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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, was published in early 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. His latest book, China Airborne, was published in early May. 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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Fair and balanced bug reporting

By James Fallows

Dec 13 2009, 10:14 AM ET

I've loved every one of the 40 or 50 computers I've owned through the decades, starting with the Processor Technology SOL-20 I got in 1978. Actually, all of them but one. I won't rub it in, but the Vista-burdened Lenovo ThinkPad T60 I bought in 2006 caused me so much grief, for so long, for hardware and software reasons alike, that starting 18 months ago it switched me from career ThinkPad allegiance over to the Mac side.

Having aired my grievances about that benighted machine month by month, for equal-time purposes I should record the first significant hardware problem with any of the three Macs I now own: an sudden intense whine from my three-month-old MacBook Pro's fan, so loud and piercing that I can't stand to use the machine any more until it's fixed. I put on my active-noise-reduction headset while making sure all its files were safely backed up in The Cloud.

Apparently this is an all too well-known issue, but one of the established solutions (deleting any queued item from the printer device - go figure) didn't help, and I don't feel like opening up the system's housing to re-seat the fan myself (another recommended fix). On to the Apple store for my first repair experience there. Just for the record.

And for antiquarian purposes: how the SOL-20, still looking quite sprightly in our basement, appeared in its youth. Only known computer with rich walnut-wood case! No, it didn't come with a "monitor." People were tough in those days.

sol-20-left.jpg




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