Blog roll addition: James Fallows

I’ve been meaning to update my blogroll for a while and it seems like now is a good place to start. My latest add is James Fallows over at the Atlantic. He’s a journalist presently living in Beijing and does great coverage of China. The man is also quite tech savvy and it sounds like we all owe him a debt of gratitude.

We all pick our causes. During my brief and enjoyable stint at Microsoft long ago, I worked on various big-think projects. But my claim to have changed the world may rest on my all-out war against "Clippy," the moronic "help" feature that popped up to say "Hey, you seem to be writing a letter!" each time you typed "Dear ..." I don’t want to overstate things, but before I arrived, Word came with Clippy turned on by default. Now it’s turned off by default. Judge for yourself.

His current quest is to get people to stop using the "boiled frog" analogy. Turn up the heat fast, frog jumps out, slow, frog stays in and boils. Apparently it isn’t true. I’m not going to fully join that crusade, but I will make sure I don’t use that particular parable.

Fallow’s is also the author of a classic 1996 piece on why Americans hate the media. Great read and still holds today.