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.
Issue December 2006

Microsoft Reboots

Magazine December 2006

A preview of the new versions of Windows and Office

Issue December 2006

Postcards From Tomorrow Square

Magazine December 2006

Our man in Shanghai samples budget beer, survives subway scrimmages, and starts living the contradictions of China’s breakneck modernization

Getting out of Iraq: What's the right idea when all ideas are bad?

Technology
For much of the last five years I have been writing about the buildup to the Iraq war, the management of the war, and the war's likely consequences. Apart from this article in the Atlantic a year and a half ago, I have avoided writing or saying much about what the United States should do next in Iraq. About the general management of the "war on terror" -- sure, no problem, as shown in one article from early in 2005 and another from a few months ago. But as for the "best" way to deal with the worst strategic error in modern American history, I've had nothing useful to say. There was a natural but not so high-minded reason I felt this way. Having been against this venture from the start, I had no stomach for coming up with "solutions" to problems that I thought ahead of time were likely to prove insoluble.

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Getting out of Iraq

Magazine November 2006

What's the right idea when all ideas are bad?

To and from Hongqiao: Dickensian details of daily Chinese life

Technology
Sunday, November 25, 10:30 am: Taxi from downtown Shanghai to Hongqiao airport, the older, closer-in airport that handles most domestic flights. (Versus the newer, fancier, more distant Pudong Airport. Pudong is the equivalent to Dulles, O'Hare, or JFK; Hongqiao is National, Midway, or LaGuardia.) Halfway through the 30-minute trip, on the freeway portion of the drive, I notice that the car is drifting from side to side across lanes as it travels. Nothing so unusual about that. But this feels somehow different - and I look at the rearview mirror and see that the driver has fallen asleep.

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Podcast of Blind Into Baghdad interview

Technology
Recently posted here.

Atlantic tech column about Vista and Office2007

Technology
Is here on the Atlantic's web site.

China article in the Atlantic

Technology
It is here, subscribers only. Subscribe!

Dog years and China years

Technology
Thirty years ago I was working on the Carter presidential campaign. That meant going to bed about 2am, getting up about 4:30 am, and cranking out speeches in all the hours in between, via typewriters (yes) while on buses and airplanes. This was the time when I learned that coffee and Coke were the two staple foods. At a campaign stop in Los Angeles after several months of this existence, I ran into Anthony Lewis, reporting on the campaign in his role as columnist for the New York Times. I had met him a few years earlier. "You look terrible!" he said. I was then in my mid-20s, but I told him that I realized I was getting one year older each day on the campaign.

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Improbable but True

Magazine November 2006

James Fallows on how he came to co-write a 1980 Atlantic cover story advocating the draft with Senator-elect Jim Webb

Improbable but true: James Webb-James Fallows joint article on the draft

Technology
I had known Jim Webb for about a year, and had worked for the Atlantic for about the same amount of time, when I proposed to him early in 1980 that we jointly undertake a project for the magazine. The results, published for the first time on the Atlantic's web site, are here (Webb's article) and here (mine); the back story follows.

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Transcript of interview for PBS documentary on Iraq

Technology
Now posted online here (and text appended after the break).

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Other people's celebrities

Technology
A few weeks ago I was on a China Eastern flight from Shanghai to Changsha, in Hunan province. I was in a window seat. The two people next to me, and the three on the other side of the aisle in the same row, were a standard group of hip-looking Chinese in their 20s. When we trudged off the plane and through the baggage area, I was amazed to see a full press gaggle, complete with TV cameras and civilian onlookers, whose members began asking questions, shooting off flash pictures, and screaming in delight when the people in my row came into view. Apparently they were famous, and not by a little!

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Election-watch 2006: Shanghai Edition

Magazine November 2006

Americans who don't like Bush are happy about the recent election results. The Chinese are not so sure.

Election-watch 2006: Shanghai edition

Technology
I have met exactly one person in China who professed admiration for George W. Bush. This was a retired senior PLA officer, no softie himself, who said he respected Bush because "he is tough man." The more common Chinese view resembles what Americans have gotten used to hearing in England, France, Japan, [choose your country] since the run-up to the Iraq war late in 2002. People think the Bush administration has been too high-handed, too ham-handed, and a lot of other things that resemble the way Democrats in America have felt. The day after the midterm elections I was talking to a Chinese academic who said that what Iraq really needed was a strong-willed leader. He got a twinkle in his eye and said, "Why not send them Bush!"

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Yet another very good book

Technology
China Shakes the World, by James Kynge, for many years the FT's correspondent in Beijing. Given his obvious immersion in and affinity for the culture, it is the more impressive when Kynge takes a hard line at the end: The rise of a power that is in the world trading system, but not really of it, poses problems for everyone else. This is a line of analysis I am familiar and sympathetic with -- as it applies to Japan. I have not yet reached that point about China. Not sure why, or whether it's just a matter of time. In any case, this is valuable book.

A mystery of driving explained

Technology
In an article in the December issue of the Atlantic, which is published abnormally late for reasons I don't fully grasp, I mention that the traffic-death rate per mile driven is roughly ten times higher in China than in North America. Nothing so shocking about that:

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China slideshow at the Atlantic, plus Slate

Technology
A narration of daily life in Shanghai and Beijing here, at the Atlantic's site. Of course accompanied by my wife Deb's "Diarist" this week in Slate.

"Talking like a pirate" in Chinese

Technology
For later discussion: the pluses and minuses of studying Chinese versus Japanese. The Cliff's Notes version is that Chinese is on the whole "easier" (streamlined grammar, one pronunciation per character versus many), but is significantly harder for Westerners to pronounce. The Japanese sounds are pretty straightforward. The Chinese ones are not. Oddball pronunciation issue: there is one sound in Chinese, especially in Beijing-accent, that seems entirely impossible -- until you think of the one English sound it resembles. That is the "talking like a pirate" sound. No one knows quite how to spell it -- "arrrrrrrhh!" perhaps -- but everyone knows what it the sound is, and how to produce it. I don't know of any part of "normal" English that this sound resembles, but as long as I think "pirate," I'm OK.

A break from the election: why beta software is bad

Technology
All my adult life I've loved playing with beta software. I like it because -- well, it's new. You get a preview of the tools and tricks you'll soon be able to use. You can in effect look over the software designers' shoulders and see what problems they're trying to solve. But here is what I have learned over the last ten weeks, through the worst experience of my 25+ years of using personal computers: be very, very afraid of beta software for any functions you need for actual work. As mentioned earlier, the disaster involved the upcoming releases of Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Vista.

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Photos of Tornado Damage in Moore, Oklahoma

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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…