Thanks for joining me this week.
Recommendations
China Stories
The AI race is being waged with the top 1% of the 1% of talent in China; the rest of the 99.9% and the humanities majors have much less to look forward to. In the fourth and fifth-tier cities, one of most arresting problems in China comes into sharp relief: the extreme mismatch between college graduates and available jobs. — Chang Che, “View from a Remote Hubei City: a raw conversation with an unemployed youth”
Christopher Johnson, “The Unsettling Implications of Xi’s Military Purge: Why His Impatience With Chinese Commanders Should Worry U.S. Policymakers”
John Ruwitch, “In China, AI is no longer optional for some kids. It’s part of the curriculum”
Tabitha Speelman, “How China’s Independent Bookstores Survive”
Didi Tang, “Chinese national who exposed human rights abuses in his homeland is granted asylum to remain in US”
Afra Wang, “Learn to Love Engineers”
Chun Han Wong, “Xi Jinping Is Stripping Down His Military Command and Starting Over”
Yi Liu, “Zhang Feng on China’s New Media”
Wanderings Around the World
Diane de Vignemont, “Minneapolis Protests Sound a Lot Like the French Resistance”
Amrit Dhillon, “‘Exclusively for the elite’: why Mumbai’s new motorway is a symbol of the divide between rich and poor”
Mary Ilyushina, “‘Heated Rivalry’ is a hit in Russia, where LGBTQ+ content is heavily censored”
Lydia Kiesling, “List and Shout: How the book review became book list slop”
E. Tammy Kim, “How Shinzo Abe’s Assassination Brought the Moonies Back Into the Limelight”
The fate of India’s tech workers may foreshadow the future of a global workforce reckoning with the advent of AI. For decades, the country’s massive pool of outsourced tech workers have helped power global tech giants — the U.S. accounts for 62% of India’s IT outsourcing revenue. As employees worry that AI will threaten their jobs and demands for efficiency rise, an industry long known for 24/7 schedules and intense workloads is reaching a breaking point. — Parth Mn, “Death of an Indian tech worker”
Adam Serwer, with photographs by Jack Califano, “Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong”
Jake Spring, “National park signs related to Native Americans, climate change to be removed”
Thin, “Five Years of Darkness: The fight to keep Myanmar’s stories alive”
Sui-Lee Wee, with visuals by Lauren DeCicca, “All-Night Concerts Bring Fleeting Normalcy in a War-Ravaged Nation”
Featured photo: The beach at Sanya, Hainan Island, China, February 13, 2013.
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 
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