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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Where Congress Can Draw the Line

Magazine February 2007

No war with Iran

Sympathy For, Yes, Microsoft

Magazine January 2007

Vista's worldwide release is greeted in China with in-your-face piracy

Sympathy for, yes, Microsoft

Technology
As indicated earlier, I have not had a completely blissful experience trying out the pre-release versions of Windows Vista and Office2007. But I completely believe what I wrote a few months ago in the Atlantic: these are both very good products and well worth buying. Office's improvements are immediately visible in a snazzy, elegant, fit-and-finish way. The most important changes in Vista are largely invisible internal improvements, although it also has a gee-whiz factor in its "Aero" graphics presentation system, which is notably more attractive than any previous Microsoft standard. This new feature of Vista requires (as the new Office does not) more raw horsepower than most computers bought before 2006 are likely to have, which is one of several reasons why it makes sense to buy Vista pre-installed on your next computer but not to upgrade the one you already have. So I respect and appreciate what Microsoft has achieved -- and empathize with them after reading in today's English-language (and state-controlled) Shanghai Daily that, on the very day the software first goes on sale worldwide: "As always, Microsoft will have to battle piracy, as Vista knockoffs are already being sold on the street for 10 yuan." Ten yuan, or kuai, is about $1.30.

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How the Aussie Open will make me into a better person

Technology
As noted earlier, the just-concluded Australian Open tennis championship was the first sports event I've seen live on TV in more than six months. My enforced weaning-away from those previous idle hours moaning about the Redskins or wondering about split-times at the Tour de France is no doubt virtuous and self-improving and so on. But here is what I learned from the one truly startling participant at the Aussie Open: not the elegant Federer nor the gutsy Serena Williams but the computerized instant-replay system for disputed line calls. For anyone who has played tennis in the past or plans to play it again, the results of this system are worth serious, life-changing contemplation. Here is the three-part logic:

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Full State of the Union "deconstruction" now posted...

Technology
... on the Atlantic's site, here. A less artful looking, but perhaps easier to read, version begins immediately below. Here are the big points about this speech, then some line by line comments.

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Post Mortem: State of the Union

Magazine January 2007

Bush's 2007 State of the Union address, annotated by The Atlantic's James Fallows

Post Mortem: State of the Union

Magazine January 2007

Bush's 2007 State of the Union address, annotated by The Atlantic's James Fallows

And by the way, if anyone is watching Jim Webb...

Technology
I am biased, but I thought this was the most formidable response to the President's speech the Democrats could possibly have offered. The controlled ferocity of the last two minutes of that talk, which covered what is often called "up and down" loyalty -- the loyalty and respect troops owe their commanders, but the competence and judgment their commanders owe them -- had the good-for-TV quality of being hard to turn away from, and the unfakeable sense of coming directly from Webb's mind and heart. More on this speech, too, tomorrow. (And, yes, it ended "God Bless America.")

State of the Union Address 2007: instant analysis

Technology
As over the last few years, line-by-line speechwriter style analysis available on the Atlantic's web site tomorrow morning, U.S. time. Main point right now: This was two different speeches, perhaps three. The first speech, on domestic policy, was list-like, uninspired, and uninspiring -- apparently even to the President himself, who trudged through it as if seeing the text for the first time. The second speech, about terrorism, Iraq, and foreign policy, reawakened Bush's own interest and advanced his case about as well as a speech at this point could. The third speech, the brief, closing "Lenny Skutnik" portion, was the best part of the speech and the most skillful execution of this ritual that has been seen in years. And, oh, yes, the President couldn't help himself. His text took the bold step of not ending with "God Bless America." But this apparently was so startling that President Bush had to say, "God bless....." to know that he was done.

State of the Union Address 2007: Instant Analysis

Magazine January 2007

Atlantic correspondent and former Presidential speechwriter James Fallows shares his impressions of Bush's speech

How China is making me into a better person (sort of)

Technology
The Australian Open is underway right now; on TV I just watched Andy Roddick beat Mario Ancic in a dramatic five-set match. In my US-based phases of life, my view on the Aussie Open was: who cares? I love tennis, but the matches happened while I was sleeping, and I can't see the point of watching even the greatest match on TV if I already know how it turned out. (Seeing top-tier tennis players perform in person is completely different. There's still the element of suspense, but that's a detail. Even watching Andre Agassi or Pete Sampras warm up, as I've done from the side of practice courts, is utterly riveting, as you see how their reflexes, power, speed, and concentration differ from those of normal human beings. As a teenager I sat a few yards away from Arthur Ashe as he played an exhibition match on my high school courts. I don't think I took my eyes off him.) The newly-fascinating Australian Open made me realize: most of the reason to see anything on TV, at least for me, is the real-time uncertainty about what will happen next.

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A four-minute rebuttal to the "surge" plan

Technology
This link comes courtesy of my friend Richard Samuels, an expert in all things Japanese at MIT. If it is already widely known, sorry; it was news to me. It is a "debate" on Al Jazeera between a prominent Sunni and a prominent Shiite Iraqi over the execution of Saddam Hussein. Watch this to the end -- just over four minutes, but well spent -- and think again of the benchmarks President Bush has set for America's continued commitment to Iraq. A crackdown on sectarian militias, a fair sharing of oil revenues, a general sense of national concord. Watch, and wonder. The link is here.

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James Fallows
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