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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.

More things to bring to China if you're coming from the US

By James Fallows
Dec 6 2006, 4:14 PM ET

Earlier I published a somewhat tetchy list of things I'd be hauling back to Shanghai after a trip to the US. Here are two more big ones:

5) Aspirin. Weirdly unavailable.

6) Ground coffee, Starbucks or Peets-style. Available, but so out-of-scale expensive, compared with other local comestibles, that it's hard to enjoy. Same principle that applies to wine.

And, an idiosyncratic #7:

7) The cheapo, reliable, minimalist chic Timex watches I have loved and worn for years. Of course they're made here, and of course you can't find them even in the heaps of fake Patek Philippes, Rolexes, etc being hawked on every street corner. I love these watches because you don't have to worry if you lose one (as I just did); you never have to look twice at the dial to know what time it is; their "Indiglo" dials work great at night; and they're very accurate.

Shipments of #s 5 and 7 already on the way to us here, via friends serving as mules. Anyone visting an expat in China, keep #6 in mind.
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