Interview about Great Firewall in Network World

In the new issue of the tech journal Network World, I have this Q-and-A, with Carolyn Duffy Marsan, about the workings, weaknesses, and evolution of China's "Great Firewall," expanding on this article in the Atlantic two months back.

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The Atlantic's motto (cont.): Today's news three years ago

Just one last reminder, this one prompted by the Bear Stearns news and the collapse of Asian stock markets around me as I type, of the Atlantic's "Countdown to a Meltdown" cover story, by me, from the summer of 2005.

The point of steering readers toward the article once more is its attempt to explain, while it was going on, the origins of the credit bubble whose collapse is now causing problems.

Some "predictions" in this fictional history are looking pretty shaky now -- for instance, the assumption that the first black American with a serious chance at the presidency would be a four-star Army general running as a Republican. (Our 45th president in this scenario, the "Desert Eagle," becomes a hero by leading the raid that captures Osama bin Laden just before the 2012 elections.) But some of the other predictions, about the spread of panic from the real estate markets to the international financial system.....

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You really do learn something by reading the paper

And what I learned from today's New York Times is that tomorrow the Atlantic will remove the firewall that for years has applied to most articles in the print magazine and our very extensive archives.

Hmmm! The Atlantic, believe it or not, has been a serial innovator and pioneer in the web area. Back in the dimly-remembered mid-1990s it was one of the first non-tech magazines even to have a web site and to put much of its content online free. A few years ago it changed to the firewall / subscribers only model. Now, with the centrality of the web to the kinds of discussions we hope to provoke, this latest change, which should certainly continue the expansion of the site's influence and audience.

It will also do something that I think will be of even greater long-term importance:

The Atlantic Monthly, as we have pointed out oh, once or twice in the last while, is now 150 years old. In fact, working toward 151.

There is a phenomenal amount of fascinating and historically important material in our archives from those 150+ years. Not all of it is available online. (If you have seen the bookcases full of back volumes, you know what a gigantic challenge the mere scanning and OCR-ing will be.) Some of the highlights have been collected by Robert Vare and Daniel Smith in their superb recent 150th Anniversary anthology.

But a lot of unexplored material is available, and searchable, in the archives, and this will be an important journalistic, academic, and historic resource. Once again, a new era begins.

(I no longer have to say, "Subscribers Only" about some articles. Still -- subscribe! The timeless story of media-and-technology is that as new "delivery vehicles" arrive, they create additional forms of receiving information; eliminate a few old forms, like the cuneiform tablet; but mainly expand the range of choices people have by leaving most old forms in place. Despite television, we still have radio; despite radio and television and the internet, we still have books; despite email we still have phone calls; and for quite a while despite the internet we will still have something physically like a book or magazine, just because there are so many times and places where it's the best way to see what you want to look at. Eg: On my latest 13-hour plane flight, some of passengers mainly used laptops or iPods. Virtually all had some kind of book or magazine. Magazine content, words and pictures alike, looks far far better in real magazines -- though the web version is indispensable.)

In any case, another new beginning as of tomorrow.

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On the actual, you know, "issues" the next President will face

Enough of this campaign hubbub! Whoever is left standing to be sworn in 377 days from now will suddenly have to worry about things like.... the Chinese government's enormous hoard of U.S. dollar assets.

My attempt to explain how exactly that pile of money was stacked up, and what the Chinese government has in mind for it, in this article from the Atlantic's new January-February issue. If you been yearning to know how the dollar you spend at Wal-Mart or CVS is eventually reincarnated as a Chinese-held Treasury note, or why Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone is about the most reviled foreigner in China at the moment, your dreams have come true.

Unlike most previous such announcements, I don't have to say "Subscribers Only" for this one. It's in the free section of our site. Nonetheless, as always, Subscribe! Among other reasons, you'll get to see the wonderful full-sized version of the wonderful Guy Billout's illustration for the piece, reproduced in miniature online and below.

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Pandas en masse

Story about the Wolong Panda Reserve, the one place on earth where you can see herds of pandas, now out in our December issue. Story here. (Subscribers only; subscribe!) Free narrated slide show here. While I'm at it, Pandas International site, where Americans can make tax-deductible donations to support Wolong and other panda protection efforts, here.

Young pandas in action: chow time:

Young panda in repose:

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Throwing like a girl

The most fun I have had (so far) researching a magazine article was 11 years ago, for an Atlantic piece called "Throwing Like a Girl."

It was fun because, as the piece explains: I got to interview the actor John Goodman about how he learned to throw left-handed (to play Babe Ruth in the movie The Babe). I got to watch super slo-mo tapes of Major League pitchers with the sports-science whiz Vic Braden, at whose tennis camp I had previously had my own sporting form slo-mo analyzed (to great dismay). And I got to ask the press secretary to Hillary Clinton, then America's First Lady, where Mrs. Clinton had developed her throwing arm -- and why, ahem, she had unfortunately thrown out an Opening Day pitch at Wrigley Field "like a girl."

In the interests of science I also got to do something that I now recommend to every American male: play catch with your spouse, girlfriend, mother, or other female acquaintance who does not think of herself as having a good arm, using your "off" hand to throw. I explain in the article why this is a good thing to do.

This article has now been excavated from the Atlantic's for-pay archives and is available on a non-firewalled "Pursuits" page here. (Still -- subscribe! Right after you have that left-handed-if-you're-a-righty game of catch.)

1) Body directed straight-on toward the target, rather than turned 90 degrees away;

2) Elbow lower than shoulder as your arm comes forward;

3) Wrist inside elbow (closer to your head) as you release the ball and/or palm facing up, giving a pushing rather than hurling motion. Now you know.

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Radio interview: Nevada Public Radio, about Macau

With Dave Berns on KNPR's "State of Nevada" program. Real-time description of watching welders working in the dark on nearby Shanghai skyscraper, plus real-time coughing from my once-very-healthy lungs.

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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.

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'Declaring Victory' on free part of Atlantic site

The National Magazine Awards are a highly quirky part of journalistic culture, but magazines naturally embrace any good news they offer and scratch their heads at the nuttyness of it all when the results are disappointing -- I mean, "surprising." Meaning no disrespect to anyone, it was, umm, surprising last year when ESPN: The Magazine beat The New Yorker in the "General Excellence" category.

This year's crop of finalists was just announced, and the news the Atlantic will embrace is that we are in the finals in three categories, including my "Declaring Victory" article for the "Public Interest" award. The Atlantic's web site has, for now, made its nominated entries (and many past winners) freely available, not just for subscribers. My article, from September 2006, is here.

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Tech column on web translation tools now at Atlantic site

This tech column about improved online translation tools, especially from Google, is now on the Atlantic's site. (Subscribers only.)

Biggest surprise for me while reporting the story: such systems have gone from being pathetically flawed to becoming useable and even, gasp, "useful," within tight constraints.

Continue reading "Tech column on web translation tools now at Atlantic site" »

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'Win in China' now at Atlantic site

The April issue of the Atlantic is online, including my article on the Chinese reality show "Win in China." (Chinese name 赢在中国, or Ying zai Zhongguo. Chinese home site for the show here.) The main article is for Atlantic subscribers only (subscribe!), but this non-blocked feature has video clips that give the flavor of the show.

Viewing tips: background music for clip #1 is the show's theme song -- really, its anthem of patriotism and limitless ambition. (The song's constant refrain is Zai lu shang, 在路上 -- "on the road" or "on the way.") Clip #2 gives a flavor of the weekly Apprentice-style team competitions, in this case an effort to induce Chinese schoolchildren to try that odd-seeming substance, milk. Clip #3 depicts a showdown described in the article, the final "PK" session, or "Player Kill," between "Wild Wolf" Zhou Yu, the uneducated, hot-tempered, country-boy finalist, and the highest-finishing female contestant, Ms. Zhou Jin, who delivered a baby midway through the series and whose strategy in this session is to provoke "Wild Wolf" into blowing his top.

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Archival note: M-16 article

Magazine articles published before the early 1990s are available digitally in only hit-or-miss fashion. Republication rights were still being worked out then; Nexis coverage from that time is erratic; some material has been scanned in and much has not. I am aware of this spotty coverage mainly as it affects two Atlantic articles I did in this period: "A Damaged Culture," about the Philippines; and "M-16: A Bureaucratic Horror Story," about how internal bureaucratic squabbling left American troops in Vietnam with defective, jam-prone weapons. I frequently receive requests for copies of these articles.

I have finally found, and earlier posted, a digital version of the Philippine article, which appeared in expanded form in Looking at the Sun. I am not aware of a digital version of the M-16 article. For those who ask (and I write this because I've gotten another round of requests), it too appeared in expanded book form, in National Defense. That book was published in 1981 and has recently gone out of print, but used copies are easily and cheaply available on Amazon. That is where to look if you are interested.

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Tech column also now out in the Atlantic

Literature is born of tragedy -- and so are tech columns, including one on backups spurred by my series of unhappy surprises while testing beta software last summer and fall. This is now out in the March issue. Also, a sidebar about two very different undertakings that in their own, hard-to-compare ways are both very admirable: the Global Giving online philanthropy site, and the Gyro-Q and Results Manager organizing tools from the small software company Gyronix.

I am never 100% sure which articles are subscriber-only, since as an actual paying subscriber I see them in one uniform list. If these are behind the wall, well then...

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Mr. Zhang's Dream Town now at Atlantic site

The March issue of the Atlantic is now out; with any luck, I'll see it myself in three or four weeks when the mail makes its way across the mighty ocean. A slide show about Mr. Zhang's utopia/mystery land in Hunan province is now at the Atlantic's site. So is the story itself; but, hey, these things are always better in real print.

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Archive: "Tough but fair" article about The Economist Magazine, from 1991

"The Economics of the Colonial Cringe," published in the Washington Post's Outlook section on October 6, 1991, now in archives section, here. (Posting is largely for my own convenience, since it's not otherwise available online.) Main update: In the 15 years since have met and become friends with a number of Economist editors, who are generally wonderful folk! One is now a close colleague at work. Still.....

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Atlantic tech column about Vista and Office2007

Is here on the Atlantic's web site.

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China article in the Atlantic

It is here, subscribers only. Subscribe!

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Improbable but true: James Webb-James Fallows joint article on the draft

I had known Jim Webb for about a year, and had worked for the Atlantic for about the same amount of time, when I proposed to him early in 1980 that we jointly undertake a project for the magazine. The results, published for the first time on the Atlantic's web site, are here (Webb's article) and here (mine); the back story follows.

Continue reading "Improbable but true: James Webb-James Fallows joint article on the draft" »

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Another useful link: Foreign Affairs

Roundtable discussion sponsored by Foreign Affairs, on John Mueller's recent article saying that the homegrown terror threat is vastly overstated. Interesting to see how this discussion differs from the range of acceptable opinion among politicians.

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Weird alignment of the cosmos: Fox News & Berkeley Planet

I'll confess this doesn't happen very often -- actually, never before, for me. An article receives complementary mentions on the same day from Fox News and the Berkeley Daily Planet.

Continue reading "Weird alignment of the cosmos: Fox News & Berkeley Planet" »

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"Declaring Victory" after the foiled London airline plot

An update on the Atlantic's web site, explaining why the logic of the "Declaring Victory" is strengthened rather than undermined by the news of the foiled London airline plot. Update is here. Main article is subscribers-only; the update is open.

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"Endgaming the Terror War," interview at Atlantic online (free)

"James Fallows talks about the surprising strides we've made against al-Qaeda -- and why declaring victory will make us safer."

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Article in July/August 2006 Technology Review on Web 2.0

Here is my recent article in Technology Review about the ups and downs of living a boy-in-the-bubble-style Web 2.0 life.

Continue reading "Article in July/August 2006 Technology Review on Web 2.0" »

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Review of David Frum's book on the 1970s

My review in the March, 2000 Washington Monthly of David Frum's "How We Got Here: The 1970s -- the Decade that Brought You Modern Life" is here, on the Monthly's web site.

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"The Economics of the Colonial Cringe," about The Economist magazine; Washington Post, 1991

The Economics of the Colonial Cringe: Pseudonomics and the Sneer on the Face of The Economist.

By James Fallows; Washington Post "Outlook"section; October 6, 1991.

Last summer, a government man who helps make international economic policy told me (with a thoughtful expression) he was reading "quite an interesting new book" about the stunning economic rise of East Asia. "The intriguing thing is, it shows that market forces really were the explanation!" he exclaimed in delight. "Industrial policies and government tinkering didn't matter that much."

By chance, I had just read the very book -- Governing the Market by Robert Wade. This detailed study, citing heaps of evidence, had in fact concluded nearly the opposite: that East Asian governments had tinkered plenty, directly benefiting industry far beyond anything "market forces" could have done.

I knew something else about the book: The Economist magazine had just reviewed it and mischaracterized its message almost exactly the way the government official had.

Had he actually read the book? Maybe, but somehow I have my doubts.

What I saw that day, I suspect, was just another illustration of the power of Washington's current Sacred Cow: The Economist magazine, which each week unwholesomely purveys smarty-pants English attitudes on our shores.

Like other sacred cows, The Economist obviously has its virtues. Compared to any of the American newsmagazines, The Economist gets by with a skeleton staff of mainly young writers, who turn out a prodigious amount of copy each week. The news stories have lots of informative tidbits, and the "leaders," or editorials, in the front of the magazine often take up usefully quirky subjects. My recent favorite is one explaining why the rise of English as an international language is a short-term convenience but a long-term disaster for Americans and Englishmen. The Koreans, Russians, Japanese and even Dutch can listen in on what we're saying. We have no private language to scheme in, as they do.

But what signifies a sacred cow is that people revere it for fashionable reasons, and out of all proportion to its real strengths and weaknesses. The Economist, whose American circulation has risen from 40,000 to 183,000 over the last 10 years, seems to have reached that point among America's professional class.

For example: Several weeks ago, The New York Times Magazine ran a profile of Bill Gates, the "boy billionaire" founder of Microsoft. Here is someone with many good reasons to be vain, but the main vanity he seemed to push in the article was his association with The Economist. (Gates said that he didn't have a TV in his house, because if he had one he'd never have time to read The Economist cover to cover, "as I do now.")

As part of a feud with Newsweek's Robert Samuelson, Robert Reich, of Harvard, wrote a letter-to-the-editor that said: "I, for one, don't get my economics news from Newsweek. I rely on The Economist -- published in London." Humphrey Greddon wrote of this episode in Spy: "If so, then Reich resembles many semipretentious undergraduates, bankers and newsmagazine business writers in this country. The omniscient tone and pedantry of The Economist must impress the insecure American cousins in its readership." [2006 Update: I was then in the middle of my own little squabble with Reich, long forgotten on both sides -- I think!]

In functional terms, The Economist is more like the Wall Street Journal than like any other American publication. In each there's a kind of war going on between the news articles and the editorial pages. The news articles are not overly biased and try to convey the complex reality of, well, the news. Meanwhile, the editorials and "leaders" push a consistent line, often at odds with the facts reported on the news pages of the same issue.

For The Economist, the tension is most obvious in its coverage of Japan. According to the editorial line, Japan is becoming more and more market-minded, its trade surplus is bound to disappear, its economic mandarins are losing power by the minute and its people are about to revolt against the onerous 'salaryman' life. Meanwhile the news stories point out that things aren't evolving quite according to editorial plan. [Update: Japan's financial markets and real estate were headed for problems right about then. But its exports and trade surplus have kept chugging right along, and its mandarins and salarymen have essentially retained their same roles.]

To give one example from several hundred possibilities, last year The Economist's correspondent in Tokyo detailed the Japanese government's plan to keep foreign companies from selling advanced "amorphous metals" to Japanese customers, until Japanese firms could gear up to make the products on their own. A few pages later in the same issue, a book review announced, with great confidence but without noticeable evidence, that Asia's "stunning growth was built on efficient investment and innovation, which in turn owed everything to openness to trade."

More recently, an Economist article pointed out that Japan's trade surplus is on the rise with nearly all its partners. Its conclusion was not that the magazine should revise its theories but that readers should prepare for "whining" (translation from the British "whingeing") from the small-minded protectionists in the rest of the world.

The editorial line pushed by The Economist is also functionally similar to the Journal's. Markets nearly always work, and government meddling nearly always fails. If some fact seems not to fit this schema -- for instance, the success of Asian governments in meddling with their economies -- the fact should be harumphed out of the way. [Updated example: China.] Political leaders must above all be firm, like the Divine Mrs. T. Writers and thinkers should above all be "clever," The Economist's highest term of praise. (The Journal's counterpart is "realistic.") Those who disagree are to be mocked -- as sissies by the Journal and dim bulbs by The Economist. The world should be viewed, from above, with a pitying amusement. Why can't they be as clever as we?

The real question about this editorial approach is why it's paid off better for The Economist than for the Journal. Why is it impossible to imagine a professor boasting in print, "I rely on the Wall Street Journal -- published in New York"? Why do people apparently buy the Journal (or The Washington Post or the New York Times) only if they want actually to read it -- rather than just to carry it around, as a suspiciously large number of Economist "readers" seem to do?

The roots of the explanation stretch back to 1776 and America's incomplete separation from the motherland. England is a perfectly nice little country, with many achievements to its credit. If you like to attend plays, want to read comic novels, hope to spare your skin the damaging effects of the sun, then England's the place for you. Countries once part of its empire, including America, are much better off than those that were under the Spanish or French. But England has two completely loathsome traits, which in exported form are involved in the reverence for The Economist.

The first is, of course, the English class system. Yes, America has its own tangled class problem, which is becoming worse as public schools and the military lose their democratizing function. But Americans can still be embarrassed by obvious reminders of class difference. Except perhaps in Beverly Hills and Manhattan, when the refrigerator repairman comes to the doctor's house, the doctor is supposed to treat him as if they're equals -- not as "My good man."

Perhaps it is not England's fault, or The Economist's, that those Americans who would love to have a similar class system here -- with themselves on top! -- take on English airs. (As Henry Allen of The Post has pointed out, the right response to this phenomenon is not Anglophobia but Anglophilophobia.) But The Economist has certainly, if only half-consciously, traded on the "published in London" snob appeal. "Americans imagine that The Economist is better written," says Time magazine's Richard Stengel, "because they impute an English accent to what they read."

There are certain English products whose quaintness is put on mainly for export purposes -- they're the equivalent of Ye Olde Tea Shoppe-style tourist traps, which the locals avoid. Something similar is going on with The Economist. The Economist now has considerably fewer readers -- and is strangely less influential -- in England than in America. Indeed, it is disdained by the very Englishmen whom many American readers would most love to emulate: the secure upper and upper middle classes.

In America, the magazine presents itself as a kind of voice of the super-confident English aristocracy, whereas its advertisements within England play on the status-anxiety of its readers there. For example, one billboard displayed in England reads in bold print: "I never read The Economist." The punch line comes in the identification of the hapless confessor of this dereliction, a "Management trainee -- aged 44."

Another key to the magazine's boom in America during the 1980s must lie in its sycophancy toward Ronald Reagan in particular and American culture in general. We are all so used to being sneered at by the French or Swedes. To hear someone who poses as a British aristocrat celebrating American vigor -- it's just irresistible! If it came from the Wall Street Journal or USA Today, we'd consider it plain boosterism, but it works from The Economist, since we imagine we're overhearing the foreigners' real views. I think the flattery is actually the most refined and vicious version of the old British condescension toward the colonies. These Yanks! They'll believe anything! Let's give them another dose of how the world looks up to them!

The other ugly English trait promoting The Economist's success in America is the Oxford Union argumentative style. At its epitome, it involves a stance so cocksure of its rightness and superiority that it would be a shame to freight it with mere fact.

American debate contests involve grinding, yearlong concentration on one doughy issue, like arms control. The forte of Oxford-style debate is to be able to sound certain and convincing about a topic pulled out of the air a few minutes before, such as "Resolved: That women are not the fairer sex." (The BBC radio shows "My Word" and "My Music," carried on National Public Radio, give a sample of the desired impromptu glibness.)

Economist leaders and the covers that trumpet their message offer Americans a blast of this style. Michael Kinsley, who once worked at The Economist, wrote that the standard Economist leader gives you the feeling that the writer started out knowing that three steps must be taken immediately -- and then tried to think what the steps should be.

A certain modesty would seem appropriate in The Economist's leaders these days, considering that after 10 years in which the Thatcher government essentially did what the magazine said, Britain has the weakest economy in Europe. (Remind me, again, why we're looking to the British for economic advice.) But the implied message of the leaders often seems to be, "I took a First at Oxford. I'm right."

The cover of anonymity for the magazine's writers is an important part of its omniscient stance, among other reasons because it conceals the extreme youth of much of the staff. "The magazine is written by young people pretending to be old people," says Michael Lewis, the author of "Liar's Poker," who now lives in England. "If American readers got a look at the pimply complexions of their economic gurus, they would cancel their subscriptions in droves."

This brings us back to Robert Wade's book. The crucial paragraph of The Economist review -- the one that convinced my friend the official, and presumably tens of thousands of other readers, that Wade's years of research supported the magazine's preexisting world view -- was this:

"The [Asian] dragons differed from other developing countries in avoiding distortions to exchange rates and other key prices, as much as in their style of intervening. Intervention is part of the story -- but perhaps the smaller part. That being so, Mr. Wade's prescriptions seem unduly heavy on intervention, and unduly light on getting prices right."

These few lines are a marvel of Oxbridge glibness, and they deserve lapidary study. Notice the all-important word "perhaps." Without the slightest hint of evidence, it serves to dismiss everything Wade has painstakingly argued in the book. It clears the way for: "That being so . . . " What being so? That someone who has Taken a First can wave off the book's argument with "perhaps"?

The "that being so" style of discourse is not wholly alien to the United States -- think of William Buckley on TV. But Americans know how to put his views in perspective. The complications of Anglophilic snobbery and Oxbridge-style swagger prevent most American readers from realizing that, when they read Economist leaders, they're essentially reading Wall Street Journal editorials, written with even less self-doubt.

Several months ago, when I was visiting Australia, I walked through the spectacular botanical gardens in Melbourne with a native-born Australian and a British expatriate. I was bedazzled by the lushness, and said how much I admired it. The Australian deferentially said to the Briton, "Well, I suppose it can't quite compare with Kew." "Ah, Kew!" the Englishman said, and then said no more, as if he were too polite to detail all the ways in which London's Kew Gardens were superior. A few seconds later, the Australian slapped himself on the forehead. "The colonial cringe!" he said. He'd made himself feel inferior about something that was objectively superb.

Ah, Economist! Ah, Kew!

---

James Fallows is Washington Editor of the Atlantic Monthly. He used to live in England.

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A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines?

This 1987 Atlantic Monthly article was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in the United States and has remained the subject of controversy and attention in the Philippines. This is the text as originally published in the magazine.

Continue reading "A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines?" »

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The Case Against Credentialism

The Atlantic Monthly

December, 1985

"The case against credentialism"

By James Fallows

In 1961, David McClelland, a psychologist at Harvard, , published The Achieving Society, an extravagantly ambitious attempt to discover why certain cultures "worked" better than others. Why, among West African tribes were the Ashanti and the Ibo so economically dominant? Why was so much of the commerce of Southeast Asia run by expatriate Chinese, and so little by the Malays among whom they lived? Why had Jewish immigrants to the United States risen faster than southern Italians?

Continue reading "The Case Against Credentialism" »

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