Yale Bulletin and Calendar

November 2, 2001

Volume 30, Number 9

James Fallows

Noted journalist James Fallows
to present annual Fryer Lecture

James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, will visit the campus on Wednesday, Nov. 7, as a Poynter Fellow in Journalism.

Fallows will deliver the Poynter Fellowship's Gary Fryer Memorial Lecture on the topic "New Media, New Menaces: What America's New War Is Showing Us About Ourselves" at 4 p.m. in McNeil Lecture Hall of the Yale University Art Gallery (entrance on High Street). Following his talk, he will take part in a panel discussion on that subject with four journalists who are graduates of Yale. They are Ruth Conniff '90, political editor of The Progressive magazine; Tish Durkin '88, staff writer for The National Journal and a contributor to The Atlantic Monthly; Seth Schiesel '94, '97 LAW, media and communications correspondent for The New York Times; and Jacob Weisberg '86, chief political writer for Slate.

The event, which is free and open to the public, is also part of the University's "Democracy, Security and Justice" lecture series.

Earlier that day, at 2 p.m., Fallows will be the guest at a tea in the Saybrook College master's house, 90 High St. All are welcome to attend.

Fallows was the Washington editor for The Atlantic Monthly from 1979 to 1996. For two years of that time he was based in Texas, and for four years was in Asia. He has written for the magazine about such subjects as immigration, defense policy, entitlements, politics, economics and computer technology, among others.

Since he has been with The Atlantic Monthly, Fallows has written five books, including "National Defense," which won the American Book Award in 1981; "Looking at the Sun," a commentary on the Asian economic and political system; and "Breaking the News: How the Media Undermines American Democracy." In his recently published "Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel," Fallows -- who is a recreational pilot -- predicts that the small-plane industry will revolutionize personal travel in the same way that computers have changed communication. His earlier books are "The Water Lords" and "Who Runs Congress?" (with Mark Green and David Zwick).

Fallows was also editor of U.S. News & World Report from 1996 to 1998. He served as the chief speechwriter for former President Jimmy Carter during his first two years in office. He has been a regular commentator on National Public Radio for the last two decades.

A graduate of Harvard University, where he was president of The Harvard Crimson, Fallows went on to study economics at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He began his career in the early 1970s as an editor and writer for the Washington Monthly and Texas Monthly magazines.

Since 1998, Fallows has been chair of the board of advisers of the New American Foundation, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C. In early 1999, he worked at Microsoft designing software for writers.

The annual Fryer Lecture honors the late Gary G. Fryer, who served as Yale's director of public affairs and special assistant to the president, and also directed the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism, from 1994 until his death in 1997.

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Campus Notes