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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.

'Sexy Beijing' on American TV tonight (updated)

By James Fallows
Apr 9 2008, 1:20 AM ET

I will confess that I have never actually seen Sex and the City on American TV. (I know, that's a shocker.) In fact, we didn't have HBO in America, so we saw the Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, etc, via the video store. (And king of them all, The Wire, via pirate-video store in China.) But because I had never seen the Sex and the City opening credits, I didn't realize what Danwei.org's Sexy Beijing was making fun of.

Even so, I knew that it was very funny -- and the star Sufei, aka Anna Sophie Lowenberg, is all the more charming when you think of her playing off Sarah Jessica Parker. A sample is below (the subtitling is great). I mention it now because apparently an episode is going to be on the PBS show Global Watch on the night of April 9. Check it out.

Update: 1) I hear from Luke Mines of SexyBeijingTV that tonight's episode is "Beijing Caucus," in which Beijingers talk to the star, Sufei, about Hillary, Barack, Chuck Norris, and so on. Clip here on SBTV's site or here on YouTube. 2) I also hear that SBTV is no longer part of Danwei.org.
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