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 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. In the 1980s and 1990s Fallows was a frequent contributor of commentaries to
National Public Radio's
Morning Edition, and since 2009 he has been the regular news analyst for NPR's
Weekend All Things Considered. From 1996 to 1998, he was the editor of
US News & World Report. He was the founding chairman of the
New America Foundation, a nonprofit group based in
Washington D.C. During the 2000–2001 academic year, Fallows taught at the graduate school of journalism at the
University of California, Berkeley, and in 2010 he was the Vare Writer in Residence at the
University of Chicago. Starting in the 2010 academic year, he is a visiting Professor in U.S. Media at the
United States Studies Centre at the
University of Sydney. Fallows is an instrument-rated pilot. In
Free Flight, published in 2001, he described the new generation of "
personal jets" and other advanced aircraft coming onto the market from
Eclipse Aviation and
Cirrus Design, as well as the story of Cirrus founders brothers
Alan and Dale Klapmeier and how they became involved in aviation. 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"). 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
MS Windows, 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. == Politics ==