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James Fallows

James Fallows - James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States, and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book, China Airborne, will be published in May.
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James Fallows is based in Washington as a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has worked for the magazine for nearly 30 years and in that time has also lived in Seattle, Berkeley, Austin, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and Beijing. He was raised in Redlands, California, received his undergraduate degree in American history and literature from Harvard, and received a graduate degree in economics from Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. In addition to working for The Atlantic, he has spent two years as chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, two years as the editor of US News & World Report, and six months as a program designer at Microsoft. He is an instrument-rated private pilot. He is also now the chair in U.S. media at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, in Australia.

Fallows has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award five times and has won once; he has also won the American Book Award for nonfiction and a N.Y. Emmy award for the documentary series Doing Business in China. He was the founding chairman of the New America Foundation. His two most recent books, Blind Into Baghdad (2006) and Postcards From Tomorrow Square (2009), are based on his writings for The Atlantic; he is at work on another book about China. He is married to Deborah Fallows, author of the recent book Dreaming in Chinese. They have two married sons.

Fallows welcomes and frequently quotes from reader mail sent via the "Email" button below. Unless you specify otherwise, we consider any incoming mail available for possible quotation -- but not with the sender's real name unless you explicitly state that it may be used. If you are wondering why Fallows does not use a "Comments" field below his posts, please see previous explanations here and here.

If I were Sen. Bill Nelson ... (updated x2)

By James Fallows
Dec 23 2009, 8:19 AM ET

... I wonder how I would feel about the home page of the WaPo's opinion section just now.

NelsonGersonWaPo.png

Sen. Ben Nelson is probably not crazy about the op-ed itself, but that's in the normal sphere of political disagreement. Wonder how long it will stay this way on the site, having been up there overnight.

(To spell it out: the very negative-toned headline refers to the wrong guy. Second paragraph of the article: "Such was the case in the final hours of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's successful attempt to get cloture on health-care reform. Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, the last Democratic holdout,..." Thanks to reader EG.)

Update:   Checking back a few hours later (11:20am), the mistake is still there on the WaPo's home "Opinion" page. I don't mean to go crazy on the "are there no copy editors?" theme, but again this genuinely surprises me: That the nation's leading newspaper of politics, in the top-most item on its main opinion page, would make a highly embarrassing error in a highly insulting headline about the major political news of the moment - and no one would fix it. We all make errors; I have put up more embarrassing typo-marred items than I would like. But how many people at the Post have to have seen the site by this point (including the author of the piece) - without any of them saying, Ooops?? I can't imagine that if the main page of the sports site said in its lead headline that "George Allen" was going to be the new general manager of the Redskins, rather than his son Bruce Allen, the error would stay up there for hours. (Or more plausibly George Allen Jr, rather than his brother Bruce.) But then, I couldn't imagine that the "Bill Nelson" item would stay up uncorrected either.

Oh well. Back to work, and Merry Christmas!

Update #2: Just now, 11:35 or so, I see that it is fixed. Never mind!


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