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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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Getting a start on being thankful: new Kindle firmware

By James Fallows

Nov 25 2009, 12:15 PM ET

If you have a Kindle 2 or Kindle DX, the new firmware update is worth checking out, so you can play with it while dozing off in front of the football games tomorrow. Amazon's announcement here. Stalwart Kindle Classic customers like me will have to gut it out with original firmware. But those who, like my wife, have the newer models can take advantage of features like better handling of PDF files and the option of rotating files to view in landscape or portrait mode (ie, horizontally or vertically). FWIW, I find that reading .DOC and .PDF files makes up more and more of my time with a Kindle. It's a much more palatable option than printing them out (wasteful) or logging yet another hour staring at a normal computer screen (ugh).

One more plus of the new firmware, reported today by reader D.P. in Shanghai:
"Just upgraded my USA (CDMA) Kindle 2 to firmware version 2.3 (via USB), and it registers and connects to amazon here in Shanghai! Just got my new December issue of The Atlantic over Whispernet. This is pretty interesting."
Now that's the ideal use of new technology! The real thing to be thankful for is that there is so much activity in the "e-reader" field, so that a few months from now we'll have not just the Kindle and B&N's Nook but many other competitors too. This is what the Pilgrims must have had in mind when they started the Thanksgiving tradition.

On this front: my interview two weeks ago about e-reader use with Len Edgerly, on his The Kindle Chronicles series.


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