19 Facts About James Fallows

1.

James Mackenzie Fallows was born on August 2,1949 and is an American writer and journalist.

2.

James Fallows is a former national correspondent for The Atlantic.

3.

James Fallows's work has appeared in Slate, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The American Prospect, among others.

4.

James Fallows is the author of eleven books, including National Defense, for which he received the 1983 National Book Award, Looking at the Sun, Breaking the News, Blind into Baghdad, Postcards from Tomorrow Square, China Airborne, and the national best-seller Our Towns, which was co-written with his wife, Deborah Fallows, and made into an HBO documentary of the same name in 2021.

5.

James Fallows was raised in Redlands, California, and graduated from Redlands High School.

6.

James Fallows studied American history and literature at Harvard College, where he was the editor of the daily newspaper, The Harvard Crimson.

7.

From 1970 to 1972, James Fallows studied economics at The Queen's College, Oxford, as a Rhodes scholar.

8.

James Fallows subsequently worked as an editor and writer for The Washington Monthly and Texas Monthly magazines.

9.

James Fallows wrote for the magazine about immigration, defense policy, politics, economics, computer technology, and other subjects.

10.

James Fallows won the National Book Award for National Defense and won a NY Emmy in 2010 for his role as host of a documentary series, Doing Business in China.

11.

James Fallows 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.

12.

James Fallows has received numerous honorary degrees, including from the University of Utah, the University of Maryland, the University of Redlands, Northwestern University, Ursinus College, and in 2017 the University of Vermont.

13.

James Fallows has had a long interest in technology, both writing about and helping to develop it.

14.

James Fallows was the on-stage host for the IDG Corporation's "Agenda" conference in the early years of the 2000s and of Google's "Zeitgeist" conference starting in 2005.

15.

James Fallows has written regular technology columns for The New York Times and The Atlantic.

16.

In September 2021, James Fallows launched a Substack site called Breaking the News, whose title was based on his 1996 book of the same name.

17.

James Fallows was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.

18.

In 2012, James Fallows gained notice for the results of the testing of his genetic makeup.

19.

James Fallows is married to writer and researcher Deborah James Fallows, with whom he has two sons.