At the Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows explains why China is so awful at managing its own reputation.

The Atlantic Monthly has “Searching” by Billy Collins.

The Atlantic Monthly has “We Are All Businessmen” by Mark Fabiano.

The bus bounces over the lot and onto the road. Blue smoke makes us all cough, and the driver grinds the gears as he shifts up. The town passes from view and we head into the countryside, where there are no foreigners. The ride is bumpy, and there are no scenic views. I often wonder what Mr. Richard and the others would see if they came along. Like this. My best part of the day is getting off the bus in my village and walking down the road to my house. Of village life, they never see how we may live, our families working in the spice garden. Yes, they know about the kingfishers and monkeys. They don’t know how we strive daily to make our house clean from the dust, and without electricity and running water, we live OK.

In “The Autumn of the Multitaskers” in The Atlantic Monthly, Walter Kirn laments our buzzing era.

My hunch is that when we look back on it someday, at our juggling of electronic lives and the array of subtly different personas that each one encourages (we’re terse when texting, freewheeling on the phone, and in some middle state while e-mailing), the spectacle will appear as quaint and stylized as those scenes in old movies of stiff-backed lady operators, hair in bobby pins, rapidly swapping phone jacks from hole to hole as they connect Chicago to Miami, reporter to city desk, businessman to mistress. Such scenes were, for a time, cinematic shorthand for the frenzy of modern life, but then communications technology changed, and those operators lost their jobs.

To us.