Fallows has been a visiting professor at a number of universities in the U.S. and China, and has held the Chair in U.S. Media at the United States Studies Centre at University of Sydney. He is the author of eleven books, including National Defense (1981), for which he received the 1983 National Book Award,[5]Looking at the Sun (1994), Breaking the News (1996), Blind into Baghdad (2006), Postcards from Tomorrow Square (2009),[6]China Airborne (2012), and the national best-seller Our Towns (2018), which was co-written with his wife, Deborah Fallows, and made into an HBO documentary of the same name in 2021.
For the first two years of the Carter administration he was Carter's chief speechwriter. At age 27, he became the youngest person in history to hold that position. From 1979 through 1996, he was the Washington Editor for The Atlantic Monthly (now The Atlantic). 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 Awards 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 National Book Award for National Defense[5] and won a NY Emmy in 2010 for his role as host of a documentary series, Doing Business in China.[9]
Fallows's most influential articles have concerned military policy and military procurement, the college admissions process, technology, China and Japan, 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). It 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, Massachusetts were approved for service. He argued that the class bias of the Vietnam draft, which made it easy for him and for others from 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.[10]
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").[14] During the operating system wars of the early and mid-nineties, Fallows used and wrote about IBM's Operating System/2 (OS/2) and its battles with MSWindows, often frequenting the Canopus forum and online community on CompuServe. In 1999, he spent six months at Microsoft designing software for writers. More recently, he 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 years of the 2000s (decade) and of Google's "Zeitgeist" conference starting in 2005. He has written regular technology columns for The New York Times and The Atlantic.
In September 2021, Fallows launched a Substack site called Breaking the News, whose title was based on his 1996 book of the same name.
For the first paperback edition of National Defense, Fallows received a 1983 National Book Award for Nonfiction.[5][note 1]
He was a finalist at the National Magazine Award in the years 1988, 2006 (twice), 2007 and had won the award in 2003 for his article The Fifty-First State?.[20] The documentary series On The Frontlines: Doing Business in China in which he participated as an editorial supervisor and co-host (together with Emily Chang) was awarded the 2010 Emmy Award.[21]
In 2012, Fallows gained notice for the results of the testing of his genetic makeup. In addition to the fact that the lineage shown on the mitochondrial DNA of his mother's side did not resemble any other samples found in a large-scale study, it was shown that Fallows had an abnormally high percentage of Neanderthal ancestry, at 5% of his genes being of Neanderthal origin. This drew attention from numerous scientists.[23][24]
Personal life
Fallows is married to writer and researcher Deborah Fallows, with whom he has two sons.[25][26] The book Our Towns (2018) was co-authored and researched by the couple, which became the basis for an HBO documentary film in 2021.[27]
Fallows, James (1971). The water lords: Ralph Nader's study group report on industry and environmental crisis in Savannah, Georgia. Grossman Publishers.
Green, Mark; Fallows, James; Zwick, David (1972). Who runs Congress?. New York: Bantam Books.
^This was the award for paperback "General Nonfiction". From 1980 to 1983 in National Book Awards history there were several nonfiction subcategories including General Nonfiction, with dual hardcover and paperback awards in most categories. Most of the paperback award-winners were reprints, including this one.
^Fallows, James. "More Emmy News", James Fallows The Atlantic blog, April 20, 2010.
^Fallows, James (1977). "What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?" In Robbins, Mary Susannah, ed. (2007, orig. 1999). Against the Vietnam War: Writings by Activists. London and Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 159–164. ISBN978-0-7425-5914-1.
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