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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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West Point, Phillips Collection: two very different YouTube clips

By James Fallows

Nov 8 2009, 11:26 AM ET

West Point: Over the decades I have sung the praises of defense thinkers broadly associated with or inspired by the late Air Force colonel John Boyd. More on this general outlook to national strategy here. One prominent figure in this group is Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel and prolific author. Recently he was invited to West Point, his alma mater, to address cadets on the realities of military life and military thinking. His full address, broken into a series of YouTube clips, starts here.


Mostly for specialists, but for those interested in the effort to shape a sustainable U.S. military strategy, this is worthwhile. Macgregor's latest book is here.

Phillips Collection: This very elegant small museum/gallery near DuPont Circle in Washington now has has a display by the sculptor and artist Barbara Liotta (a close friend of my wife's).  This brief clip she shows how she installed her piece "Icarus" at the Phillips. This is interesting to me in showing the combination of elementary manual skills -- like tying knots around the small stones she is suspending -- with an original vision of how strings and stones can create a powerful 3-D structure. She has another gallery show in Washington here. Detail of suspended stone below; then, the YouTube clip.

LiottaRock.jpg


Meta point: the value of YouTube in showing two committed people from completely different realms of endeavor intensely at their work.


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