Eleven Signs a City Will Succeed

by James Fallows

lead_large

This article appears in the March print edition of The Atlantic, alongside the cover story, “Can America Put Itself Back Together?”—a summation of James and Deb Fallows’s 54,000-mile journey around America in a single-engine plane.

Jim starts this way: “By the time we had been to half a dozen cities, we had developed an informal checklist of the traits that distinguished a place where things seemed to work. These items are obviously different in nature, most of them are subjective, and some of them overlap. But if you tell us how a town measures up based on these standards, we can guess a lot of other things about it.”

Can America Put Itself Back Together? Kicking Off Another Online Season

by James Fallows

Screen Shot 2016-02-19 at 6.45.41 PM

Across the country, people think America is going to hell—but things look better here locally. Why the general tone of the moment’s politics is wrong.

In this online piece, Jim Fallows calls attention to his new cover article laying out the themes emerging from the American Futures reporting project, and provides a short synopsis of key points.

This post contains a bonus — a video, produced by videographers from The Atlantic, showing Jim and his wife Deb as they talk about Mississippi’s “Golden Triangle.”

Read (and view) here.