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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.

See you in a week

By James Fallows
Jan 31 2009, 8:58 AM ET

There are so many things I'd find interesting to talk about at the moment, from the latest inside dope on security theater as reported by the people who have to carry it out, to the Most Valuable Player awards for software and hardware in the last year (and updates on Offline Gmail and Windows 7), to the best replacement for the boiled frog cliche, to, yes, The Economy. Plus, the view in China at the dawn of what is both the Year of the Ox () and the year of the Obama (奥巴马, the last character meaning "horse" but there just for phonetic reasons since it is pronounced ma). And so on. Including, yes, a further comment on the Inaugural Address, which will be yellowing in the National Archives by the time I type out my promised wrapup.

But because of a long-anticipated series of family and personal obligations that lie immediately ahead, some pleasant and others merely unavoidable, I will be off line for most of the next week or so. Details as relevant later on.

If this were back in my Japan days, I would sign off with じゃ
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