Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Sometimes … well, sometimes a week is more like 10 days, which feel like a month. Can’t explain it, time works in mysterious ways.

Thanks for reading.

Recent Goodreads Reviews

Recommendations

China Stories

David Bandurski, “Xi’s Ten-Year Bid to Remake China’s Media”

Cate Cadell, Nick Miroff, and Li Qiang, “Walk the Line: Chinese migration surge tests President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping”

For reasons ranging from political repression to pandemic lockdowns and a relentless work culture, a growing number of Chinese have become practitioners of runxue—“run philosophy,” or emigration. In each of the past two years, more than three hundred thousand Chinese have left the country, according to data from the United Nations—more than double the number in 2012. They include China’s wealthiest, who have snapped up luxury villas in Singapore and contributed to record-high real-estate prices in Tokyo, as well as those who have embarked on the perilous trek to the United States via the Darién Gap, on the border between Colombia and Panama. Among this exodus, many are like Zhang: skilled, educated members of the middle class who once enjoyed the public life available in China’s cities.

— Chang Che, “Reimagining China in Tokyo”

Rebecca Feng, “China’s Long Blueprint for Economy Falls Short on Details, Raising Concerns”

Michael Forsythe, Katrina Northrop, and Eliot Chen, “The Billionaire Criminal Who Secretly Profited Off Jack Ma’s Deals”

Amy Hawkins, “Professor sacked over abuse claims in rare win for China’s #MeToo movement”

After decades of digging in their own backyard, Chinese archaeologists are now fanning out across the world, trying to unearth connections between Chinese civilization and pivotal moments in global history. 

— Sha Hua, with photographs by Alexander Parkyn-Smith, “China Reaches Back in Time to Challenge the West. Way, Way Back.”

Chris Lau, “China’s LGBTQ+ community celebrates rare scenes from Paris Olympics. But the internet is divided”

Hillary Leung, “Social workers were once among the most active in Hong Kong’s civil society. Now, few are speaking up”

Liza Lin, Stu Woo, and Raffaele Huang, “The U.S. Wanted to Knock Down Huawei. It’s Only Getting Stronger.”

Guldana Salimjan, “The Dream of Han Innocence”

Christian Shepherd, Vic Chiang, and Suzan Haidamous, “China brokers ‘Beijing declaration’ for Palestinian unity”

Wanderings Around the World

Megan Asaka, “Seattle’s Japantown Was Once Part of a Bustling Red Light District — Until Its ‘Troublesome’ Residents Were Pushed Out”

Ben Buckland, “Trekking Across Switzerland, Guided by Locals’ Hand-Drawn Maps”

Charlotte Higgins, “Ukraine’s death-defying art rescuers”

The death and imprisonment of Kremlin critics, the adoption of new repressive legislation, the muzzling of journalists and a tightening noose on the internet has fostered a climate of fear and self-censorship in Russia. Authorities have targeted ordinary citizens, with many facing fines and lengthy imprisonment for merely voicing opposition to the war or challenging the official narrative.

— Georgi Kantchev, “Russia Crushes Dissent as Putin’s System Ramps Up Repression”

Andrew E. Kramer and Maria Varenikova, with photographs by Finbarr O’Reilly, “The Buried Book That Helped Ukraine’s Literary Revival”

Niha Masih, “‘Magical’ self-portrait was hidden for decades — until the canvas was flipped”

Ivan Nechepurenko, “In Georgia’s Depressed Heartland, Pining for the Soviet Past”

I spoke with some older Russian intellectuals who told me that Soviet repression under Leonid Brezhnev, or even Yuri Andropov, was mild compared with what dissidents now suffer under Putin. “We are dealing with street thugs in power,” Victor Shenderovich, a 65-year-old satirist, told me earlier this month. “The bandits know too well how to handcuff their victims to a pipe and make people suffer for a confession, or just for the fun of it. The Soviet regime was ugly, but nobody thought of killing the No. 1 political prisoner, Andrei Sakharov. Putin’s executors don’t blink.”

— Anna Nemtsova, “Evan Gershkovich’s Soviet-Era Show Trial”

Amy Qin, “The Lesser-Known Side of Harris’s Identity: Asian American”

Xanthe Scharff, “When Women Fight Back Against Autocracy”

Shahzia Sikander, “My sculpture was beheaded. Here’s why I’m not fixing it.”

Reis Thebault, “A new Field of Dreams rises in Oakland, the city major sports abandoned”

Graham Webster, “The post-Biden foreign policy opportunity”

Standout Story

When the Indus River, which flows through Indian-occupied Kashmir, was turned into a lake over one hundred kilometres wide in parts of Pakistan, it wasn’t our problem. That wasn’t our home. And if India, so very recently a part of the same land through which the same life-giving river flows, where so many of my generation’s grandparents were born, could adopt this attitude of indifference, what hope did Pakistan have for receiving justice from the rest of the world—from England, whose two-hundred-year occupation of South Asia divided land and people, impoverishing and polarizing us for their extractive gain; from the United States, the second-largest emitter of global greenhouse gases, whose early backing of Taliban fighters changed the landscape of Pakistan forever?

— Richa Kaul Padte, “Land of Five Rivers”

Featured photo: Bomb Ponds (2009) series of photos by Vandy Rattana, shown in the “Angkor Complex: Cultural Heritage and Post-Genocide Memory in Cambodia” exhibition at University of Michigan Museum of Art, July 27, 2024.