James Fallows is an American print and radio journalist who has been associated with The Atlantic Monthly for many years and has written seven 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 Carter's chief speechwriter for the first two years of his presidency.

Fallows has had a long interest in technology, both writing about it and helping 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 been involved in the design of the Open Source Application Foundation 's information manager, code-named Chandler.

Career

Fallows was born and raised in Redlands, California. He studied American history and literature at Harvard University, where he was the editor of the daily newspaper, the Harvard Crimson. From 1970 to 1972 Fallows studied economics at 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.

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. Since 1998, he has been chairman of the board 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 2001–2002 academic year, Fallows taught at the graduate school of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

Books

• The Water Lords: Ralph Nader's study group report on industry and environmental crisis in Savannah, Georgia (1971)
• National Defense (1981)
• More Like Us (1989)
• Looking at the Sun (1994)
• Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy (1996)
• Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel (2001)

External links

• Official website.
• James Fallows profile, NNDB.
• Agenda review.