Thanks for joining me this week.
Recommendations
China Stories
Keith Bradsher, “The New York Times Marks the Centennial of Its Shanghai Bureau”
Violet Du Feng, “How to Find a Date in a Country With Over 30 Million Extra Men” (video)
Oliver Holmes, “‘Don’t say we didn’t warn you’: Beijing summons journalists in Hong Kong after fire”
Katrina Northrop, “How China is using AI to extend censorship and surveillance”
Teresa Xie, “‘Left-Handed Girl’ takes on quiet shame across generations in Taipei”
Li Yuan, “After Deadly Fire, Hong Kong Ominously Warns Grieving Citizens to Stay in Line”
Lijia Zhang, “Jung Chang: A Grande Dame of China Writing”
Wanderings Around the World
Durrie Bouscaren, “An afternoon at the iconic Martyrs’ Café in Baghdad”
Justin Chang, “This new movie about Russia’s independent journalists is harrowing, but not hopeless” (audio)
John Delury, “South Korea’s Day of Infamy”
Junhyup Kwon, “AI-powered textbooks fail to make the grade in South Korea”
Andrew Limbong, “Libraries and museums get federal funding back after Trump cuts”
Ian McNulty, “This restaurant was a hopeful sign after Katrina. Now it’s shutting down for immigration sweeps.”
Katrina Miller, with photographs by Emily Elconin, “Fighting for ‘The Right to Night’ Under Starry, Rural Skies”
Elizabeth Tsurkov, “Celebrating Syria’s Liberation From a Prison Cell in Iraq”
Charlie Warzel, “When Chatbots Break Our Minds” (audio)
Standout Story
After graduation, I was one of a handful of students in my cohort who didn’t find a job: American editors were unimpressed by my clips from The Inner Mongolian Life Weekly. Since then, I have variously worked at coffee shops (one fired me after three days); delivered packages for Amazon (peeing in a plastic bottle, as I rushed to stay on schedule, is as sympathetic as I have ever been to the CCP’s Marxist propaganda); and served as a paralegal at a Han law firm, until the office racism got the better of me (“Do you know how to ride a horse?” “Do all Mongolian men have four wives?” “Is it true that, in Inner Mongolia, citizens are legally allowed to commit one murder?”). The closest thing I had to steady employment was part-time work writing reports about the CCP’s treatment of minorities for Voice of America and PEN America. I had hoped that one of these might turn into a permanent job. But earlier this year, when Elon Musk took an axe to these institutions’ budgets, my funding was frozen. I was DOGE’d.
— Soyonbo Borjgin, “The Xi Jinping School of Journalism”
Also: “The end of a Mongolian-language newspaper,” a Rhyming Chaos podcast interview by Jeremy Goldkorn with Soyonbo Borjgin
Featured photo: Holiday lights in Dexter, Michigan, December 6, 2025.
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 
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