Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

This won’t be another newsletter looking back at 2023 or ahead to 2024. Trust me, I thought about writing one of those.

But then I spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s at my parents’ house. With a fair amount of downtime and a comfortable couch, I decided that this was the perfect week to clean out my Pocket.

Pocket is a free Firefox extension that enables readers to save links for later; if I realize that an article will take more time to read than I have, or if I want to return to a story, I click a little button in my browser and zap the link over to Pocket. Whenever I have some extra time, I go into my Pocket and catch up—reading, organizing, and deleting. The catch, of course, is “whenever I have some extra time.” In any given week, I’ll add more links to Pocket than I’ll delete, resulting in a steadily growing pile of to-be-read articles.

So in the past week I made a conscious effort to work down that pile, re-sorting my Pocket list so the oldest saved stories appeared at the top. They stretched back to 2019—four years and an eternity ago.

I read analysis of the 2019 protests in Hong Kong and revisited the uncertainty of early 2020, when we all struggled to figure out how much of a threat Covid-19 posed. Clicking through the links reminded me of how during that spring only Taiwan had gone ahead with its baseball season, implementing strict protocols and broadcasting games on Twitter for fans like me to watch from afar. I had saved a virtual stack of articles about Black Lives Matter and anti-Asian hate, working to understand the experiences and perspectives of communities other than my own. I read commentaries on the downward spiral of U.S.-China relations and the increasing authoritarianism of Xi Jinping—analysis that with a few updates would largely still apply today. In a week, I only got through saved stories from 2019 and 2020, slowly excavating sedimentary layers of my interests and concerns, anxieties and questions.

(There were fun things, too: recipes, knitting patterns, travel ideas, movies to watch and podcasts to check out. Not all was doom and gloom.)

Most of the pieces I read were very much of their time—reporting and updates on events now firmly in the past. Interspersed in the more current Recommendations below, though, you’ll find some older links to articles and essays that feel evergreen (I’ve marked them with an asterisk *).

And, of course, this cleanup effort resulted in a New Year’s Resolution: in 2024, I’ll work harder to keep my Pocket from getting over-stuffed.

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I didn’t spend the entire week lounging on the couch—my brother and I went to the movies and saw Godzilla Minus One. For me, the film was enhanced by listening to this episode of the Historians at the Movies podcast featuring guests Bill Tsutsui and Akiko Takenaka.

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I also churned through the entire first season of In Retrospect with hosts Susie Banikarim and Jessica Bennett. Journalists Banikarim and Bennett examine major cultural events of the past forty years, such as Oprah’s wagon of fat and the condemnation of Robin Givens as “the most hated woman in America.” They also take a step back and reconsider their own participation in the media; in one of the strongest episodes, the pair talk about their professional regrets.

Recommendations

China Stories

Yangyang Cheng, “The Holy and the Broken”*
Helen Davidson and Chi Hui Lin, “Escaping Xi’s China by paddleboard: ‘I rushed into the water and thought if they catch me, they catch me’”
Earth.Org, “Concrete jungle: The campaign to prevent Hong Kong’s nature trails from being paved over”

The early stages of the coronavirus pandemic brought to light some of the dysfunctions of China’s medical system, including underinvestment in primary-care clinics and overreliance on huge, rigidly bureaucratic urban hospitals. But, if the coronavirus exposed the country’s health-care challenges in their most acute form, the quieter crisis in end-of-life care reveals a chronic underlying condition, whose symptoms are at once brutally economic and deeply cultural. Prosperity and medical advances have transformed the way Chinese people live, but they have done little to address the question of how they should die.

Jiayang Fan, “China’s Struggles with Hospice Care”*

Wenxin Fan, “China’s Jobless Don’t Always Show Up in the Data. But They Show Up in the Library.”
Amy Hawkins, “China cracks down on negativity over economy in bid to boost confidence”
Veronica Lin and Jessie Yeung, “The 21-year-old ‘retiree’ who left China’s rat race for life in the rural mountains”

If our goal is to tell a more integrative story, then a valuable starting point would be to recognise that China, and Asia more broadly, was not a mere bystander to capitalism’s 18th-century birth in Europe. From the beginning, its people helped to power circuits of capital accumulation spanning the globe – especially through the tea trade – resulting in impersonal pressures toward expansion and acceleration. These social dynamics, shared in common with the rest of the industrial world, have often gone undetected, because they expressed themselves in local and idiosyncratic ways.

Andrew Liu, “Tea and capitalism”*

Kathleen Magramo, “Hong Kong activist flees to UK citing ‘stringent surveillance’ by national security police following his prison release”
Christian Shepherd, “What China’s new defense minister tells us about Xi’s military purge”
Warren P. Strobel, “American Spies Confront a New, Formidable China”
Vivian Wang and Joy Dong, “Jiang Ping, the ‘Conscience of China’s Legal World,’ Dies at 92”
Lingling Wei, “China Wants to Move Ahead, but Xi Jinping Is Looking to the Past”

Chinese government experts openly admire the collection capabilities of American spy agencies and their technology. Chinese intelligence journals often carry studies examining U.S. operations. A recent study of U.S. national security services by the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, the main M.S.S. research institute, said, “Drawing on an in-depth assessment of the relevant methods of the United States, China should choose what works and dispense with what does not.”

Edward Wong, Julian E. Barnes, Muyi Xiao and Chris Buckley, “Chinese Spy Agency Rising to Challenge the C.I.A.”

Yang Caini, “Shanghai’s Story, Told From the Skies”

Wanderings Around the World

David Pierson, “Mongolians Are Circus Stars All Over the World, Except at Home”
Julian Lucas, “Can ‘Distraction-Free’ Devices Change the Way We Write?”*
Michael Luo, “The Dark Purpose Behind a Town Constable’s Journal”*
Mujib Mashal, “Beyond Bollywood’s Glitz, a Subtler Indian Cinema Embraces New Stories”
Planet Detroit, “Inside Detroit’s circular fashion economy” series
Manvir Singh, “The Mongol Hordes: They’re Just Like Us”

My story of being hated, known for being hated, and the pressures of dealing with that hate is unique in certain ways, as all stories must be, but layered sexism is something experienced to varying degrees by most female academics. Gendered hate harms not only the women targeted but the academy as a whole. If historians, religious studies scholars, and other humanities professors are going to share their expertise with the public in the social media age—and I think we should—then we need to talk about the hate that this earns some women and how it echoes through the sexism that continues to pervade the academy.

Audrey Truschke, “Hate Male”*

Tamara J. Walker, “The Enduring Lesson of Langston Hughes’ Christmas in Uzbekistan”
Jennifer Weiner, “Oprah Proves Diet Culture Spares No One”
Han Zhang, “How Lea Ypi Defines Freedom”

Standout Story

Happy New Year! Thanks so much for being here in 2023—I hope you have a happy and healthy start to 2024.

Feature Photo: Screenshot of saved articles in my Pocket, December 31, 2023.