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.

Beer in Shanghai, part 3: Sam Adams crisis is over

Technology
It makes my head hurt to think about this, but about 21.7 million containers left the port of Shanghai last year. (These are the standard 20-foot long metal boxes that go from freighter ships to railroads or trucks and are called TEUs in the trade.) On a round-the-clock basis, that's more than 59,000 TEUs per day, nearly 2500 an hour, two every three seconds. This year the port of Shanghai will send out significantly more. I know what's in the containers as they leave. Computers. Toys. The world's supply of electric toothbrushes I saw manufactured at a nearby plant. Shoes. You name it. Rather, you buy it. What's on the ships when they return? I don't know - actually, I'm looking into it, and it's a subject for another day. (Maybe it's dollars, to pay for all the stuff?) What I can say with relief is that the container with the spring 2007 shipment of Sam Adams beer made it safely into port. The stores that were sold out across the city last week have been resupplied. Thank you, Sam Adams company; thank you, Port of Shanghai stevedores who labored to serve the public through the Chinese New Year holiday. That leaves only 21,699,999 containers to account for.

Am I being too rational? The prospect of war on Iran

Technology
Starting late in 2004, I have been writing that the United States could not rationally comtemplate attacking Iran. (For reasons laid out in 2004, 2006, and 2007.) Through that time I have been arguing with friends, adversaries, and people I do not know, all of whom keep saying: rational or not, it's coming! This dispute is strange in one obvious way.

More »

Momentarily less sympathy for, yes, Microsoft

Technology
Microsoft's OneNote is a great little product. I know, like, and once worked at Microsoft alongside Chris Pratley, who led its development inside the company. I know, like, and have praised in public the elegance of OneNote's design and its overall usefulness. I've been using the beta version of OneNote 2007 for a couple of months, and the time has come to pony up for the real, bona fide, for-release version. No problem: the $79.95 upgrade price is a relative bargain. (Yes, I could get it for under $1 on the street here in Shanghai, but, as noted earlier, That Would Be Wrong.) So I use the Help/Activate command from inside the program, and what do I find? First, the online purchase program will not work with Firefox.

More »

Thank you, Martha Raddatz

Magazine February 2007

"For the first time, I actually felt sorry for the President."

Thank you, Martha Raddatz

Technology
At yesterday's news conference, Martha Raddatz of ABC finally got to ask President Bush directly the question that has been obvious since he first announced his "surge" policy one month ago. Ignore the first sentence of her question and look at what comes after that:
Q Mr. President, do you agree with the National Intelligence Estimate that we are now in a civil war in Iraq? And, also, you talk about victory, that you have to have victory in Iraq; it would be catastrophic if we didn't. You said again today that the enemy would come here, and yet you say it's not an open-ended commitment. How do you square those things?
Of course Bush didn't answer.

More »

Beer in Shanghai, part 2: challenge

Technology
In the last few months, in a dozen cities in mainland China plus Hong Kong, Macau, and various sites through Vietnam, I've had a chance to try a large range of Asian beers. The local mainstays around Shanghai: Tsingtao, Snow, REEB, plus the Chinese-brewed (ie, watery) versions of Carlsberg, Tiger, Heineken, Bud, Foster's, San Miguel, Asahi, Kirin, and Suntory. In the north, Harbin and some other beers I now forget. In the south, Haizhu, Kingway, and Pearl River beers. Beijing Beer and Yanjing Beer in the capital. Exotic variants like REEB DARK (ugh) and Tsingtao Light (UGH!!). In Vietnam, BGI, 333, Saigon, and Bia Larue. Yeah, there are differences.

More »

Beer in Shanghai, part 1: lament

Technology
Sam Adams clean sold out at the usual-suspect supermarkets! Arrggh! At 12 kuai per 12 ounce bottle (just over $1.50), or not that much more than beer-store prices in the U.S., this was the main retail alternative to the hopeless, hopless local brews. Sure, it's six times as expensive as REEB or locally-made Tiger, but it's fifty times as good. This is a rare illustration of the "life in Shanghai"= "life in the Klondike" hypothesis, as we wait for the next shipment of provisions to arrive.

Archival note: M-16 article

Technology
Magazine articles published before the early 1990s are available digitally in only hit-or-miss fashion. Republication rights were still being worked out then; Nexis coverage from that time is erratic; some material has been scanned in and much has not. I am aware of this spotty coverage mainly as it affects two Atlantic articles I did in this period: "A Damaged Culture," about the Philippines; and "M-16: A Bureaucratic Horror Story," about how internal bureaucratic squabbling left American troops in Vietnam with defective, jam-prone weapons. I frequently receive requests for copies of these articles. I have finally found, and earlier posted, a digital version of the Philippine article, which appeared in expanded form in Looking at the Sun. I am not aware of a digital version of the M-16 article. For those who ask (and I write this because I've gotten another round of requests), it too appeared in expanded book form, in National Defense. That book was published in 1981 and has recently gone out of print, but used copies are easily and cheaply available on Amazon. That is where to look if you are interested.

This Is What I Call a Cultural Revolution

Magazine February 2007

Queuing Day in China

This is what I call a cultural revolution: Queuing Day in China

Technology
Yes, it would be easy to make fun of "Queuing Day." Pathetically easy. On this day, observed for the first time on February 11 in Beijing, people are supposed (gasp!) to stand in lines before getting on buses, buying tickets, paying at check-out stands, etc. From now through the Olympics, the 11th of every month will be a queuing day. The old cornball jokes come to mind: There is the yokel who takes a bath every Saturday night whether he needs it or not, and there are people who stand in line on the 11th of every month whether they need to or not. On the 12th, things are back to normal. But actually, I find this effort at social uplift strangely touching.

More »

Interesting online map technology: Smart Shanghai

Technology
I'm on on record as scoffing at the silly term "mashup" and thinking that "Web 2.0" has been more impressive as a slogan than as a clearly-defined concept. Still, some of these new-fangled web sites are pretty interesting! Maps in particular -- they get better and better because of the combination (which is how you say "mashup" in English) of aerial photos, geographically-tagged information, user-supplied content, Ajax-based interactivity, and other adornments. Recent example: this map of Shanghai, which lets you zoom in and out and arrow around, in a way that was novel when applied by Google maps; and, significantly, lets you search by street name, which is a big plus when you're getting to know a city. (You click on "Find Streets" and then choose from a drop-down list.) It doesn't zoom to a specific street address, in the fashion of Google Maps or similar applications; but it's useful in its own way. Perhaps this kind of searchable map is already known far and wide to everyone but me. I don't know: the main other place I've seen it is on this German site. What I can say is that it was a big help this morning in figuring out how to get to an appointment on Yueyang Road.

Nobody's perfect: Gmail and spam

Technology

Spam is of course a modern blight, but until recently I thought I'd found the closest thing to a perfect solution. This was the spam filter built into Gmail. Compared with any of the other email services on which I've maintained accounts -- Yahoo, Hotmail, the Atlantic's in-house system, until recently AOL -- Gmail seemed better by both measures of anti-spam effectiveness. It had very few "false negatives" (spam it should have trapped but mistakenly let through) and virtually no "false positives" (messages I wanted to see but that it mistakenly trapped).

Or so I thought.

More »

APOLOGIES: Contact function has been broken for two months

Technology
Oh my. Through a trail of little clues (and thanks to Michael Goldberg of MDV in Menlo Park, who tried to contact me another way when he got no reply to a message left here), it turns out that the "contact" function on this site has not worked for at least the last two months.

More »

Homage where homage is due: Charles Peters

Technology
David Ignatius of the Washington Post has a very nice column of tribute to Charles Peters, my original employer in the magazine world and, for me and a large number of other people in journalism, something like Chairman Mao without the starvation and mass terror. That is, an inspirational and consequential figure whose doctrine had its oddities and whose personal habits did too, but whose influence can't be ignored. Fortunately Charlie's influence, unlike the Chairman's, was overwhelmingly to the good.

More »

The Squeegee Men of Shanghai

Magazine February 2007

Forget running for president, Rudy. Come deal with the shoe-squeegee men of Shanghai.

Tech column also now out in the Atlantic

Technology
Literature is born of tragedy -- and so are tech columns, including one on backups spurred by my series of unhappy surprises while testing beta software last summer and fall. This is now out in the March issue. Also, a sidebar about two very different undertakings that in their own, hard-to-compare ways are both very admirable: the Global Giving online philanthropy site, and the Gyro-Q and Results Manager organizing tools from the small software company Gyronix. I am never 100% sure which articles are subscriber-only, since as an actual paying subscriber I see them in one uniform list. If these are behind the wall, well then...

Mr. Zhang's Dream Town now at Atlantic site

Technology
The March issue of the Atlantic is now out; with any luck, I'll see it myself in three or four weeks when the mail makes its way across the mighty ocean. A slide show about Mr. Zhang's utopia/mystery land in Hunan province is now at the Atlantic's site. So is the story itself; but, hey, these things are always better in real print.

The squeegee men of Shanghai

Technology
I like China. I like Shanghai. I like most Chinese people I see and meet. But I'm getting pretty tired of China's big-city counterpart to the squeegee men whom Rudolph Giuliani was famed for chasing off the streets of New York. Forget running for president, Rudy. Come deal with the shoe-squeegee men of Shanghai.

More »

It is tedious to say this again, but there is a HUGE logical problem with the Iraq policy

Technology
At President Bush's meeting with the Democratic leadership over the weekend, the following line drew applause, according to the transcript released by the White House:
And I have made it clear to the Iraqi government, just like I made it clear to the American people, our commitment is not open ended.

More »

Where Congress can draw the line: no war with Iran

Technology
Deciding what to do next about Iraq is hard -- on the merits, and in the politics. It's hard on the merits because whatever comes next, from "surge" to "get out now" and everything in between, will involve suffering, misery, and dishonor. It's just a question of by whom and for how long. On a balance-of-misery basis, my own view changed last year from "we can't afford to leave" to "we can't afford to stay." And the whole issue is hard in its politics because even Democrats too young to remember Vietnam know that future Karl Roves will dog them for decades with accusations of "cut-and-run" and "betraying" troops unless they can get Republicans to stand with them on limiting funding and forcing the policy to change. By comparison, Iran is easy: on the merits, in the politics. War with Iran would be a catastrophe that would make us look back fondly on the minor inconvenience of being bogged down in Iraq. While the Congress flounders about what, exactly, it can do about Iraq, it can do something useful, while it still matters, in making clear that it will authorize no money and provide no endorsement for military action against Iran.

More »

The Biggest Story in Photos

Photos of Tornado Damage in Moore, Oklahoma

Subscribe Now

SAVE 65%! 10 issues JUST $2.45 PER COPY

Newsletters

Sign up to receive our free newsletters

(sample)

(sample)

(sample)

(sample)

(sample)

(sample)

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…