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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.
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Thanksgiving Day overseas (occasional series)

By James Fallows

Nov 21 2007, 10:20 PM ET

Thanksgiving Day overseas is always good and bad.

Good: bonding with other expat Yanks over our shared secret national ritual. Foreigners know about the 4th of July but are always a little hazy about the point of Thanksgiving and when exactly it is.
Bad: just another Thursday for everyone else. No NFL on TV.

Last year: a very nice turkey dinner with others of our tribe in our apartment in Shanghai. This year: our apartment building in Beijing is thoughtfully having an evening turkey dinner, advertised this way: "See you in your scariest costume & display your creativity in the Pumpkin Carving Competition." Hmmmm.

But to start the list of things to be thankful for: the English-language state-controlled Chinese media! Life would be duller without it. For instance, today's front-page story about the problems caused by the Three Gorges Dam.

http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r96/jfallows/IMG_4313A.jpg

Perhaps the predictions they have in mind are those in the Book of Revelations, about the End of Days? It's a possibility.

In any case happy Jour de Merci Donnant!

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