faulkner-cJames Fallows, author, Atlantic Magazine writer, and erstwhile speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, has cataloged with discernment his admiration for several of President Obama's landmark speeches over the last 18 months. So it was surprising to read his prediction that the president's acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize will flop. Fallow's argument is "probabilistic:" Of the hundreds of Nobel prize acceptance speeches delivered over the years, he contends, only one was ever noteworthy:  the three-minute oration by novelist William Faulkner, a man notorious for hating to make speeches. Here is Faulkner's remarkable address, delivered on December 10, 1950:
The full text is after the jump:
12 October, 2009

As the US right hurls ever more fantastic slippery slope arguments at health care reform, the Atlantic's James Fallows has challenged readers to come up with a single non-specious example of a metaphorical slippery slope. Aside from, "birth leads inevitably to death," they've been pretty much stumped. But one reader offered this 19th century advice from Thomas de Quincey, author of Confessions of an Opium Eater. If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun...

20 September, 2009

Atlantic Magazine writer James Fallows, drawing on this New York Times op-ed piece, bemoaned the lack of headway in replacing the GDP (gross domestic product) with a GPI (genuine progress indicator) in the years since the Atlantic published this seminal 1995 cover story on the concept. In fact, that Atlantic cover story helped inspire Nova Scotia's Ron Colman to found GPI Atlantic, which has done important work developing measures of real progress in this region. Colman wrote Fallows to point this out, and today Fallows blogs about GPI Atlantic.  [Disclosure: contrarian once worked for GPI Atlantic.]...

12 August, 2009
fallows-roof-1s Two questions about this photo from an entry in Atlantic Magazine writer James Fallows's wonderful blog:
  1. Do you notice anything unusual about this cityscape?
  2. Can you name the country in which this photo was taken?
Answers after the break. 
31 May, 2009