Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

I’m sure there’s some mathematical concept that can explain why I’ll request five books from the library over a three-month span, only to see all five become available to me within the same week. Overnight, it seems, I find myself checking out an arm-full of books, all in great demand, with only 21 days before the library will want them back. There’s some sort of cosmic convergence at work here—right?

This started to happen to me in mid-November, when a bunch of fun-looking novels I’d requested over the summer suddenly began flowing my way. Once I realized this was happening, I decided to go with it: nothing but fiction for the rest of 2023.

Goodreads reviews of my recent binge-reads:

Jenny Jackson, Pineapple Street (4 stars)
Emily Henry, Beach Read (4.5 stars); People We Meet on Vacation (2.5 stars); Book Lovers (4 stars); Happy Place (3 stars)

Recommendations

China Stories

Of all the ways Yahoo failed over the years—from the perspective of business, cultural relevance, simple technology—perhaps none has had a greater human toll than how it failed these Chinese users of its popular email service.

Eileen Guo, “Inside the decades-long fight over Yahoo’s misdeeds in China”

Ryan Ho Kilpatrick, “The ‘Alternate Ethics’ of Chinese Journalism” — interview with anthropologist Emily H. C. Chua
Mae Ngai, “Anti-Chinese Laws Are on the Rise. We’ve Been Through This Before.”
Christian Shepherd, “After arrests and deportations, Mongolians worry about Chinese reach”
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, “Why the U.S.-China Relationship Isn’t as Predictable as It Sometimes Seems”
Elaine Yu, “Hong Kong Issues Bounties for More Exiled Dissidents”

Wanderings Around the World

When you order a pair of sweatpants online and don’t want to keep them, a colossal, mostly opaque system of labor and machinery creaks into motion to find them a new place in the world. From the outside, you see fairly little of it—the software interface that lets you tick some boxes and print out your prepaid shipping label; maybe the UPS clerk who scans it when you drop the package off. Beyond that, whole systems of infrastructure—transporters, warehousers, liquidators, recyclers, resellers—work to shuffle and reshuffle the hundreds of millions of products a year that consumers have tried and found wanting. And deep within that system, in a processing facility in the Lehigh Valley, a guy named Michael has to sniff the sweatpants.

Amanda Mull, “This Is What Happens to All the Stuff You Don’t Want”

D. Parvaz, “Iran blocks Mahsa Amini’s family from collecting a human rights prize in her name”
Hannah Yoon and Michelle Ye Hee Lee, “Seven Decades Away from Home” — a multimedia article sharing the stories of Korean War survivors permanently displaced by the conflict

Standout Story

Alice Su and David Rennie, “Stand-up feminists”

This episode of the Drum Tower podcast goes to an underground comedy club in New York, where feminist activists hold a monthly Chinese-language stand-up comedy night. As Alice Su and David Rennie discuss, the acts aren’t always humorous—performers often tell stories of coming out as queer or learning to recognize behavior as sexual harassment. Tickets for the show typically sell out within a minute of going on sale, showing the demand among the many in the New York Chinese diaspora for gathering as a community in a safe space—one that wouldn’t be possible in a major mainland city these days.

Feature Photo: Holiday decorations at the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House, Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan, December 11, 2021.