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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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Too noisy to think, too "misty" to see

By James Fallows

Feb 21 2008, 9:05 AM ET

It is the fifteenth and, I devoutly pray, the last day and night of nonstop firecracker explosions in Beijing, to welcome in the Year of the Rat. This promises to be the most intense evening since Fifth Night. If my calculations were correct and that night I heard several hundred thousand detonations ... well, there are going to be more tonight.

By the way, "firecrackers" does not quite convey what's going on here. "Little sticks of ammo" is more like it.

Anybody who thinks that the Chinese populace does nothing but toil in factories to produce low-cost goods for exports -- well, that idea needs some refining. Unless maybe we're talking about mini-ammo factories, for domestic use. And if anybody is ready to give another little lecture about how economic modernization makes cultures the same all over the world -- hey, shut up. I couldn't hear you over the din anyway.


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