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. His latest book,
China Airborne, was published in early May. 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.
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Everyone's favorite illustration of the perils of computerized (mis)translation has been the scene at right, from a restaurant in China in the mid-2000s.
