Southern California native James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the author of China Airborne. Before talking about the future of aerospace in China, he shared in the Zócalo green room the three things he thinks are unfairly underrated: Vibram finger running shoes, America as beer paradise, and Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
Q. What’s the most trouble you ever got into growing up in Redlands?
A. I got into some serious trouble. Two of my friends and I were driving down to the then-small town of Costa Mesa to take Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics speed reading courses. We loaded up with oranges and started throwing them at cars on the freeway on the way back. The cops showed up at my parents’ house at 2 a.m.
Q. What’s your favorite doughnut flavor?
A. Winchell’s Original Buttermilk. Does anyone have a different one from that?
Q. What’s the last thing you want to hear a flight attendant say over the intercom?
A. As we heard yesterday, “There seems to be an issue, and the maintenance man is coming aboard. We’ll have an update in two hours.” In flight, nothing bothers me, except U.S. Air is starting to do in-flight hucksterism for their new wonderful Visa card.
Q. What’s underrated?
A. The satisfactions of running in those Vibram finger shoes, which I’ve done for a long time and really like. How America has become paradise for beer-there’s no other place that has the range of craft beers that America now has. Which leads me to the real answer: Jimmy Carter.
Q. What is the most unusual time, place, or situation that you came up with a brilliant idea?
A. That would require there having been any! My wife and I were living in England and decided for our honeymoon to go to a work camp in Ghana. We had no money, and it was cold in England, and Ghana would be warm. It was a couple months of manual labor and no food and getting malaria. The brilliant ideas born from that were two-fold: that my wife and I could do almost anything together, and that there’s a reason why poor countries don’t like being poor.
Q. Describe your style in one sentence.
A. Wishing to be more dashing than I am. Dashing manqué.
Q. What are you keeping in your garage that you probably should have gotten rid of already?
A. A lot of the furniture from my parents’ house in Redlands that we became the curators for when they were gone, and that I can’t really bear to get rid of.
Q. What’s the best food you’ve ever had on a plane?
A. It would have to be Malaysian Airlines. They dish out standard Malaysian food, including rendang, a very spicy curry dish, and what they call roti canai, which is a sort of pounded, delicious oily flatbread.
Q. What embarrasses you?
A. There are so many ways to go here. I’m embarrassed that I was an oppressive big brother to my little brother. I’m embarrassed coming across as more earnest than I want to because I want to seem non-earnest. I am embarrassingly sentimental about the ongoing midlife crisis. I am embarrassed to be as conscious of the ever-ticking life clock as I am.
Q. What music have you listened to today?
A. A taxi driver, an old Russian, had a sort of classic cool jazz era station he was playing-all the stuff from the Stan Getz-type era.
*Photo by Aaron Salcido.