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.

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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Translation tool bonus: Pera-kun and Wakan

Technology
In the current issue of the Atlantic, I have a tech column about new translation tools by Google and Yahoo for coping with "hard" languages, notably Arabic and Chinese. Here are two more free utilities I learned about too late to include in the column, but which I now use frequently for dealing with Chinese.

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Silent Spring

Technology
A week ago I noticed a dark object arcing across the sky, at eye level from our 22nd-floor apartment in Shanghai. I just caught it in peripheral vision, rather than looking at it directly. Without thinking consciously, I began speculating: maybe a hawk? Maybe one of those turkey vultures that seem to show up against stormy springtime skies? Maybe just a crow, or a large and very dark pigeon? Then I turned and saw what it was: a black heavy-duty plastic trash bag, swooping up and down in the turbulent wind. I thought a minute more and realized what I had been seeing but not noticing through the previous months: there are no birds in big Chinese cities.

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Congressional hearings update: welcome back, C-Span

Technology
As mentioned previously here and here, Congressional committee hearings are the most interesting and usually the most important parts of what the House and Senate do. But until now they have been nearly impossible to observe if you didn't queue up that morning outside the hearing room in Washington, if C-Span didn't choose that particular session to cover, or if you didn't tune into C-Span (or set the TiVo) between 1:45am and 3:20am when the hearing was being shown. All that is about to change. The main players in this process have been Carl Malamud, who has been forcing the issue; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to whom Malamud recently delivered his "unsolicited report" explaining how webcasts of hearings could be made available in a standardized, searchable, downloadable form; and of course C-Span, which has recently done something very admirable.

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Improbable but true: Colbert Report appearance March 27

Technology
Or at least, improbable but currently scheduled. First trip to the US in six months coming up soon. If current plans hold, it will include an appearance on the Colbert Report on March 27. We'll see. I just hope that my latest unfortunate made-in-China haircut, an unintended Tintin-style (but for the middle aged) fauxhawk has come closer to growing out by then.

Happy Birthday, Tom

Technology
At the White House press briefing on March 15, 1977, Jody Powell, then the press secretary for President Carter, had some important business to cover. The President was about to give his first major speech on foreign policy, an address to the U.N. General Assembly, and Powell would offer a preview. There were twists and turns to discuss in the development of Carter's National Energy Policy, which he had introduced in a "fireside chat" in February and which he would lay out in detail in a major address in April. The Administration proposed to liberalize the rules for Americans who wanted to travel to Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia, or Vietnam. And so on. But before getting into the murk of policy, Powell announced a bit of in-house news. The first child born to a member of the new administration's staff had made his appearance. Very early that morning, Thomas Mackenzie Fallows had been born at George Washington University Hospital; he and his mother, Deborah, were both doing well. Thirty years to the day later, both are still doing very well. To Jody Powell, thank you for this consideration. To our son Tom: Happy Birthday today!

'Declaring Victory' on free part of Atlantic site

Technology
The National Magazine Awards are a highly quirky part of journalistic culture, but magazines naturally embrace any good news they offer and scratch their heads at the nuttyness of it all when the results are disappointing -- I mean, "surprising." Meaning no disrespect to anyone, it was, umm, surprising last year when ESPN: The Magazine beat The New Yorker in the "General Excellence" category. This year's crop of finalists was just announced, and the news the Atlantic will embrace is that we are in the finals in three categories, including my "Declaring Victory" article for the "Public Interest" award. The Atlantic's web site has, for now, made its nominated entries (and many past winners) freely available, not just for subscribers. My article, from September 2006, is here.

Observer vs. Economist, or Yanks vs Redcoats yet again

Technology
The fraternity of American journalists who have dared speak irreverently of The Economist in public has just grown by 25%: Previous members were: Michael Lewis (soon after Liar's Poker); Richard Stengel (in his pre editor-of-Time days); "Humphrey Greddon" (not in Zuleika Dobson but in yesteryear's Spy, under what must have been a pseudonym, and if I were a New York guy I'd know who the writer really was); and me, 15+ years ago. We now welcome to the club Tom Scocca of the Observer, on the strength of this offering, which (disclosure) refers back to other members, especially Stengel and me. The 1991 Washington Post article of mine that Scocca mentions is here, and the updated intro to it is here. If I've lost track of other people who meet the eligibility standards, sorry! And, by the way, the people I've come to know from The Economist are actually very nice. You can't help admiring the feat they have pulled off.

Carl Malamud campaign, updated

Technology
As mentioned earlier, Carl Malamud has been campaigning to get the real, juicy, usually most important parts of Congressional deliberations -- the numerous committee hearings that take place each day, not just the kabuki-like stylized rhetoric of the House and Senate floor so familiar from C-Span -- availabile for searchable, free, downloads on the internet. Most committees already produce their own webcasts, but there is no easy, standardized way to get at them. Malamud has just released what he calls an "unsolicited report" to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about the importance and practicality of his scheme. It is worth reading -- and, from what I can tell, worth implementing. Check it out.

The Boiled-frog Myth

Magazine March 2007

Hey, really, knock it off!

Update: something must be happening with the MPAA

Technology
It's not just the shuttered video stores! No pirate DVD vendors in their usual spots on Shanghai's Nanjing Lu or Huaihai Lu this afternoon. None of the usual cadre of fake Rolex-Gucci-Prada hawkers on those same streets. Trade negotiators in town? Crackdown in honor of the National People's Congress in Beijing? Maybe a joint delegation from the MPAA and the Italian Ministry of Commerce? For now it's a mystery, at least to me.

The boiled-frog myth: hey, really, knock it off!

Technology

Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is scientifically impressive, politically important, and no doubt personally redemptive for Gore himself, who has endured an injustice that would leave most people screaming all day every day. Plus, it's an Oscar winner! But as noted several months ago, the movie also contains one moment of pure ignoramus-hood: the perpetuation of the boiled-frog myth. ("Put a frog in a pot of boiling water and he'll jump right out, but just raise the temperature slowly and he'll let himself be cooked." In reality the situation is more like: "Put a frog in a pot of boiling water and he'll be scalded to death, but give him a chance to escape when the slowly-warming water gets uncomfortable, and he will hop right out.")

Comes now The Economist, to give Gore (and countless other speech-makers) company.

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Issue April 2007

Thoughts on Writing This Column

Magazine April 2007

James Fallows on what most surprised him about this topic and the biggest development that happened after press time.

Hmm, I wonder if an MPAA delegation is in town

Technology
There are two rival DVD stores within a few blocks of my apartment. These are in addition to the street peddlers with little piles of DVDs laid out on blankets, or the semi-permanent vendors with their disks on carts or inside tiny shopfront booths. I prefer the stores because they'll warn you about DVDs that have dubbed-Russian soundtracks (a surprisingly large number, suggesting where a lot of the illicit copying is done) or were shot by someone lurking in a theater balcony. On those, you can hear other patrons coughing or munching popcorn through the show. The stores also have an in-house display machine on which you can try a disk and see whether it works before you shell out your 7 kuai, or 91 cents. (Ethics note: I'll happily buy a legit DVD if I ever see one.)

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Tech column on web translation tools now at Atlantic site

Technology
This tech column about improved online translation tools, especially from Google, is now on the Atlantic's site. (Subscribers only.) Biggest surprise for me while reporting the story: such systems have gone from being pathetically flawed to becoming useable and even, gasp, "useful," within tight constraints.

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'Win in China' now at Atlantic site

Technology
The April issue of the Atlantic is online, including my article on the Chinese reality show "Win in China." (Chinese name 赢在中国, or Ying zai Zhongguo. Chinese home site for the show here.) The main article is for Atlantic subscribers only (subscribe!), but this non-blocked feature has video clips that give the flavor of the show. Viewing tips: background music for clip #1 is the show's theme song -- really, its anthem of patriotism and limitless ambition. (The song's constant refrain is Zai lu shang, 在路上 -- "on the road" or "on the way.") Clip #2 gives a flavor of the weekly Apprentice-style team competitions, in this case an effort to induce Chinese schoolchildren to try that odd-seeming substance, milk. Clip #3 depicts a showdown described in the article, the final "PK" session, or "Player Kill," between "Wild Wolf" Zhou Yu, the uneducated, hot-tempered, country-boy finalist, and the highest-finishing female contestant, Ms. Zhou Jin, who delivered a baby midway through the series and whose strategy in this session is to provoke "Wild Wolf" into blowing his top.

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James Fallows
from the Magazine

Mars, Our First Outpost on the Final Frontier

James Fallows talks with space entrepreneur Eric Anderson about the next wave of space exploration.

The Skeptic’s Guide to the South Pacific

How I learned to stop worrying and love vacation

The Places You’ll Go

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