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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.

Policy announcement: reader mail

By James Fallows
May 9 2009, 12:29 AM ET

For me, 49% of the point in having an online site is the scrapbook/diarist function: having a place to note developments, oddities, events I have come across that I won't put to "real" journalistic use. This is part of the way we all try to make sense of our progress through time.

51% of the payoff is hearing from other people about related thoughts, incidents, and  phenomena they have come across. It's like having a conversation with people you hadn't known before but who turn out to have common interests and experiences.

So I appreciate hearing from readers (see the "email JF" button at the right). I try to answer but ... no offense if I don't.

Here is the policy announcement: to save myself the back and forth of asking permission to quote this or that, I will assume that material anyone sends me IS quotable, unless you say otherwise. And, I will assume that I should NOT use your real name with the quote, unless you say "feel free to use my name." That is a safer default assumption, if I make a mistake, than the opposite one would be.

So, again: please do write; I'll try to answer; and I'll consider this all "on the record" unless you say otherwise, but not attributable by name unless you explicitly say it is.



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