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
No real-world human being brings to the U.S. presidency the range of attributes necessary for full success in the job.
For a decade or more after the Vietnam war, the people who had guided the U.S. to disaster decently shrank from the public stage.
I seem to be one of the few people in journalism who never worked or wrote for the 'Boston Phoenix.' I certainly read and admired it, and feel the same general malaise at news that it is gone.
I am about as pro-Google a person as you're going to find in the media. I've had friends at all levels of the company since its founding, and still do now.
The hoary joke in the literary world, based on 'Dreams From My Father,' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer.
When a company is charging money for a product - as Evernote does for all above its most basic service, and same for Dropbox and SugarSync - you understand its incentive for sticking with that product.
The pandering and ignorance-across-party-lines represented by the John McCain-Hillary Clinton united front for a temporary reduction in the gasoline tax should make Americans hold their heads in their hands and moan [...] Please. This is embarrassing. It makes me long for the good old days of debating about flag pins on the lapel.
Every previous era looks innocent.
Societies are healthiest when their radius of trust is broad and when people feel they can influence their own fate.
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.
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.