and how many trees and birds and flowers there are, and how few unfinished edges -- open ditches, stacks of construction beams -- you come across. Since I'm in Northern California I haven't yet had the cliched reaction of how large the people themselves look. But I notice how sparse they seem to be on the streets, compared with any Chinese town. The name for America in Chinese and several other Asian languages is 美国, or meiguo, "beautiful country."

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Reason to live: beer in Shanghai, cont.

Technology
Now that I have spent 24 hours in America, where every product is available every place all the time, this observation seems pathetic, but: this was what I was excited about the day I left Shanghai. The best news I have heard on the globalization front in a long, long time is that into the sea of indistinguishable, flavorless, soulless, depressing Tiger, Chinese-Suntory, Chinese-Carlsberg, Qingdao, REEB, and the rest of the sorry lot will soon arrive.... good beer. Great beer! Rogue Dead Guy Ale!

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Airline security update: the knives are back!

Technology
Shanghai-San Francisco, UAL, 10 hours+ in the plane, the magic of business class! I am tall enough, and old enough, and have had enough experience with the 31" seat pitch in economy, to appreciate every minute in which my knees are not jammed into the seat ahead. Bigger surprise: full set of metal cutlery with the meal, knife too!

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James Fallows
from the Magazine

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Google’s Michael Jones talks with James Fallows about the future of mapping, and why…