Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

And we’re back!

I, of course, thought that taking August “off” would enable me to get completely caught up on life. The books I would read! The closets I would organize! The freezer I would restock!

Needless to say, most of my plans did not come to fruition, though I did clean out my garage and am pretty proud of finally tackling that task. I read quite a bit (everything is logged at Goodreads) and watched as many Phillies games as I could manage (including one in person). I took a two-week road trip to Philadelphia, stopping at six National Parks along the way, and completed a tough half-marathon yesterday. I have a new review up at the Wall Street Journal’s books section, plus found a new-to-me author who writes action-adventure-romance novels featuring main characters from Myanmar (see below).

In other words, I had a good late-summer reset and am now looking forward to some cooler weather and changing leaves as fall creeps in. It’s good to be back.

Thanks for joining me this week.

Recent Book Reviews

Recommendations

China Stories

Helen Davidson and Jason Tzu Kuan Lu, with photos by An Rong Xu, “Drugs, smuggling and abductions: inside the fast and furious world of pigeon racing in Taiwan”

Beijing’s strategy ignores a crucial fact about the Dalai Lama’s role in the Tibetan freedom struggle. He has been the single most powerful force restraining violence and radicalization within Tibet for the past 50 years. He has advocated for Sino-Tibetan reconciliation, not greater hostility. Once he leaves the scene, the chances of conflict in and around Tibet are likely to rise. Beijing’s attempt to control the Dalai Lama’s succession may backfire, destabilizing China’s western frontier and provoking the very instability that Chinese leaders hope to avoid.

— Tenzin Dorjee and Gyal Lo, “Beijing’s Dangerous Game in Tibet: How Controlling the Dalai Lama’s Succession Could Backfire”

Lucy Hornby, “The Mother, the Son and the War”

Dean Minello, “Red Cards for Rejected Majors”

Christian Shepherd, “Beneath China’s display of military might, a far-reaching corruption purge”

At the parade, Xi, Putin and Kim walked side-by-side on the red carpet, the first time all three leaders have met at the same time. Nominally to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, the parade was a formidable display of China’s growing military strength and Xi’s aspiration to lead a new world order no longer centred on America.

— Katie Stallard, “Putin, Xi and Kim debut their new world order: Autocrats of the world, unite!”

Joseph Torigian, “Xi and Putin Weaponize WWII’s Legacy”

Vivian Wang, “China Is Trying to Expand Its Social Safety Net. Yet Many Chinese Are Worried.”

Benno Weiner, “Ill Winds in Tibet” — review of Christopher Peacock’s new English translation of The Red Wind Howls: A Novel, by Tsering Döndrup

Li Yuan, “In Protest, He Turned the Camera on China’s Surveillance State”

My mother has told me that whenever she steps into her nephrologist’s office, she feels like a schoolgirl waiting to be scolded. She fears annoying the doctor with her questions. She also suspects that the doctor values the number of patients and earnings from prescriptions over her well-being. But in the office of Dr. DeepSeek, she is at ease.

— Viola Zhou, “My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek”

Wanderings Around the World

M.Z. Adnan, “The Vibrant, Disappearing World of India’s Photo Studios”

Rebecca Corbett, “Green gruel? Pea soup? What Westerners thought of matcha when they tried it for the first time”

Bathsheba Demuth, “Where the Dogs Run”

Elizabeth Goodspeed, “The Casual Archivist’s Short History of the Business Card, From Versailles to Microsoft Word”

Much stands to be lost, even aside from decent wages and the livelihoods of the translators and interpreters who help make our cultures better understood. The quality of translations across the board, from video games to corporate communiques stands to decline, with AI output, according to interviewees, often being homogeneous, blind to local details, or flat-out wrong. Nuances about places and cultures, recognizable to a knowledgeable human interpreter risk disappearing, sanded down by blunt-force automation. It’s not overly dramatic to say that we risk losing the capacity for cultures to understand one another better if we’re all simply feeding output into each other’s automated translation systems.

— Brian Merchant, “AI Killed My Job: Translators”

Kristian Monroe, “‘Founders Museum’ from White House and PragerU blurs history, AI-generated fiction”

Dasl Yoon, with photos by Jean Chung, “This 95-Year-Old Dreams of Walking Home to North Korea”

Standout Story

As far as I can tell, there is no blue answer to MAGA. Where are the words on the political left, or in the political center, that can catalyze millions and lead them to see their fates and futures as joined? What are the words that include an irresistible mix of temporal promises, including the past and future as well as the present? That meld a deep-seated, shared desire with a call to action? And why haven’t we thought of these words yet? It’s funny to me (but not ha-ha) that with so many humanities scholars, creative types, creative wordsmiths on the left, Democrats haven’t yet found their magic words.

— Tiya Miles, “We Need New Words”

Featured photo: Sunrise over a farm in Bird-in-Hand, PA, September 6, 2025.