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'What Is Special About My City': Coshocton, Bartlesville, Birmingham
A little over a week ago, readers began suggesting smaller cities with interesting stories worth chronicling for a ground-up sense of emerging American realities. Some of the responses that came in...
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Update on 2 Menaces to Society: Gmail Design Team, and Tipping Culture
1) The Evil of Gmail's UI/Design Team. I'm not going to waste any more time complaining about their constant fritterware "improvements" to the Gmail interface. You eventually get used to it -- and if...
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Software's Final Frontier: A Conversation With Charles Simonyi
Charles Simonyi sets off on a space tourist trip in April 2007. (Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters)JF: You are a longtime pioneer at Microsoft and elsewhere. What was the basic idea that made you think you...
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'What Is Special About My City': Lewiston, Eau Claire, Athens
Drawn from the large range of thoughtful responses that came in for our American Futures project, and following this first installment recently, here are three more accounts of American towns....
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Holland, 'Snowmelt,' 'Patient Capital,' and the Revival of Downtown
Riverview GroupLet's get back to Holland. It's the small lakeside manufacturing town in Michigan where we have spent a week. The picture above was taken 25 years ago, and it is part of a very important...
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'What Is Special About My Town': Fayetteville, Bartow, Kirksville
Reinvention and resilience across the nationRead more More in our series. Above shows blue for previously discussed cities, green for the ones discussed today. Live map on our companion site coming...
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Thanks Much! On the Geography of Language
By Deborah Fallows As we travel around America, I like taking stock of the linguistic landscape of the places we visit. By that I mean listening for the words and phrases, and the accents and idioms...
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Greetings From Sioux Falls
There is still lots to tell about Holland, Michigan. Mentally we are mainly still there, but physically my wife and I are now in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where this morning as part of our...
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'What Is Special About My Town': Las Cruces, Durango, Boise
Continuing the series, reader suggestions on three more places to visit in our American Futures project. The map shown here is a screen shot; for "live" version go to the project site. Over to the...
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Giant Lawn Machinery Everywhere: This Actually Is a Thing
Reinvention and resilience across the nationRead more Scenes from just the past few days. The fascinating aspect in each case was that the plot of land under maintenance was so small or narrow that...
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Holland: Where Things Go After the Recycling Bin
My friend Adam Minter, of the Shanghai Scrap blog and also of dispatches for the Atlantic and Bloomberg (etc) about China, has a great new book coming out this fall called Junkyard Planet. Since (as...
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Notes From the Road: Drought, Politics
1. Water. This was a scene over eastern South Dakota a few days ago. It's the part of the state that locals refer to as East River, as in East [of the Missouri] River, and that is an extension of the...
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'What Is Special About My Town': Bend, Walla Walla, Watsonville
Reinvention and resilience across the nationRead more Continuing the series, reader suggestions on three more places to visit in our American Futures project. Above shows blue for previously discussed...
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Life on the Road: Beef Jerky, Swimming, and a Search for Spiritual Relief. By...
By Deborah Fallows We’ve been on the road for 2 weeks. Or more accurately, we’ve been in the air. That means we have flown well over 1500 miles, slept in 7 different places, eaten several ounces...
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American Futures: The Video
The Atlantic's excellent video team, led by Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg, was out at Montgomery Country Airpark in Gaithersburg, Maryland, two weeks ago as we headed off on our journey. Here's how it...
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On the Orientalism of the Prairie
Recently I did an item on the giant lawn machinery I kept seeing each day in Midwestern and Prairie / Plains states, which I noticed because it was being used on tiny little plots of grass. James...
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'What Is Special About My Town': Butte, Lawrence, McAllen
Reinvention and resilience across the nationRead more Continuing the series, reader suggestions on three more places to visit in our American Futures project. Above shows blue for previously discussed...
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Readers on 'American Orientalism'
Yesterday I mentioned a little flap about whether it was condescending and "Orientalist," or on the contrary merely observant, to note habits in one part of the country that differ from the norm...
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'What Is Special About My Town': Dubuque, St. Peter, Fayetteville
Reinvention and resilience across the nationRead more We continue to highlight three places at a time from among the 650+ locales that readers recommended we visit for American Futures. As usual, the...
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The 'Rapid' Story: Trains, Planes, and the Making of a City
As our journeys go on, my wife (Deborah Fallows) and I will be reporting what we’ve seen, learned, wondered about, and been corrected on. Meanwhile John Tierney, from his base in Boston, will be...
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