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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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Gmail down -- and now back up!

By James Fallows

Sep 1 2009, 5:00 PM ET

This is broadly known in the tech world, but for the purposes of the Atlantic's site this will be the official announcement that: for at least the last hour, Gmail has been inaccessible through most of the normal means-of-access. OTOH, I am still getting Gmail messages on my Blackberry, since I have Gmail set up to bounce a copy of all incoming info there. So some of the lower-brainstem functions of Gmail are still intact. Depending on how long this takes to clear up -- next few minutes, another hour or two -- will no doubt set off various speculation about the vulnerability of cloud computing, about whether there are some aspects of scale too vast even for the unimaginably vast collection of Google servers, whether Twitter (now ablaze with reports) could be brought down in collateral damage, and so on. All of that in due course. Right now, it's like living through real-time tech history!

5:14 pm EDT: It's back! At least for the moment. Will be interesting to hear this sleuthed out.
 
(Updated official Google status reports here.)


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