About credentialism and the Marilee Jones / MIT case

We can make it three for three — sort of — among Atlantic “voices” on the folly of being obsessed with whether someone has an academic credential, versus whether that person can actually do the job. I dealt with and respected Marilee Jones, the now-cashiered admissions director at MIT, during my various stints of writing about the (folly of the) college admissions process. Her message boiled down to: Oh, calm down, which is exactly the message students applying to college should hear.

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At least George Tenet is not telling a flat-out lie

Which is a difference between him and White House counselor Dan Bartlett.

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It happens to us all

This is Mike Gravel campaigning now:

This is Mike Gravel as I had thought of him until the instant I saw the recent Democratic debate:

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Welcome to TheAtlantic.com! (This site's address is about to change)

The Atlantic Monthly: 150 years old this year!

The Atlantic.com: online since 1993!

The new, improved, expanded Atlantic Online: ready for unveiling in the next few days!

Part of the new, improved, expandedness is the incorporation of blogs by various staff members, including me. So the new, improved, barely-expanded address for this little chronicle is http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com.

A switchover process is beginning. Over the next week or two archived posts, links, categories, and other material from this site will be transferred to the new one. Eventually (as happened with the mighty AndrewSullivan.com, when he joined the Atlantic) all outside links to this site itself will automatically be redirected to the appropriate part of the Atlantic's site. Until then new posts will appear in both places.

Unfortunately it turns out that RSS feeds can't be transferred automatically. So anyone interested can go to the Atlantic's site and set up a new RSS feed here. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, which -- as I look out the window here in Shanghai and see a man hauling a laden oxcart down the street, with himself in the role of ox -- is in the big view not that bad.

Thanks to people who have contacted me via this site, and special thanks to those who over the last decade have helped me cobble together an evolving web presence: David Rothman, Chet and Ginger Richards, Jonathan Kibera and Tom Fallows, and most recently, with this current WordPress site, James Cham. I am very grateful to all.

See you at TheAtlantic.com, and thanks for your interest.

Jim Fallows -- oops, I mean "JamesFallows.TheAtlantic.com."

Welcome to TheAtlantic.com! (This site's address is about to change)

The Atlantic Monthly: 150 years old this year!

The Atlantic.com: online since 1993!

The new, improved, expanded Atlantic Online: ready for unveiling in the next few days!

Part of the new, improved, expandedness is the incorporation of blogs by various staff members, including me. So the new, improved, barely-expanded address for this little chronicle is http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com.

A switchover process is beginning. Over the next week or two archived posts, links, categories, and other material from this site will be transferred to the new one. Eventually (as happened with the mighty AndrewSullivan.com, when he joined the Atlantic) all outside links to this site itself will automatically be redirected to the appropriate part of the Atlantic's site. Until then new posts will appear in both places.

Unfortunately it turns out that RSS feeds can't be transferred automatically. So anyone interested can go to the Atlantic's site and set up a new RSS feed here. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, which -- as I look out the window here in Shanghai and see a man hauling a laden oxcart down the street, with himself in the role of ox -- is in the big view not that bad.

Thanks to people who have contacted me via this site, and special thanks to those who over the last decade have helped me cobble together an evolving web presence: David Rothman, Chet and Ginger Richards, Jonathan Kibera and Tom Fallows, and most recently, with this current WordPress site, James Cham. I am very grateful to all.

See you at TheAtlantic.com, and thanks for your interest.

Jim Fallows -- oops, I mean "JamesFallows.TheAtlantic.com."

A new home on the web

Welcome to the new, expanded Atlantic web site!

This coming week, a revamped version of The Atlantic Online will be unveiled. Our magazine, the oldest in the country, was also one of the first to have a full-fledged web presence. The Atlantic Monthly is beginning its 151st year of operation, and TheAtlantic.com is in its 15th year.

This new version will feature online contributions – ok, blogs – by various staff members. I'll be one of them, and the occasional entries I've been making at JamesFallows.com will move here. The full new address is http://JamesFallows.TheAtlantic.com. Over the next week or two, the entries, archives, and links from my existing site will migrate here. (The "Monthly Archive" links, to the right, are connected to existing archives; for the moment, the "Categories" links connect only to new entries on this site.) Eventually – following the model of the big brother of our staff sites, AndrewSullivan.com, which recently shifted its enormous presence to AndrewSullivan.TheAtlantic.com – my old site's home address will automatically be redirected to this one.

The only switch we apparently can't do automatically is RSS feeds. Anyone who would like to re-up can click here to create a new RSS feed. Sorry we can't make this happen on its own. Life is cruel.

I'm proud to have written for The Atlantic since 1975, when I was a free-lancer in Austin (while my wife was in grad school at the University of Texas), and even prouder to have been on its staff for all but three of the years since 1979. Most of what I've done, and will continue to do, is "normal" writing for the "real" magazine. But, especially while based in China, I plan to augment that with pictures and dispatches for our web site, plus entries more suitable for this medium than for the magazine itself. I'm guessing that I will post entries about 1/100th as often as the other big-time bloggers assembled here, but I figure: any more might exhaust our readers, and certainly would exhaust me.

Sincere thanks for your interest in the magazine, and in our site.

Sayonara and thank-you note from old site

Background note on change-over plans from my own previous site is here.

Fair but depressing report on aviation

Matthew Wald has long covered the aviation-disaster beat (among other topics) for the New York Times. Through his stories he has struck me as being very, very conscious of all the things that can go wrong in the air. A healthy appreciation of the risks of flight is actually a desirable trait in pilots, but I had assumed that when he thought about pilots, especially amateur pilots, he would be in the "why would anyone take such a risk?" camp.

His story today in the New York Times is actually quite fair and calm sounding, which makes its conclusion the more sobering.

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About that Presidential Medal of Freedom, Mr. Tenet

Two and a half years ago, after interviewing many, many people involved in shaping Iraq-war policy, I wrote the following in the Atlantic (and then in Blind into Baghdad):

There is no evidence that the President and those closest to him ever talked systematically about the "opportunity costs" and tradeoffs in their decision to invade Iraq. No one has pointed to a meeting, a memo, a full set of discussions, about what America would gain and lose.

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Communicating in China

I got on an elevator on the 17th floor of an office building in Shanghai, headed for the lobby. It stopped at the 16th floor, where a conference was apparently just breaking up. Thirteen other people, all Chinese, got in -- as many as the elevator would hold. The door closed, people stood shoulder-to-shoulder-blade -- and ten kept talking on their mobile phones. Floor by floor in the descent, the volume went up, as each person spoke with ever-increasing loudness to compensate for the (ever-increasing) ambient noise.

The good news for China: mobile phones work everywhere --

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David Halberstam

The news of David Halberstam's death is a surprisingly shocking blow. In general, a man's passing at age 73 cannot seem wholly unnatural or out of sequence. But it was hard to think of Halberstam as being as anything but young. He was as full of ambition and energy and enthusiasm and spark as anyone I know, of any age.

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Is it just "fog"?

Or perhaps "mist"? As mentioned earlier, the relatively grim vista on Sunday morning -- Earth Day! -- could have been affected by weather that led to rain on Sunday afternoon. And today, Monday, it's actually bright and pretty outside. But a friend reminded me of what the cityscape looked like (from a higher floor in the same building), not long ago on a dry day. He calls his picture, below, "Shanghai Sunrise," since he was looking east toward the daybreak over Pudong. It features a sun whose color can't easily be explained by "mist" or "fog."

When people say China has a pollution problem... (updated)

.... this is the kind of thing they are talking about. Shanghai skyline, from our apartment near People's Square, 8:30am China time, Sunday morning, April 22, 2007. And Shanghai's not even that bad, compared with most other big cities.

UPDATE: After the jump are more photos of the blear, followed by the way the same scenes look on a very nice day here.

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Sun-Times vs China update (re Va Tech shooting)

The Chicago Sun-Times has altered the story by Michael Sneed mentioned in the previous post. Now there is an "explanation" about earlier suspicions pointing toward a Chinese suspect, rather than a Korean:

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Virginia Tech shooting: one American woman terrifies China

It was Tuesday night China time when the authorities in Blacksburg, Virginia, identified the gunman as a young Korean. For the previous 12 hours, the worst traits in the Chinese media had been brought out by an even-worse lapse by part of the U.S. media. One -- and as far as I can tell, only one -- journalist in the U.S. identified the killer publicly and quickly as a student from China who had recently been given his visa in Shanghai. During the long night after the shooting U.S. time, which was daytime Tuesday in China, that report was picked up -- surprise! -- by Fox news and a few smaller U.S. outlets, and, via web news sites, it quickly made its way to China.

What the Chinese media did next was bad in a predictable way.

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The uneven hand of the law

A few days ago on Nanjing Xi Lu, a very main tourist and shopping street in Shanghai, we saw a yelling and shoving match break out. A group of uniformed officials swooped down on the merchants who had laid out their blankets on the sidewalk to sell "Tibetan" jewelry, stone or wooden carvings, and similar little wares. The officials grabbed the goods and stuffed them into big bags with official markings on them. The team we saw was headed by an ominous-looking character, a tall, well-muscled young guy in plainclothes who wore sunglasses and a walkie-talkie with earpiece, Secret Service-style.

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Here is a good idea: Brits drop "war on terror"

It has been obvious for quite a while that calling the effort to contain violent extremists a "global war on terror" does nothing to help the cause, and hurts in many ways. It unifies opponents who might otherwise have little in common. It gives them what they want, in elevating them to parity with the world's great powers. To the extent the U.S. or U.K. public pays attention to it, it further helps the terrorist cause, by making people, well, terrorized. To the extent the public comes to ignore it, it cheapens the whole concept of war.

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Wolfowitz = Swaggart, chap. 1

I was wrong to suggest that Paul Wolfowitz was like Robert McNamara. That is disrespectful to McNamara. The better comparison is to Jimmy Swaggart. Let me explain, through the roundabout medium of Norman Podhoretz.

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A great 'graphic novel': Shenzhen by Guy Delisle

I have been spending a lot of time in southern China, especially in the factory-wonderworld of the Pearl River Delta region. The latest China Southern flight from Shenzhen, in this delta, back to Shanghai was delayed many hours -- "Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to tell you that Flight XXXX to Shanghai will be delayed because of: delay." But the time was more pleasant thanks to Guy Delisle's wonderful comic book -- oops, graphic novel -- about his own journey to the same city, Shenzhen.

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Reason to live, cont. (Beer in Shanghai dept.)

Purchased yesterday from the young heroes working to improve life in Shanghai:

Foreground: beer skyline. Background: Shanghai skyline, east side of People's Square.

Intellectual piracy? Who, us?

In observation of the U.S. announcement that it was taking complaints about illegal Chinese copying of books, videos, music, software, etc to the WTO, my wife and I decided to check out the local pirate-video stores. (Here, the way the NY Times explains the complaint; here, the way the People's Daily does. Any time you're tempted to think the world is in any sense "flat," try a compare-and-contrast exercise like this to see how unevenly ideas and perspectives spread beyond their native shores.)

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Signs that the apocalypse is near (Shanghai edition)

1) On a beautiful spring afternoon in the city, the gingko trees along (relatively) charming Da Gu Lu, beginning to leaf out, are filled with .... twittering birds! Where did they come from?

More ominous thought: how long can they last?

2) On Chengdu Lu, beneath the North-South Elevated Highway, a taxicab roars up to a red light, like always, and prepares like always to mow down the pedestrians in a marked crosswalk, with the green light in their favor. But a uniformed "traffic assistant" steps bravely into the cab's path,

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Defining the "op-ed book" (David Frum edition)

Imagine my surprise when, in a wee-hours bout of jet lag on the first evening back in Shanghai, I picked up a copy of the International Herald Tribune. No, the surprise was not the radical shift in media experience: the previous morning, in Washington, I had waded through the thick heap of that one day's New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, feeling like an explorer cutting through the jungle with a machete. Now, I had one slim, precious little document in my hands, which I felt I had to guard carefully and every one of whose articles I intended to pore over.

Rather the surprise was what my poring-over revealed.

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Oddest advertising slogan in America? (this week)

In the olden days -- that is, last month, before my hiatus in the US -- listening to NPR broadcasts on the internet meant using either the Real or the Windows Media player, or iTunes. Now NPR appears to have its own proprietary NPR Audio Player. It works fine, and -- good for NPR -- has space for a billboard-ad sponsor, bringing at least some revenue to the network.

Right now the sponsor is the British tourism agency, which is flogging the motto: "Be a BRIT different."

Huh??? Did any native speaker of, well, American, get a look at this campaign before it went live?

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Worst pilot in America?

Many pilot-enthusiast forums (including my favorite, the Cirrus Owners and Pilots Association site) are buzzing about this audio file, which indeed is quite incredible, plus incredibly embarrassing.

Basic plotline: at Sanford airport, just north of Orlando, a commercial jetliner tells air traffic control that it has a problem. The plane is coming in for a landing, with 100+ people aboard, and the pilots can't be sure whether the nose wheel has come down.

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Happy flying, Charles Simonyi

I had two things in common with Charles Simonyi when I lived in Seattle in 1999 and 2000: an interest in flying, and a friendship with Michael Kinsley, who introduced us at lunch one day in a dining hall on the Microsoft campus. The distance in all other ways was vast.

Simonyi was one of the company's true titans, second only to the incomparable BillG on the general-esteem scale. According to a recent article in Technology Review, Gates himself calls Simonyi "one of the great programmers of all time." I was a lowly short-term contractor at Microsoft, going to work each day adorned with the "orange badge of shame," the orange-colored ID for temp workers, as opposed to the blue badge for "real" employees. For six months I was on the team preparing the next upgrade to Word -- a program Simonyi had invented. From the (very nice) house my wife and I had rented in Seattle's Leschi district, on the slopes of the west bank of Lake Washington, we could see Simonyi's (futuristic and stupendous) destination-spa/home being finished on the opposite shore. Simonyi has frequently dated Martha Stewart. I have been more fortunate in my love life.

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Wolfowitz = McNamara, chapter 402

From John Cassidy's (very good) profile of Paul Wolfowitz as head of the World Bank, in the New Yorker:

Wolfowitz refused to talk about Iraq specifically, but he told me that he still believes in the vision of a moderate, democratic Middle East.

Jeez louise. How much inner peace does it suggest about a person -- the most famed intellectual in the Bush administration -- if he refuses to talk about the event for which he will always be principally known? ("John Hinckley refused to talk about shooting President Reagan specifically, but he told me that he still believes in his vision of a happy future with Jodie Foster.")

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Tech column from May issue of the Atlantic now up

Tech column on Central Desktop, Basecamp, NoteShare, etc, now posted on the Atlantic's site. Subscribers only. Subscribe!

Traveling around the U.S. to see friends and family, desperately loading in provisions for the next long stint in China (which begins with DC-SF-Shanghai flight tomorrow), taking a while off to be sick, talking with colleagues about next largish article from China, and other duties can keep a man off the internet, as they have done me for me through the last week. But soon enough the stimulation of landing at Pudong airport, fighting through the crowds and peering through the haze, and thinking: a lot of interesting things are going on.