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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.

Well, this will be interesting: Typhoon Wipha

By James Fallows
Sep 18 2007, 8:50 AM ET

Landfall south of Shanghai in a few hours. Shanghai is just to the right of the red dot on the map. Raining like mad today. I wonder what real winds will do in a city where there are construction cranes, stacks of metal siding, etc all over the place, not to mention a lot of vulnerable people living in exposed circumstances.

Update: Ahah! It turns out the that graphic below is from a dynamic, updated site rather than a static image. So at this moment, nearly a day after original posting, it shows a green dot near Shanghai, and eventually it will show no dots from this typhoon at all. To find Shanghai on the map, follow the 30-degree latitude line over to the coast of China. Shanghai is just north of the big inlet, which is the mouth of the Yangtze River.




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