James Fallows is an American print and radio journalist who has been associated with The Atlantic Monthly for many years and has written eight books. His work has appeared in Slate, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The American Prospect, and other magazines. He was also one of Nader's Raiders at Public Citizen and Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter for the first two years of his presidency. This does not cite any references or sources. ... The Atlantic redirects here; for the ocean, see Atlantic Ocean. ... Slate Thick slate fragment Slate roof Slate is a fine-grained, homogeneous, metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low grade regional metamorphism. ... The New York Times is a daily newspaper published in New York City by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. ... This article is about the literary magazine. ... The New Yorker is an American magazine that publishes reportage, criticism, essays, cartoons, poetry and fiction. ... The American Prospect is a monthly magazine which focuses on US politics and public policy. ... Ralph Nader (born February 27, 1934) is an American attorney and political activist of Arabic descent. ... Public Citizen is a U.S. non-governmental organization, founded by Ralph Nader in 1971 and based in Washington, DC. Its activities span across a diverse range of issues, including energy policy, trade policy, campaign finance reform and accountability, consumer protection, medical malpractice, and public health. ... James Earl Jimmy Carter, Jr. ... Look up speechwriter in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

Fallows has had a long interest in technology, both writing about and helping to develop it. He's taken a special interest in personal information management software, going back to Lotus Agenda which he glowingly reviewed for The Atlantic in 1992 ("Of all the computer programs I have tried, Agenda is far and away the most interesting, and is one of the two or three most valuable") [1]. In 1999, he spent six months at Microsoft designing software for writers. More recently, he's has written about the design of the Open Source Applications Foundation's information manager, code-named Chandler. He was the on-stage host for the IDG Corporation's "Agenda" conference (no relation to Agenda software) in the early 2000s and of Google's "Zeitgeist" conference starting in 2005. He has written regular technology columns for the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly. Personal information management (PIM) refers to both the practice and the study of the activities people perform in order to acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve and use information items such as documents (paper-based and digital), web pages and email messages for everyday use to complete tasks (work-related and not... Agenda is a DOS-based personal information manager, designed by Mitch Kapor and Jerry Kaplan, and marketed by Lotus Software. ... Year 1992 (MCMXCII) was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will display full 1992 Gregorian calendar). ... Microsoft Corporation, (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is a multinational computer technology corporation with global annual revenue of US$44. ... The Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) is a non-profit organization founded by Mitch Kapor whose purpose is to effect widespread adoption of free software/open-source software. ... Chandler is the name of a personal information management software suite which is free and open source software released under the GNU General Public License. ...

Career

Fallows was raised in Redlands, California and graduated from Redlands High School. He studied American history and literature at Harvard College, where he was the editor of the daily newspaper, the Harvard Crimson. From 1970 to 1972 Fallows studied economics at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He subsequently worked as an editor and writer for the Washington Monthly and Texas Monthly magazines. For the first two years of the Carter administration he was Carter's chief speechwriter. From 1979 through 1996, Fallows was the Washington Editor for The Atlantic Monthly. For two years of that time. he was based in Texas, and for four years in Asia. He wrote for the magazine about immigration, defense policy, politics, economics, computer technology, and other subjects. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine award five times and won in 2003, for "The Fifty-First State?" (The Atlantic, November 2002), which was published six months before the invasion of Iraq and laid out the difficulties of occupying the country. He won the American Book Award, for "National Defense." Redlands is a city in San Bernardino County, California, United States. ... Official language(s) English Capital Sacramento Largest city Los Angeles Area  Ranked 3rd  - Total 158,302 sq mi (410,000 km²)  - Width 250 miles (400 km)  - Length 770 miles (1,240 km)  - % water 4. ... Redlands High School is located in Redlands, California, United States. ... Harvard Yard Harvard College is the undergraduate section and oldest school of Harvard University, founded in 1636. ... The Harvard Crimson, of Harvard University, is the United States oldest continuously published daily college newspaper. ... The University of Oxford (usually abbreviated as Oxon. ... Rhodes House in Oxford Rhodes Scholarships were created by Cecil John Rhodes. ... The Washington Monthly is a magazine based in Washington DC which covers American politics and government. ... Texas Monthly is a monthly American magazine published in Austin, Texas. ... James Earl Jimmy Carter, Jr. ...

Fallows's most influential articles have concerned military policy and military procurement, the college admissions process, technology, and the American war in Iraq. Early in his career, he wrote an article called "What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?" (Washington Monthly, October 1975). This described the "draft physical" day at the Boston Navy Yard in 1970, in which Fallows and his Harvard and MIT classmates overwhelmingly produced reasons for medical exemptions, while the white working class men of Chelsea were approved for service. He argued that the class bias of the Vietnam draft, which made it easy for influential and affluent families to avoid service, prolonged the war, and that this was a truth many opponents of the war found convenient to overlook.

In the 1980s and 1990s Fallows was a frequent contributor of commentaries to NPR's Morning Edition. From 1996 to 1998, he was the editor of US News & World Report. He was the founding chairman of the New America Foundation, a nonprofit group based in Washington D.C.. During the first six months of 1999, Fallows worked at Microsoft designing software for writers. During the 2000–2001 academic year, Fallows taught at the graduate school of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an instrument-rated pilot and in "Free Flight," published in 2001, he described the new generation of "personal jets" and other advanced aircraft now coming onto the market from Eclipse Aviation and Cirrus Design. Fallows has received numerous honorary degrees, including from the University of Utah, the University of Maryland, the University of Redlands, and in 2006 Northwestern University. “NPR” redirects here. ... Morning Edition is an American radio news program produced and distributed by National Public Radio (NPR). ... U.S. News & World Report is a weekly newsmagazine. ... The New America Foundation is a non-profit public policy institute and think tank located in Washington, D.C. that promotes innovative political solutions transcending conventional party lines -- what they call radical centrist politics. ... Aerial photo (looking NW) of the Washington Monument and the White House in Washington, DC. Washington, D.C., officially the District of Columbia (also known as D.C.; Washington; the Nations Capital; the District; and, historically, the Federal City) is the capital city and administrative district of the United... Microsoft Corporation, (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is a multinational computer technology corporation with global annual revenue of US$44. ... Sather tower (the Campanile) looking out over the San Francisco Bay and Mount Tamalpais. ... Eclipse Aviation Corporation is an Albuquerque, New Mexico based manufacturer of the Eclipse 500 Very Light Jet (VLJ). ... 2003 Cirrus SR22 The Cirrus Design Corporation is an aircraft manufacturer founded in 1984 by Alan and Dale Klapmeier. ... The University of Utah (also The U or the U of U or the UU) is a public university in Salt Lake City, Utah. ... The University of Maryland, College Park (also known as UM, UMD, or UMCP) is a public university located in the city of College Park, in Prince Georges County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., in the United States. ... The University of Redlands is a private liberal arts and sciences university located in Redlands, California. ... Northwestern University is a private, coeducational, non-sectarian research university located in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois. ...

Books

• The Water Lords: Ralph Nader's study group report on industry and environmental crisis in Savannah, Georgia (1971). Grossman Publishers. ISBN 0-670-75160-X
• Who Runs Congress (1972). With Mark Green and David Zwick. Bantam.
• National Defense (1981). Random House. ISBN 0-394-51824-1
• More Like Us: Making America Great Again (1989). Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-49857-0
• Looking at the Sun: The Rise of the New East Asian Economic and Political System (1994). Vintage Paperback (reprint ed, 1995) ISBN 0-679-76162-4
• Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy (1996). Pantheon Books. ISBN 0-679-44209-X. Vintage Paperback (1997) ISBN 0-679-75856-9
• Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel (2001) PublicAffairs Paberback (2002) ISBN 1-58648-140-1
• Blind into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq (2006) Vintage ISBN 978-0-307-27796-1

External links

• Official website.
• James Fallows profile, NNDB.
• Audio of lecture delivered to the World Affairs Council of Northern California.
• Audio/Video recording of James Fallows on his book Blind Into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq as part of the University of Chicago's World Beyond the Headlines series.