Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

November. The penultimate month of a year that has often felt endless and yet flown by. November always seems like a month that people want to rush through, eager to get to the December holidays and end-of-year celebrations. Christmas commercials are playing regularly on TV now; one of the radio stations I usually listen to while driving will switch over to 24/7 holiday music later this week. Instagram shows me posts from friends who spent the past weekend decorating their houses with trees and garland.

I don’t want to rush through November. I love the quiet darkness of these early mornings and the array of colorful, oddly shaped squash that has appeared in the Kroger produce section. I haven’t yet turned on my heater (or “furnace”—a Michigan term that I still haven’t gotten accustomed to), so I spend days working at home wearing layers of cozy sweats, a soft blanket over my legs. November, to me, is a month to slow down and savor before the enjoyable but hectic activity of December.

It’s also a month when many people I know hunker down and focus on writing. Even though the official NaNoWriMo organization shut down earlier this year, I see social media posts from people planning their own informal novel-writing challenges for November. Political scientist Mirya Holman shared her Academic Writing Month goals last week. This is the month to be productive, these challenges say. Hurry up and get things done before the year is over. And although I love a goal, a streak, a to-do list, I want to spend this month focusing on the works other people have created rather than contributing my own.

I’m going to spend this November reading novels. (Maura’s Novel Reading Month, MaNoReMo?) This is, in part, a decision born out of necessity: a whole bunch of my library holds have all arrived at the same time. But it also feels like a very November thing to do—a commitment to appreciating the work of artists who might, at the moment, be wondering if their books mean anything amidst the chaos of our present times. These are darker days, both literally and figuratively. I want to light some candles for my mind.

Thanks for joining me this week.

New Writing

Recommendations

China Stories

Beyond politics or culture, the barrier is bureaucratic. Public schools are full of idealism but their design favors homogeneity. As far as I can see, attempts to legislate improvements make things worse, by introducing rigidity which in turn forces more homogeneity and devalues local creativity. This dooms efforts like the Chinese programs, which by nature demand exceptionalism.

— Lucy Hornby, “The End of the Experiment: Another Chinese language program blinks out”

Susan Jakes, “‘Mistress Dispeller’: A Q&A with Filmmaker Elizabeth Lo”

While China’s high-profile robotaxi industry races to deploy 1,000 cabs across 50 cities by the end of this year, the autonomous delivery vehicle (ADV) industry has quietly surged ahead. As of July, more than 15,000 ADVs — mid-sized electric vans with two to ten cubic meters of storage that can handle payloads of up to a ton — had been put on the road nationwide, with approvals to operate in over 200 cities.

— Peiyue Wu, “China’s Delivery Revolution”

Wanderings Around the World

Ajay Kamalakaran, “Commerce amid suspicion: Inside Russia’s 19th-century push to trade with India”

Minho Kim, “Radio Free Asia Will Halt News Operations Amid Shutdown”

Sydney Page, “She hiked the entire Appalachian Trail at 80, unaware she’d just made history”

Kalyani Ramnath, “Forgotten migrants, unfinished decolonisation: Why Kalyani Ramnath writes about citizenship history”

At the time, the only other hidden child I knew about was Anne Frank. She and her family lived in a set of secret rooms in Amsterdam before being turned over to the Gestapo by unknown informants. Inside the Secret Annex, she wrote in her diary with the freedom of someone able to consider her Jewish identity and write truthfully about her family’s situation. Circumstances were markedly different for children in open hiding who attempted to live unnoticed among the non-Jewish population. Once the decision was made for them to go into open hiding, they had to forget the past overnight, masking themselves as faux Christians, and never – by a glance, an accent or a social mistake – reveal their original ethnic identity. Survival in this manner involved a combination of luck, planning, and the ability to live behind a wall of psychological silence.

— Carolyn Ariella Sofia, “Hidden in plain sight”

Standout Story

I wanted to understand how an obscure district in a neglected state became India’s byword for digital deceit. Initially, I thought this would be a story about the dark promise of technology and the lure of easy money. But over weeks of reporting, what emerged was a portrait of two Indias colliding – one chasing material progress, the other bent on survival. And in their collision was born the kind of ambition that can drive those with nothing to lose into criminality, while entrenched inequalities make it impossible for them to turn back.

— Snigdha Poonam, “‘Scamming became the new farming’: inside India’s cybercrime villages”

Featured photo: Dawn over the Huangpu Rive in Shanghai, China, June 15, 2011.