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James Fallows

James Fallows - James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. A 25-year veteran of the magazine and former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, he is also an instrument-rated pilot and a onetime program designer at Microsoft.  For the next few weeks while he is on book leave, guest bloggers are appearing in this space.  For information on this week's guests, click here

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.

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 has won 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 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.

Pepco: No More Mr. Nice Guy

Today this site's readers are getting some highly diverse guest testimony -- Xujun Eberlein introducing the mystery of the American-run "concentration camp" near Chongqing that is legendary inside China and unknown in the United States; Bruce Holmes, long of NASA, on what a "Sputnik moment" looks like from the inside -- plus hearing from the plain old regular host too. This time with an update on how Pepco, the DC-area electric company, is responding to widespread complaints about even more widespread, days-long power outages caused by a 6" snow storm last week. (As noted here, here, and here.)

Problem: lots of tree branches falling onto power lines. Solution! The scene out the front window early today:

PepcoTrees.png

The wood lying on the truck bed had been standing along the street, in the form of trees, when dawn broke. I'm fully signed up for the idea that you can complain about a 45-hour heat-and-power loss, or you can complain about cutting down trees, but you can't gracefully complain about both. So I will say that I'm impressed by Pepco's look-ahead, "how do you like us now?" attitude, and I trust that the storm that's coming tomorrow will leave the juice on. We don't have much firewood left after last week's storm. Now I turn the stage back to the guests.


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