Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Thanks for joining me this week.

New Goodreads Reviews

Recommendations

China Stories

Eliot Chen, “DOGE’s Latest Target is Seen as a Gift to the CCP”

Michelle Kuo, “Found in Translation”

Grace Marion, “In Taiwan, a Growing Cohort of ‘Preppers’ Readies Itself for an Uncertain Future”

Dalia Parete, “Feminists Without Borders” — interview with Jinyan Zeng, author of Feminist Activism in the Post-2010s Sinosphere

Andrew Stokols, “Shenzhen and the ‘Low Altitude Economy’”

Edward White and Joe Leahy, “China’s unspoken question: who will succeed Xi Jinping?”

Wanderings Around the World

Elizabeth Blair, “As Trump takes over leadership at Kennedy Center, some protest through dance” (audio)

Katherine Churchill, “When Good Housekeeping Meant Getting Vaccinated Against Polio”

Charlie English, “‘It allowed us to survive, to not go mad’: the CIA book smuggling operation that helped bring down communism”

Jessica Goudeau, “The Kennedy Center Belongs to All of Us”

Melissa Hellmann, “‘Fixing a problem we didn’t cause’: the Black Appalachian activists cultivating community power”

Mike Ives, “Cambodia’s Stolen Statues Are Coming Home to an Overflowing Museum”

Dinyar Patel, “Four simple – yet difficult – steps for reforming Indian archives and libraries”

Cassidy Randall, “These people protected US forests and lands. Their jobs have now vanished due to Trump”

Natasha Walter, “‘Woman, life, freedom’: the Syrian feminists who forged a new world in a land of war”

Leah Zani, “A Deadly Freeze: US Aid & Bombs in Laos”

Standout Stories

Emily Feng, Jawad Rizkallah, and Greg Dixon, “The Iconic Singer of the Syrian Revolution” (audio)

We sat with the news the next morning, Andy in numb shock, me alternating between crying and yelling. I started to stress clean, and when I picked up Andy’s to-go mug, with a few drops of coffee still in the bottom, I put my other hand against the lip of the sink and broke down. He’d poured it yesterday morning, when he still had a job, when he still had a career path as a civil servant unfurling in front of him. He’d just started packing his lunch and going into the office, he’d just set up the computer monitors at his desk. I couldn’t even think about him earnestly spooning hummus into a half-cup tupperware without tearing up.

— Carolyn Highland, “Let My People Go to Work” (hat tip to Anne Helen Petersen for sharing this essay in today’s Culture Study newsletter)

Featured photo: Yellowstone National Park, September 5, 2024.