Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Thanks for joining me this week.

New Goodreads Reviews

Recommendations

China Stories

The conviction of Lai, the self-made entrepreneur and pro-democracy media publisher, was in fact an anti-climax — a footnote in a long and carefully orchestrated exercise to silence one of the Party’s most stubborn and effective critics in the nominally autonomous special administrative region. His upcoming formal sentencing, possibly to life in jail, will be a footnote to that footnote. — Noah Berman, “Get Jimmy”

Tristan G. Brown, “Excavating a History Already Found: Archaeology and the Politics of the Past in the People’s Republic of China”

Laurie Chen, Emma Farge, and Michael Martina, “‘Unhinged’ or savvy? Meet Li Chenggang, who leads China’s trade talks with the US”

Rachel Cheung, “China’s Labor Market Braces for an AI Shock”

ChinaFile Conversation, “How Will China Respond to Maduro’s Capture?”

Helen Davidson, “China pressing European countries to bar Taiwan politicians or face crossing a ‘red line’”

Jeremy Goldkorn and James Carter, “China’s Disastrous First President” (audio)

Niu Yuhan, “How is the Chinese public engaging in climate adaptation?”

Andrew Peaple, “Jane Perlez on the State of the U.S.-China Superpower Battle”

Wanderings Around the World

Elizabeth Hightower Allen, “Sticker Shock” (on new non-resident fees at National Parks, as well as the people finding creative ways to cover up Donald Trump’s face on this year’s Annual Pass)

The Dayton accords receive plenty of criticism given the state Bosnia is in today, but the agreement itself is not the problem. Without it, there would be no peace. The real problem is that Dayton was never meant to be self-executing. Its success always depended on outside actors remaining engaged in Bosnia’s reconstruction until the country’s institutions could stand on their own and uphold a single multiethnic state. Instead, international stewardship faltered when Washington changed its priorities and Brussels stood aside. The result is a country still rife with ethnic division, held together by a 30-year-old peace agreement that, in the absence of consistent enforcement, has yielded a political system that benefits the few at the expense of the many. — Elmira Bayrasli, “Bosnia’s Unfinished Peace: Growing Turmoil in the Balkans Threatens European Security”

Hannah Beech (reporting from Myanmar), “At This Office Park, Scamming the World Was the Business”

Mallory Carra, “How independent journalism is a form of resistance: ‘I’m not answering to anyone’”

Nina Jankowicz, “The Restorative Power of Protest”

Maggie Penman, “A Virginia library book found its way home after 36 years and a world tour” (I’m including this one because it features Harry the Dirty Dog, one of my childhood favorites)

Jennifer Schuessler, “Humanities Endowment Awarding Millions to Western Civilization Programs”

Standout Stories

Trump’s real innovation has been to marry the archaic geopolitics of a settler empire to the modern legal frameworks devised by his liberal predecessors. What distinguishes his latest regime is its effort to reimagine and remake the borders of American state power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic in a single domain of impunity: call it ‘Homeland Empire’. — Nikhil Pal Singh, “Homeland Empire”

I became a hater by doing precisely those things AI cannot do: reading and understanding human language; thinking and reasoning about ideas; considering the meaning of my words and their context; loving people, making art, living in my body with its flaws and feelings and life. AI cannot be a hater, because AI does not feel, or know, or care. Only humans can be haters. I celebrate my humanity. — Anthony Moser, “I Am an AI Hater”

Featured photo: The semi-frozen Detroit River, January 17, 2026