Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Thanks for joining me this week.

New Goodreads Review

Recommendations

China Stories

James T. Areddy, “Jerome Cohen, the First American to Practice Law in China, Dies at 95”

Yangyang Cheng, “Being a Journalist in China” (audio)

Eric Fish, “The ‘Iron Dam’ that became China’s deadliest secret” (audio)

Francesca Regalado, “A Curator Flees Bangkok After China Deems His Art Show Too Provocative”

Sin Vega, “Rally Point: How Rise of the White Sun makes a rich playground of China’s impossibly chaotic Warlord Era” (video game review)

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, “In Memoriam: Paul A. Cohen (1934-2025)”

Wanderings Around the World

Anna-Theresa Bachmann and Hannah El-Hitami, “The Arab World’s First Indie Record Label”

Jeffrey Brown, Maea Lenei Buhre, Mike Fritz, and Cali Steffenhagen, “Citizen historians document Smithsonian exhibits under White House scrutiny” (video)

At first glance, such acts of arson might be interpreted as iconoclasm. Burning down heritage buildings can be read as an attack on symbols of belief, or even state and power, akin to toppling statues or defacing reliefs. Yet the comparison falters on a crucial point: unlike monuments or statues, these buildings had been recontextualised and reintegrated into Indonesian civic life. They were no longer serving as inert relics of colonial glorification but by multiple generations of Indonesians. To destroy them was not simply to resist acknowledging the collective struggles of the past in repurposing the heritage building, but to unravel its fragility in the memory of the present. In this sense, the fires of 2025 constituted less a reclamation than a rupture: an act of deliberate forgetting, where a certain interest overrode the tenuous continuity of historical meaning.

— Noandha Dhegaska, “Indonesia’s heritage in flames”

Hasya Nindita and Zhaoyin Feng, “Soaking up the storm: Sponge cities and the future of flood-resilient Southeast Asia” — sadly, the developer of sponge cities, landscape architect Yu Kongjian, died in a plane crash on September 23

Featured photo: Longwood Gardens, Kennett Square, PA, July 22, 2017.