Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

I try to have these Weekly Wanderings ready to publish on Sunday mornings. Throughout the week, I’ll have an open Word doc on my computer and add links to it as I trawl the internet, building the post in bits and pieces. Sometimes I’ll also write the headnote in advance, but usually that’s the last thing I do before I start copying and pasting into WordPress. Over the past few months, I’ve developed a nice little early Sunday morning ritual of sitting at my dining table with a cup of coffee, re-reading my comments and double-checking links before I hit that “Publish” button and then get on with my day. Once every few weeks that ritual shifts to Sunday afternoon or evening, depending on my schedule, but so far I’ve been reasonably successful at maintaining my personal commitment to publishing on Sunday.

This is purely about my own desire to restore and build a writing routine—something I used to be excellent at, but which started to slide before the pandemic and then completely went down the drain once the rest of my routines vanished overnight. I know that the Sunday thing only matters to me, and that it wouldn’t be a huge deal if I skipped a week now and then. But I also know that “now and then” has a way of turning into “months at a time,” and I don’t want that for me.

So, in spite of Thanksgiving and travel I was determined to put this post out before the week completely got away from me. Some of the links are several months old—I’ve been trying to clean out my Pocket list before the end of the year—but that seems appropriate for a post that could be subtitled “Better Late Than Never.”

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you again on Sunday (I hope).

Recent Goodreads Reviews: Books on Russia & Ukraine

Recommendations

China Stories

The fate of Rahile Dawut illustrates how the very existence of minority cultures is vulnerable to political change. What was once permitted can suddenly be perceived as a threat to the state when there is a shift in ideology. Her work, which was supported and funded by the Chinese Government for more than two decades, became a symbol of ‘separatism’ almost overnight. Her case is an example of how minority identities came to be reframed as a threat to the Chinese State as the Chinese Communist Party began putting more emphasis on its one-nation ideology.

Anonymous, “Rahile Dawut: A Lifetime Passion That Ended with a Life Sentence”

David Bandurski interviews Vita Golod, “Telling Ukraine’s Story of the Russian Invasion”
Yangyang Cheng, “The Many Worlds of China: On Joshua Kurlantzick’s ‘Beijing’s Global Media Offensive’ and Michael Berry’s ‘Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke’”
Helen Davidson and Chi Hui Lin, “‘There are no crops to celebrate’: climate crisis wipes out a way of life in Taiwan’s mountains”
Alice Herait, “Decades after the end of White Terror, Taiwan still struggles to come to terms with its painful past”

Facing a shrinking population and a long-term economic slowdown, the party wants China’s women to be docile, baby-breeding guarantors of social, economic and demographic stability. Instead, many Chinese women, who now have greater personal freedom and control over their lives than during the early Communist era, are quietly resisting.

Leta Hong Fincher, “Young Chinese Women Are Defying the Communist Party”

Jemimah Steinfeld, “Critics of Beijing Face Increasing Impersonation Attacks”
Xin-yun Wu, “Holding Out Hope for Journalism in Taiwan”
Shawn Yuan, “Return to China? Xing would rather die in the jungle”

Wanderings Around the World
Alex Langstaff, “The Bulgarian Computer’s Global Reach: On Victor Petrov’s ‘Balkan Cyberia’”

Countless investigations have examined why the United States didn’t see 9/11 coming, and the explanations are many. But one factor these assessments don’t fully capture is that some [CIA] analysts did know that such an attack could happen, and that many of the earliest, most tenacious, and most perceptive of them were female, in an institution that had long underestimated women and their work.

Liza Mundy, “The Women Who Saw 9/11 Coming”

Luke Patey, “Tomorrowland: Can India become the de-risking champion multinationals are looking for?”
Lydia Polgreen, “This Photograph Demands an Answer”

One director who has worked with Netflix and Prime Video said streaming companies didn’t just fear antagonizing the Modi government. They were even more concerned about its right-wing supporters, who might launch mass campaigns calling for boycotts and arrests. “What the government has done very smartly is they effectively say, ‘You self-censor stuff,’” the director said. “There is a gun to your head because at any point of time, it’s so easy to mobilize a bunch of people.”

Gerry Shih and Anant Gupta, “Facing pressure in India, Netflix and Amazon back down on daring films”

Standout Story
Emily Schmall and Shalini Venugopal Bhagat, “India’s Daughters” series at the New York Times

Feature Photo: “Oh, good, someone came to vacuum,” I thought fuzzily as a loud sound awoke me at 4am today. Once my head cleared a bit, I realized that I did not, in fact, have an intruder who had decided to clean my house; a snowplow was clearing the driveway below my bedroom window. Winter has arrived in Ann Arbor.