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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.

Yellow Sheep River

By James Fallows
Sep 10 2008, 12:15 AM ET

The new issue of the Atlantic is in subscribers' hands and up on the web. It includes my story on a touching and quixotic effort by two businessmen / idealists to bring the good parts of modern technology to a remote village in Gansu Province called Yellow Sheep River. Here is one of the people I write about, Kenny Lin, on horseback near a Tibetan prayer-flag structure in the 11,000-foot highlands outside Yellow Sheep River.

 http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r96/jfallows/IMG_3568.jpg

There's an accompanying slide show, here, narrated with my best Beijing-air-induced chronic rasp, that gives an idea of how completely different China's far western regions look from the images of Shanghai and Beijing now familiar on TV.

The story talks about an odd-sounding but intriguing effort to lift children from rural poverty via ...blogging! In effect, it gives them scholarships that allow them to stay in (public) school, and in return they chronicle their lives in words and pictures on web sites, developing tech skills along the way. Here are some the children he is trying to help:

http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r96/jfallows/IMG_3537.jpg

The main Chinese site for this project is here; the English language version is here. It includes an easy way to sponsor students for this work, as my wife and I have done and will continue to do.



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