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.

Has Bush been smart all along?

Technology
Maybe it's just because the event happened between 2am and 3am China time. But I listened with mounting amazement to President Bush's post-election press conference on Wednesday. It was not simply the tone of relative reasonableness and contrition -- or as close to it as we've ever heard in public from this man -- that was so surprising. Contrition? What the transcript renders as "It was a thumping," and what was actually delivered as "It was a thumpin'," was more frank-sounding than anything the President has ever said about, well, Iraq. The amazing aspect was that this man sounded smart.

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Has Bush Been Smart All Along?

Magazine November 2006

James Fallows marvels at a side of President Bush we haven't previously seen

Proud to Be an American, Chapter 12,745

Magazine November 2006

Life is about to become dramatically more pleasant, positive, and effective for Americans in their dealings with every other part of the world.

Proud to be an American, chapter 12,745

Technology
Election Day 2006 was a very good day for American democracy, for obvious reasons: it showed that dozens of Congressional districts could in fact be "in play" despite the well-known excesses of gerrymandering, and it was long-sought proof that there is, finally, some accountability for gross failures of judgment, execution, competence, and vision. After running two gubernatorial campaigns in Texas and one presidential campaign (his first) on themes of accountability, responsibility, and facing up to mistakes, George W. Bush has imposed almost none of it on his administration. Two word proof: Donald Rumsfeld. (Don't remember the "accountability" theme? It was how he polished off Ann Richards in their first debate back in 1994, as described here.) Also: to be free at last of the phrase, "the genius of Karl Rove." Not to mention, "the Republican ground game." Hallelujah. And: to know that however the Virginia recount turns out, George Allen is never going to be a presidential nominee. Here is a less obvious reason that it matters: Life is about to become dramatically more pleasant, positive, and effective for Americans in their dealings with every other part of the world.

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What's wrong with travel, part 973

Technology
What I crammed into my carry on bag on my recent slog from China to America and back: Test Everyone recognizes the gear:

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What's wrong with travel, part 972

Technology
This is why, after one crack at it, I won't be doing a lot of small-airplane flying in China any more. Here is how a Cirrus SR-22 got fueled up at the main airport in Changsha, capital of Hunan province. (Man in the truck is Peter Claeys, intrepid Cirrus salesman for China. Other men, including the luckless one working the siphon, are involved in local aviation.) Changsha airport Further travel adventures to be reported in the Atlantic.

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Another book well worth reading

Technology
John Pomfret's China Lessons, mentioned earlier, is a subtle and insightful account of China's political evolution and devolution. Timothy Clissold's Mr. China is a subtle and insightful account of China's political and economic evoution and devolution -- and is absolutely hilarious as well. Two aspects of life that loom larger and larger in my own experience are central themes here. One is what I think of as the "paradox of slipshodness."

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Issue November 2006

Searches, Backups, Soul of a New Program

Magazine November 2006

Issue November 2006

Making Haystacks, Finding Needles

Magazine November 2006

New programs let you easily categorize anything you come across on the Web or in your own files—and, more important, let you find it all again

Robert Klitgaard on culture, education, and More Like Us

Technology
I have often thought of Robert Klitgaard's book Tropical Gangsters when living in or reporting on countries where structural corruption seems like an unavoidable and unchangeable condition of life. The book is a darkly comic, Evelyn-Waugh-as-economic-advisor account of Klitgaard's experience on World Bank project in Equitorial Guinea, often described as "the worst country in the world." I was living in Japan at the time, which was still on the way up, but also traveling in countries like the Philippines and Indonesia -- whose contrast with Japan raised obvious questions about the relative roles of policy, and of culture, in national improvement or deterioriation. One result of this on my end was an article about the Philippines called "A Damaged Culture,"

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The cost of "security" (Cory Lidle connection)

Technology
The post-9/11 "security" restrictions in airspace around Washington have always been pointless. Now they may actually have killed people -- or helped to, and the ones who perished were not terrorists.

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The independent-minded Gregg Easterbrook

Technology
Gregg Easterbrook -- of the Washington Monthly, the New Republic, the Atlantic, Brookings, ESPN, and probably half a dozen places I am forgetting -- is a long-time friend of mine. He is also is about the most independent-minded, sometimes contrary, person to come out of the Washington Monthly culture, which is saying something. A three-book series over the last decade -- A Moment on the Earth, Beside Still Waters, and The Progress Paradox -- took on liberal conventional wisdom about the environment, spirituality, and the nature of economic life in a brave (and overall convincing) way. Consistent with his nature, Gregg has neve been shy about saying, in public, when he disagrees with his friends. Indeed much of the item linked here (from his wonderful TMQ feature, which of course is mainly about football) consists of disagreeing with me, about my preceding book. But the item also had the following to say about my current book, which -- knowing that praise from Gregg is far from automatic -- i gratefully reprint:
His brilliant new book "Blind into Baghdad" is the most important thing anyone has written about the Iraq War. Read it.

Interview with Sir Richard Dearlove at Aspen

Technology
Sir Richard Dearlove was the former head of British secret intelligence, and a central figure in the famed "Downing Street Memorandum," reporting eons before Bob Woodward that the intelligence had been "fixed" for the plan to invade Iraq. Here is a .WMV file of my interview with him and Shashi Tharoor at Aspen. It is notable especially for his argument about why the U.S. was destroying itself by cutting legal and ethical corners in the Global War on Terror -- as described at the time here.

A Nation of Ninnies

Magazine October 2006

How Gary Cooper can save us (from mayor Daley, among others)

Interview with Bill Clinton at Aspen

Technology
This was at the "Aspen Ideas Festival," co-sponsored by the Atlantic, in July. Hour-long video, availabile in MP3 here and in a variety of other formats here (at bottom of page). It was the interview I described on the Atlantic's Aspen blog.

Interview with Michael Dell at Google Zeitgeist

Technology
Dell has released a video of the interview I conducted with its founder and CEO at Google's recent Zeitgeist conference, here. My main personal impressions of him: mensch-like, good sense of humor, and although he traveled with what appear to be bodyguards, much less air of a big shot than a lot of other big shots.

How Gary Cooper can save us (from Mayor Daley, among others)

Technology
Here are the four ways we'll know that Americans are regaining their sanity about "Homeland Security" 1) When some politician has the guts to stop using the hideous term Homeland Security, or "Homeland" itself.

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Good item in Slate on Cory Lidle, with one crucial error

Technology
Slate's "hot documents" feature has an informative item about the sad Cory Lidle crash. (Disclosure: "hot documents" was created, and most of the time is written, by my close friend Tim Noah, although not this item.) Unfortunately the item has one innocent but major error of logic, or of understanding how airplanes work.

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Was Cory Lidle's Airplane at Fault?

Magazine October 2006

James Fallows suspects not

The Cory Lidle Crash: One Fact, Two Explanations

Magazine October 2006

James Fallows ponders what might have gone wrong.

The Biggest Story in Photos

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…