Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

I went to Detroit yesterday for a rare hockey doubleheader at Little Caesars Arena (LCA). The night game featured the Flyers pulling off a win against the Red Wings—I certainly have no complaints about that! The really special game, however, started at 1pm when the New York Sirens and Montreal Victoire took the ice in a Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) “takeover,” aka a neutral-site visit to Detroit to help the league gauge local enthusiasm for women’s hockey as it considers which cities will get teams next.

Enthusiasm for women’s hockey in Detroit is HIGH.

This was the fourth PWHL visit to LCA since the league’s 2023 founding and set a record with 15,938 in attendance (for comparison, the Red Wings-Flyers drew 19,515 fans). Soon after the doors opened, I joined a line for the PWHL merchandise table that snaked around the LCA atrium; it took me more than 15 minutes to reach the front. Even before puck drop, the crowd’s energy started high and never dipped. I saw numerous girls hockey players on group outings, all of them wearing their team jerseys. Dozens of people—from a onesie-clad baby to senior citizens in sweatshirts—declared “Everyone Watches Women’s Sports” with clothing from TOGETHXR. And throughout the game, the LCA camera operators highlighted the signs fans had brought to clamor for a Detroit team:

Hockeytown is ready for PWHL
Detroit wants a team
Put us in coach, we’re ready
How about Motor City Mavens? (My vote is for Detroit Riveters, to honor Rosie)
Future Detroit PWHL goalie right here
We can’t be what we don’t see

In the third period, as Montreal scored three goals for a comeback win over New York, someone started chanting “We want a team!” Other people quickly joined in, and within seconds the entire arena was filled with the sound of Detroit fans demanding PWHL representation.

I’m not clued in to the inner workings of PWHL decisions, but my hunch is that leadership will heed this demand sooner rather than later. After all, there’s a reason Detroit has earned the nickname “Hockeytown.”

Thanks for joining me this week.

Recommendations

China Stories

Soyonbo Borgjin, “Xi Launched a Political Campaign. I Measured How 21 Provinces Responded.”

Even as foreign textbooks are banned and news broadcasts portray Western societies as gun-toting hellscapes, Chinese universities are hiring Greco-Roman classicists. One Beijing university recently completed a new translation of Plato. Another university established a research center, led by an Oxford professor, that puts ancient Chinese texts in conversation with other classical textual traditions, including Greek and Latin. The reason for the classics fervor varies depending on whom you ask, but most scholars agree that Chinese officials tend to see the Western classics as a complement to their politics. — Chang Che, “How China Learned to Love the Classics”

Chang Che, “Inside China’s robotics revolution”

Mark Chiu, “Telling China’s Story, One Bottle at a Time”

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Mark Clifford, “My Book Is Banned in Hong Kong”

Paul French, “A Chinese Intellectual in Oxford”

Jordyn Haime, “The Campus Front for Xi’s World Vision”

Daniel Herszberg, “Custodianship in a Time of a Political Depression: Soft Resistance, Retention, and Commemoration in Post-NSL Hong Kong”

Peter Hessler, “China’s Shifting Relationship to the Countryside”

Jessie Lau, “What happened to China’s fake Van Goghs?”

Alice Liu, “Family Line, Party Line w/ Joseph Torigian”

Yi-Ling Liu, “Shenzhen Express”

Wenhao Ma, “Censorship Is Not Deterring Global Adoption of Chinese AI”

Dalia Parete, “The Great Broadcasting Retreat”

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Yalkun Uluyol, “China’s Repression Still Haunts Uyghur Exiles”

Vivian Wang, “The Sudden Death of a Man Who Told Chinese Kids How to Succeed”

Chun Han Wong, “Next Task for Xi Jinping: Rebuild the Military Command He Wiped Out”

Chun Han Wong, “Xi Enforces His Demand for Ethnic Unity Across China”

Li Yuan, “Laid Off in Midlife, China’s Reform Generation Braces for Downward Mobility”

Wanderings Around the World

Aleppo is no longer in the headlines. The guns have fallen silent, and global attention has moved elsewhere. Yet the city – and the country – are engaged in what may be a harder battle: not simply reconstructing buildings, but remaking the relationships that once allowed those buildings to function as a shared space. The question now is how Syrians who lived on opposite sides of the frontlines – who lost homes, relatives and illusions – can inhabit a common civic life, and learn to trust each other, and trust the new authorities. — Rania Abouzeid, “From the Ruins”

Jon Lee Anderson, “Is Cuba Next?”

Joyeeta Banerjee, “A U.S. scholarship thrills a teacher in India. Then came the soul-crushing questions”

Blair Braverman, “‘Their Power Feels Like Mine’: A Dog Sled Racer Says Goodbye to Her Pack”

Laurel Chor, “How Kyiv’s Honey Cafe keeps making world-class desserts despite Russian missile strikes and power blackouts”

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Steven Kurutz, “That Red Roof! Those Tiffany Lamps! It’s a Pizza Hut From the Past.”

Ivan Nechepurenko, with visuals by Mary Gelman, “In Russia’s Former Capital, Restoring the Past to Survive the Present”

Featured photo: The New York Sirens take on the Montreal Victoire in a PWHL game at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, Michigan, March 28, 2026.