Deborah Fallows

Deborah Fallows is the co-author, with her husband James Fallows, of Our Towns — the book in which the couple flew a single-engine prop plane town-to-town across America, using the low-altitude vantage as both method and metaphor (from 1,500 feet you see patterns invisible at ground level but detail invisible to airline passengers). In Kyle’s notes she carries the book’s “library reporting and ‘river walk’ law,” threads of on-the-ground civic observation that run throughout. The Fallowses turned the project into an ongoing reader collaboration, inviting people to tweet about their own towns with the tag #ThisIsMyTown.

Context: Deborah Fallows is an American writer and linguist (PhD in linguistics) who has written for The Atlantic and authored Dreaming in Chinese; Our Towns (2018) was a national bestseller co-written with the journalist James Fallows.

Where this appears

• Our Towns — co-author and co-pilot of the cross-country reporting project; her library reporting and “river walk” observations recur through the book