James Fallows
James Fallows
James Mackenzie Fallowsis an American writer and journalist. He has been a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly for many years. His work has also appeared in Slate, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The American Prospect, among others. He is a former editor of U.S. News & World Report, and as President Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter for two years was the youngest person ever to hold that job...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth2 August 1949
CountryUnited States of America
Every previous era looks innocent.
A basic rule of life for reporters is that you should spend your time talking with and learning about people who are not sending you press releases, rather than those who are.
Successful societies-those which progress economically and politically and can control the terms on which they deal with the outside world-succeed because they have found ways to match individual self-interest to the collective good.
Societies are healthiest when their radius of trust is broad and when people feel they can influence their own fate.
Our military plans should be based on the assumption of unpredictability, rather than on carefully drawn, static models of the world.
According to the Office of Technology Assessment, 3 Minuteman missiles and 7 Poseidon missiles could destroy 73 percent of oil-refining capacity in the Soviet Union.
The worst kind of management seeks a single optimum, a one-scale index of efficiency, like the mindless scales of 1 to 10 for grading a woman's beauty or one to four stars for a movie's appeal.
Make the important interesting.
There's no longer any surprise in noting that China has grave environmental problems.
In a time of transition for journalism all around the world, it's reassuring to know that some of the old ways endure.
I am explicitly not opening the giant can of worms that is the ongoing current discussion of patent, copyright, and trademark reform.
Everyone moans about the collapsing U.S. infrastructure.
As many people have chronicled, the decision to fight in Vietnam was a years-long accretion of step-by-step choices, each of which could be rationalized at the time. Invading Iraq was an unforced, unnecessary decision to risk everything on a 'war of choice' whose costs we are still paying.
When I was living in China, I learned to make things hyper-explicit because often they were being read by people whose command of English kept them from picking up what I thought were obvious signals.