James Fallows is a staff writer for The Atlantic, which he has written for since the late 1970s. He and his wife, Deborah Fallows, are the authors of the 2018 book Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America, which was a national best-seller and is the basis of a forthcoming HBO documentary. Fallows has reported for The Atlantic extensively from outside the United States, has written several books, and has won the National Magazine Award, American Book Award, and a New York Emmy for a documentary series on China. He also once worked for President Carter as chief speechwriter.
Previously
Much of America’s economic prosperity and success resides in its metropolitan areas. Not surprisingly, Silicon Valley and San Francisco, Austin, and Seattle are the places tha...
The US government misjudged the rise of China over the last decade — as the country has grown in economic power, it's become more rambunctious internationally, not less. Its B...
Two authors of acclaimed but thoroughly different memoirs of growing up in rural American communities dive into their experiences growing up in the heartland, what they think...
It’s easy, in the United States, to talk about China as a monolith. But the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. As in the West, Chinese society is divided by inequalit...
Following all-but-unopposed reelections this year, China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin both appear to be settling in as presidents for life. But while they’ve been...
Congress’s approval ratings are in the gutter, local candidates routinely campaign against Washington, and voter turnout for national elections rarely tops 60 percent. Politic...
Despite decades of economic decline and brain drain for many rural communities, some young American adults are choosing to stay in their rural communities, to return home if t...
Is the view from “out there” in America as bleak as our pundits and politicos keep telling us it is? Deborah and James Fallows — who have spent the past five years traveling t...
These journalists have made careers out of asking questions and listening to American voices. Especially over the past year, when we’ve so often been described as deeply and h...
With nearly 40 million people, the innovation powerhouse of Silicon Valley, and the sixth-largest economy in the world (larger than France’s, Italy’s, and India’s), California...
Activist Dolores Huerta, recipient of the 2012 Presidential Medal of Freedom, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, founder of the nonprofit media and cul...
Tens of thousands of men and women have left comfortable, privileged lives to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—and kill for it. The highest-ranking American currently...
China’s economy is slowing and the world has no choice but to pay attention. And in Beijing, Xi Jinping’s administration pursues policies increasingly divergent from democrati...
How can we break the Islamic State’s brand? How far does Putin’s media machine reach? How will China grapple with Twitter? In an era where nearly any data point is at our fing...
Cities’ identities are made and remade over time by their cultures, but is a city’s cultural identity integral to its survival? When infrastructure is crumbling, public educat...
As the 2016 presidential election approaches, the economy is a tale of two realities. On one hand, employment numbers, housing prices, and corporate profits have rebounded sub...
Red teaming is a practice as old as the role of the Devil’s Advocate, the eleventh-century Vatican official charged with discrediting candidates for sainthood. Today, red team...
White House press secretary Josh Earnest joins The Atlantic’s Jim Fallows for a conversation about what he has learned from dealing with the media in this post-factual age,...
Winner of the 2014 National Book Award, Osnos based “Age of Ambition” on eight years of living in Beijing, and traces the rise of the individual in China, and the clash betwee...
The way we produce food is getting a lot of attention these days, and for good reason. If current projections hold, we’ll have 9 billion mouths to feed by 2050 – 2 billion mor...
It’s the American dream: get a good education, work hard, buy a house, and achieve prosperity and success. This is the America we believe in — a nation of opportunity, constra...
