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'Unbelievably Small'
Associated Press[Please see update below.] Anyone who talks in public says some things wrong. It's not fair to seize on these inevitable slip-ups and screw-ups when you know what the person "meant" to...
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Sioux Falls: It's Been a Boom Town Before
[Intro comments by JF] Yesterday I mentioned the robust economy in Sioux Falls as part of the larger high-employment story of South Dakota as a whole. Two updates: First, a number of readers have...
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An Ad Campaign Don Draper Would Have Loathed (but That Worked)
Mad Men has given us a picture of what advertising was like before the Don Drapers and Peggy Olsons began pulling it toward what we think of as cool modernity. Here's an ad that represents the very...
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A City With Its Economic Bones Revealed: The Look of Sioux Falls
Cities are always more interesting if their look is connected to the work they do, or the story that brought people there in the first place. Reinvention and resilience across the nationRead more...
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'What Is Special About My Town': Burlington, Asbury Park, Macon
Continuing our series in which readers advise our travels, here are testimonials on behalf of Burlington, VT, Asbury Park, NJ, and Macon, GA. The image above is a screenshot of the interactive map you...
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Three Ways of Looking at Obama's Syria Speech
I am on the road again and not in a position to do a detailed speech response. So here are three reactions from readers. 1) It's the long game, once again. A reader writes: I think that it is worthy of...
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Everyone's a Linguist: More on 'Coming With'
By Deborah Fallows Reinvention and resilience across the nationRead more Many readers wrote in about my recent post on how so many South Dakotans end a sentence with with. As in, “Are you coming...
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Parents Aren't the Only Ones Who Care About Suffering Children
A little while ago I said that administration officials should stop basing the argument for intervention in Syria on videos of dead and dying children. The suffering of those children is terrible, but...
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What Would JFK Do? A Way to Find Out ...
The recent step back from the brink of the Syrian showdown has led to many comparisons, admiring and otherwise, with John F. Kennedy's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. That is as good reason as...
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What Putin Understands That Most Americans Don't
Here is a reaction to the Putin op-ed on Syria, and subsequent flap, from a reader who was born in the Ukraine, came to the U.S. as a child, and is now an American citizen living in California. I think...
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Road Report: Sarah Lee Guthrie
I had planned this evening to finish a report I'm really interested in: the "Fringe City" explanation that I previewed several days ago, and that helps explain why both the economy and the civic...
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What 'Fringe City' Status Means for the Look and Feel of a Community
At the moment I am writing from Burlington, Vermont, where my wife and I have been for the past few days and will return again next week. In a lot of immediately apparent ways, Burlington seems a...
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Romanesque on the Plains: The Look of Sioux Falls
Introductory note by James Fallows: Yesterday I discussed why the part of greater Sioux Falls that is visually least interesting, to put it politely -- the expanse of fast food joints and big-box...
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Tech Tips for the Day: Gmail Fix, Doo.net
1) Gmail de-lobotomization. The Gmail design team is constantly coming up with fritterware "improvements" to the system's look and feel. In the face of most of the changes, all you can do is sigh and...
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The Queen-Sacrifice Play: Obama, Putin, and the Chess Metaphor
Last week I quoted an Ukrainian-American reader on why he thought Putin was, for the moment, outplaying Obama in the multi-dimensional chess game for world opinion (not just within-US sentiment) about...
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'Say Souls On Board,' and Other Secrets of the Skies
By Deborah Fallows When I fly on commercial airlines, I always try to listen to the air traffic controllers (ATC) on my headset. On United Airlines, that would be channel 9. After 9/11, channel 9 went...
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William Polk on Syria: What Now?
Two weeks ago today, just after President Obama made his surprising and very welcome decision to seek Congressional approach before launching strikes on Syria, I posted a very long analysis by William...
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'Baltimore Altimeter, 30.46' -- Snapshots From a Clear Day in the Northeast
Yesterday my wife mentioned that part of the inflight ritual, when you are traveling on an instrument flight plan or getting "flight following" from controllers, is hearing and acknowledging the right...
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Beer Porn: The Alchemist Cannery
If you have followed the world of beer, you know two things about a brew with the odd name of Heady Topper, from a company called The Alchemist in Vermont. One is that it has an unbelievably positive...
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What the CEO of Facebook Has in Common With a Michigan School Administrator
Yesterday The Atlantic's editor in chief, James Bennet, interviewed Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook at a public session at the Newseum in Washington. You can find more about the event, plus a full video of...
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