host: and deborah fallows?: i grew up in a small town in the midwest as you can tell for my accent. i was on the edge of lake erie. growing up in small-town midwest america, you have a sense of this is a great place to grow up but there is also a sense of i would like to see some more of the world. when jim and i got married, we knew from the beginning that we wanted to travel around a bit. we still have two boys who are completely grown up now with their own families. and we did move to a number of foreign countries. my role during that time was really making the ship keep running because we went there by ourselves. jim was working but we had to kind of make it on our own. this was pre-internet days so you could not research where you are going and hit the ground running and make everything happen. i am a linguist by background so those two things in my background, growing up in a small town and being a linguist, made it easy for me to go into small to middle sized towns in america and listen to what people we

deborah fallows, we will start with you.unity colleges were one of the most surprising and important lessons that we have learned during these travels. we knew that they were around. to go from town to town and seeing the kind of impact that a community college can have on its area for people who, as he says, need a second chance, whether it is a high school or a skills level where you have lost your job at all sorts of ages. we came to think that community colleges were the linchpin of the future for such a huge part of the american population now. it got not only the individuals going back again to see a different kind of future, but engaging them in the areas where they were, where certain kinds of skills and technical training was necessary to equip them to get into the new roles that fit into the whole ecology of the region and the area. i would say one of the main messages we learned was that community colleges are so much at the core of where the country can go now. host: this is a tweet for you, james fallows, from j

then james and deborah fallows discussed the hbo documentary our town based on their book. and a discussion about the state of local funding with the brookings institution's brad whitehead and gordon gray. watch washington journal live at 7:00 eastern monday morning. easter to join with -- be sure to join with their phone calls, text messages, and tweets. announcer: monday night on the communicators a look at content moderation with director for the center of technology and innovation at the competitive enterprise interested -- in situ. >> republicans tend to be upset about content moderation being too much and it seems to be politically motivated and putting conservative voices at a disadvantage online, where a lot of the democrat members of congress seem very upset that more content is not being taken down. they feel that dangerous or untrue things are being left up and that is creating all sorts of other problems that spill over into our off-line worlds. i think a lot of washington can agree content moderation is something everyone is upset about, they come at it from tw

authors james and deborah fallows discuss the hbo do you meanry our towns based on their