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James Fallows

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, will be published in May.
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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; he is at work on another book about China. 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.
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This is not, in itself, reason to oppose a candidate....

By James Fallows

Mar 9 2008, 11:30 PM ET

... but Hillary Clinton is plummeting rock-like to the bottom of the crucial "boiled frog" primary.

I still have not seen any evidence of Barack Obama using this hackneyed, heartless, and flat-out ignorant formulation. ("You throw a frog into a pot of boiling water....")

That is, he has not used it, "as far as I know."

John McCain? Again, as far as I know, he is boiled-frog-free.

But Senator Clinton goes there again and again.

When Senator Obama wants to start fighting tough on the stump, the path is clear. "Senator McCain has a lifetime of resisting boiled-frog idiocy. I have a lifetime of resisting boiled-frog idiocy. Senator Clinton has her boiled-frog speech."

(As promised for months, results of the exciting "come up with a replacement for the boiled frog cliche" contest will be announced any day now.)

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