James Fallows

One month before the election, The Atlantic and our partners at UCSD put on the second 'Atlantic Meets the Pacific' conference in La Jolla. Video of many of the sessions has now gone up on the UCSD site. (Videos from both the 2012 and the 2011 conferences are here.)

This year I got to interview Stacey Snider, the CEO of DreamWorks, about many aspects of a studio-executive's job. But the discussion began with the then-impending release of her next big movie, Lincoln. I hadn't seen it at that point and knew only vaguely about its theme, and so I didn't ask her about its substance or implications. Instead, starting 3:00 into the clip below, I ask her to tell us what we should know about the movie that, a month hence, we'd be hearing all about. Then I asked her how a studio thinks about releasing a wholly "worthy" movie like this, in the era of The Fast and the Furious (which was another of her movies).



This is not a mainly-Lincoln discussion, but I thought it was revealing and interesting overall -- including when Snider explains that the most-misunderstood part of her job is that her principal duty is to read: scripts, novels, newspapers, histories, magazines. But its discussion of what the studio was thinking with Lincoln will be interesting for anyone who has seen the movie (as I finally have -- you should certainly do so if you haven't) and thought about its implications. For now I direct you to Ta-Nehisi Coates's ongoing exploration of these issues.

One policy point only: time and again in writing about American politics and the American presidency, I say that things are a huge mess now, but they've often been extremely messy through our history. This movie is a useful reminder on that point.

As a bonus, I also got to interview Gretchen Rubin, creator of "The Happiness Project." I was genuinely fascinated and engaged by everything she says. The three minutes that start at time 22:00 also touch on one of my Major Principles for Life.



Thanks to Stacey Snider, Gretchen Rubin, all the other guests and interviewers, and the UCSD and Atlantic Life teams who made this happen. (I went from these interviews on to China, for my "Mr. China" article in the current issue.) See you in La Jolla next fall.

Was on, talking about China, a few days ago. Archived version here. Subject was an article in the magazine plus -- this is modern married life -- at the beginning and end of the segment, my wife's book on Chinese language. All this is just For The Record.

The third in the series of conversations I've been having with Damien Ma, of the Eurasia Group, is now online, here. It's the third one down on the list on that page; previous two available there, and here. The theme this time is an extension of one often discussed in our pages: namely, how serious, really, is the environmental challenge for China, and how do the country's efforts to cope with it measure up.

By the way, lots of other interesting videos on the Atlantic's (conveniently-named) "Video" channel, here. Worth checking out.

Back in February I mentioned how great it was that Bob Schapiro and his team had received two NY Emmy nominations for the "On the Frontlines: Doing Business in China" series that Bob had worked on and invested in for years. We ran many segments from the series on this site last summer. They are all in the "Doing Business in China" category of posts, and as soon as the "category" function is restored to our site, I'll be able to link to them as a group. For now, take my word for it that they were surprisingly enlightening and informative inside looks at  factories, offices, department stores, peasant markets, and all the other aspects of China's economic life that are so often discussed in the abstract in the rest of the world.

This past weekend, the series was the winner in one of its categories! After the jump, the official list of all members of Bob Schapiro's team. I am not a completely disinterested observer, having been the on-camera co-host of the series (with Emily Chang) and then joining the NYT's Joe Nocera for "what it all means" discussions after each segment. But Bob Schapiro, Dovar Chen, and others had done so much filming and interviewing before I got involved that I can dispassionately give congratulations to them.

If you're interested in seeing this now-award-winning series in the comfort of your own home, just click this box this corrected link, which allows you to see clips and offers a discount. Makes the perfect Mother's Day gift too.

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Following this first installment earlier in April of the "China Today" series of conversations between me and Damien Ma, of the Eurasia Group, a second has just gone online. It is here, with embedded version below.

The main theme of this second conversation is which country has the leverage over the other, via China's enormous loans to and investments in the United States. Ma and I see this more or less the same way -- but in quite a different way from what you'd think based on mainstream coverage of the topic or, especially, US talk shows or political speeches. Judge for yourself.

Today we kick off a series of video conversations about the Chinese economy, US-China relations, and the general swirl of developments that is modern China. It is called "China Today"; you can find it here; and it features short discussions between me and Damien Ma of the Eurasia Group, below.

We'll be running these as a series through the spring and again in the fall. In a sense they're an extension of last year's "Doing Business in China" series of videos -- which I will provide a link to when our site's "categories" feature is put back in action, and which as noted earlier is in contention for some documentary awards. The first discussion, which we recorded this past weekend, ends up being timely in regard to the Hu-Obama RMB discussions now in the news.

Interesting discussion: this morning I had the chance to listen in, as moderator, to a very lively discussion on the short- and long-run implications of the Google/China imbroglio and the Chinese government's apparent attempt to create its own info-sphere apart from the external internet. It was a joint production of the New America Foundation and Slate, and was held at the New America HQ in Washington today. Webcast available here; seriously, this was revealing and highlighted both convergences and divergence of view. Panelists:
  --Alec Ross, "Senior Advisor for Innovation" at the State Department, who left before the end, for work relating to Sec. of State Clinton's speech tomorrow on the Internet and Freedom;
 -- Rebecca MacKinnon, now of the Open Society Institute, long-time figure in China/internet policy;
 -- Evgeny Morozov, of Foreign Policy magazine and the Yahoo! Fellow at Georgetown;
 -- Timothy Wu, of Columbia University Law School.

Among the topics covered: the pluses and minuses in Google's decision; whether the company was right or wrong to have entered China in the first place; what divisions may exist inside the Chinese government; what response the US government and US companies should and will make; whether China is limiting its own long-term potential through creating a blinkered, censored info-sphere, and so on.  We even got in two questions from viewers of a webcast in China. All in all, more informative than policy-panels often turn out to be.

Related housekeeping note: if I live these next few days the way I should, I won't post anything in this space until early next week. That is even though there is a ton of pending, updated material on the Outlook -> Gmail migration, the Nexus One phone, new models of flying cars, interesting software, whether American politics is past redemption, specific suggestions on redeeming politics, the travails of journalism, and other treasured topics. And oh, yes, recent politics. For the second time in the past two years, I've reached a breaking point of overdue chores, messages I actually have to answer, and other things that can't wait any more. (If I've ignored your message, sorry! And, join the club!) Time to plow through all of that according to the rescue-and-recovery gospel promulgated by David "Getting Things Done" Allen, before doing anything else at all. See you in the run-up to the State of the Union Address.

For the record:
- Last night's panel discussion with Jim Lehrer on the News Hour about China, Obama, et cetera, here;

- Also last night on BBC America with Matt Frei, also about Obama and China, here;

- This morning on CSPAN Washington Journal, with Bill Scanlan, also about Obama and China, not on line at the moment but I will find it at some point (here);
 
- Interview last week on The Kindle Chronicles, with Len Edgerly, about e-reading devices, here;

- Radio interview two weeks ago, when I was in Australia, with Margaret Throsby of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation -- closest U.S. counterpart would be Terry Gross -- here. Her interviews are Fresh Air-like in combining policy and personal info. Also discussing my upcoming collaboration with the U.S. Studies Centre at the University of Sydney on future-of-media issues, a topic for another day.

- Just to round this out, plan to be on KQED "Forum" with Michael Krasny at 9:30am PST / 12:30pm EST today. (Audio here.)

- Charlie Rose this evening, with Elizabeth Economy and Nicholas Burns.

Last week Tim O'Reilly held his debut "Gov 2.0" conference in Washington. All the parts I saw were interesting and provocative. For a list of clips, podcasts, and so on, go here. For the record, here is a clip of a session I did with John Podesta, former Clinton White House chief of staff and now head of the Center for American Progress. We decided to do it as a split-shift Q-and-A: first, improbably, he asked me questions, and then I asked him some. We ran out of time before I could get many details on something I really wanted to know about: what it was like to spend time with Kim Jong Il, when Podesta accompanied Bill Clinton to North Korea this summer.

 

Seriously, the conference was a valuable series of presentations, worth perusing especially if you're feeling blue about the general tone of American political "discussion" these days and the fecklessness of many public efforts.

A nice place to start is with this presentation by Carl Malamud, whose efforts to open public data to (gasp) the public I've often noted over the years. I return to the theme: we take our encouragement where we can find it.

Starting this week and through the fall, the Atlantic's site will have a series of clips from the DVD series "Doing Business in China" in which I was involved before moving back to the United States. I'll have more to say shortly about the background of the project, and what I view as its potential importance. For now I'll just say thanks to: Bob Schapiro and Dovar Chen, who figured out how to get the original and quite startling video footage inside Chinese factories, bureaucracies, stores, etc over the past few years; Joe Nocera of the New York Times, who appears on the films in "what it all means" discussions with me after each segment; and Emily Chang, on-camera co-host. I'll also mention that when we were filming some of the narration in Shanghai, it was hot and humid beyond all belief, and we were standing in direct sun on a rooftop. More to come, and I will say that I learned a lot about China through the process of working on this project.

As part of the series of shortish interviews of big shots by Atlantic staffers at the Aspen Ideas Festival, our they-never-sleep web team has posted this Q-and-A between me and Eric Schmidt of Google:



I'll confess that the most surprising aspect of this brief discussion is all the whitish stuff that is flying around the screen while it goes on. That's not some technical video-quality glitch. The city was just full of fluff, or seeds, or whatever (maybe "cotton") from cottonwood trees in the last week of June. Nonetheless we bravely went ahead. The same stuff had been in the air in Beijing two or three weeks earlier, giving me the rare opportunity to find an environmental similarity between bustling big-city China and pristine Aspen.
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Reminder (earlier notice here): If you're in New York this Tuesday evening, June 2, consider checking out the screening at the Asia Society of a new documentary on the Chinese reality TV show for budding entrepreneurs, Win in China. Screening details here; my 2007 article about the show here.

At the main web site for the film, here, you can see a short trailer. I was going to embed a playable link to the trailer, but the opening image on the embed is a headshot of me being interviewed about the show, and that seemed too weird. So here's a different static shot from the trailer, below. It depicts one of the PK phases of the show, for "Player Kill." See my article, and presumably the film, for explanation of PK and much else.

In case you missed this the first time around (as I did), highly recommended: Alex Gibney's 2005 documentary on Enron, The Smartest Guys in the Room. Apart from its original, intrinsic interest in telling the sordid tale of Skilling, Fastow, Lay, et al, the film has surprising new resonance now.

On the one hand, the sums involved in this previous-world-record-scandal now seem quaintly small. Enron was a $60 billion (or whatever) corporation that went bust. Ooooooohh, say it isn't so!  That is practically a rounding-error financial disaster now, except when achieved by a single person like Madoff.

But the fundamental dynamics of the fraud are very, very similar to what we've heard about from a dozen other institutions in the past year. And -- the part that really got my attention -- the second-tier villains in the Enron story, the enablers and blind-eye-turners for the active fraud Enron had underway, included many that have emerged in full villainy since then, Merrill Lynch, Citibank, and boosterish business journalists prominent among them. Also: if you happened to be living in California during the Enron-intensifiedinduced rolling blackouts of nearly a decade ago, as I was, you will find yourself wishing that mob justice could have been applied to the Enron team. You'll also wonder why a guy named Lou Pai is not as notorious as the rest of them -- and how he escaped with his fortune mainly intact (and accompanied by what the film refers to as his "stripper girlfriend").

Worth seeing a first time -- or a second or third, with the new eyes of 2009. Alex Gibney, the director, is known to the world as last-year's Oscar winner for  Taxi to the Dark Side and within the Atlantic as the brother of our colleague James Gibney.

Attentive viewers of this site and readers of the latest issue of the magazine will have noticed ads for a new series of DVD's called On the Frontlines: Doing Business in China. Here is the back story.

I have a certain forelock-tugging reluctance to sell, sell, sell when it comes to my own personal products and projects. Just ask my publishers! But about team efforts I feel no such diffidence. On the contrary: I think this magazine is great, and I'll say so as often as I can to anyone I can. And I think that this video series, which is the product of many peoples' labor and creativity, is very, very good and worth a serious look.

A video journalist named Bob Schapiro, with his associates Dovar Chen and others, had worked for years getting on-camera interviews with many Chinese officials, industrialists, workers, analysts, etc about the current situation of the country. About two years ago I met them in Shanghai, when they were continuing their reporting and I was one of their B-roll interviewees. 

Later, as they put the series together, I saw some of the early cuts and was genuinely impressed with what they'd been able to see and record and present on screen. I happily accepted an offer to be involved in further shaping of the series and to be one of the on-camera hosts (along with the young journalist and performer Emily Chang). Joe Nocera, my long-time friend from the Washington Monthly and Texas Monthly who is now the king of the business journalists, eventually joined the project to provide talk-show type analysis after each segment, in on-camera discussions with me.

What I particularly like about the series is that it shows people, places, and things -- inside factories, inside Chinese companies, workers from remote areas -- that are hard for most Westerners to see, and that finally leave a different impression if you actually see them as opposed to reading about them (even in the best magazines). It also shows you a little bit of the hosts: mainly, you're seeing real Chinese people in action.
 
This is very much a team effort. I'll have more to say about it periodically. The Atlantic is a partner in presenting it, and I have the same enthusiasm for it as for other projects under our label. The main site is here; a few previews and trailers are here.  If you enter a "member code" Atl-Fallows there is a $50 discount. What a deal! Seriously, I learned things about parts of China I hadn't seen by working on the project, and I think others will find it informative too.
 

Twice during our past two and a half years of living in China, my wife and I have made vacation trips to Turkey. I had not been before and now really regret that fact.

My brief travel article in the new issue of the Atlantic, here, offers a vignette that may convey part of what I found so intriguing about Istanbul. This slide show, with the Atlantic's slickest new video-effect tools by Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, has more of the Ottoman empire look. Go see for yourself -- I mean, not just via the articles but with a trip to Turkey.
 

Late Thursday night, Beijing time, I did an interview about the Olympics for the Lehrer News Hour show that I think will be shown early Thursday night US time. This was foreign-correspondentry from Ye Olden Days: hearing a question over the telephone, carefully putting down the telephone so it's out of camera frame, and then answering the question into the camera -- and those recorded answers being FTPd to the US to be spliced with the questions. OK, semi-olden days. Basic theme: Zhongguo Jia You! Aoyun Hui Jia You!

* Update: Apparently not shown Thursday. Maybe Friday? Que sera sera.

 ** Updated update: The segment did run on Friday. Info here, with link to streaming video here.

You've heard about the gala feature-packed 150th Anniversary issue of the Atlantic Monthly! See it discussed, in real time and with exciting viewer call-ins, on C-Span's Washington Journal this coming Sunday morning, Oct 21, 9:15-10 am. (Assuming I can get up by then.)

It turns out that quite a few sessions from last week's "Google Zeitgeist" conference are available via YouTube, here. The session that starts up when you hit that page is a conversation between Tom Brokaw, of NBC, and his friend Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia and very much a non-digital-age guy. (Chouinard says that his fingers have never touched a keyboard.) Clip starts with a brief setup of their discussion, by me. The other interviews and clips are linked from that page.

The Google founders, at the "Zeitgeist 2007" conference on the Google campus:

Just before leaving China last month, I showed up in the pre-dawn haze (referring to my state of mind, not the weather) at the Shanghai Media Group TV studios for an interview with Jeff Brown, of the Lehrer News Hour, about the nature of Chinese factory life. Streaming video is here; RealAudio here; MP3 here; transcript here.