68 Quotes by James Fallows

No one ever really ‘learns’ from history, because choices never present themselves in exactly the same way, and because you can always choose similarities and differences to fit current needs.

For the record, I am sticking with my claim that the simultaneous degradation of air quality, water quality, water supply, food safety, soil quality, and other environment-related variables is the main challenge to China’s continued development.

The worst kind of management seeks a single optimum, a one-scale index of efficiency, like the mindless scales of 1 to 10 for grading a woman’s beauty or one to four stars for a movie’s appeal.

The hoary joke in the literary world, based on ‘Dreams From My Father,’ was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer.

Contrary to what you might think, China’s economy is relatively less efficient, and more polluting, than those of rich countries.

We’re now in one of those periods when the reality of intense pressure on the middle class diverges from long-held assumptions of how the American bargain should work.

The demise of Google Reader, if logical, is a reminder of how far we’ve come from the cuddly old ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ Google days, in which there was a foreseeably-astonishing delight in the way Google’s evolving design tricks anticipated what users would like.

When a company is charging money for a product – as Evernote does for all above its most basic service, and same for Dropbox and SugarSync – you understand its incentive for sticking with that product.

Over the eons I’ve been a fan of, and sucker for, each latest automated system to ‘simplify’ and ‘bring order to’ my life. Very early on this led me to the beautiful-and-doomed Lotus Agenda for my DOS computers, and Actioneer for the early Palm.