Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

The Full Wizard of Oz

I woke up at 1:30am last Wednesday morning to a sound I’d never heard before. It was loud and piercing—fire alarm?, I wondered groggily—but distant, definitely coming from outside my house. After a minute, my sleep-addled brain connected the dots and I understood: tornado sirens. The tornado sirens are going off. That can’t be good. I picked up my phone, expecting to see an emergency alert, but the screen was empty of notifications. I had to google “Washtenaw County tornado” to find the notice that yes, a tornado warning was in effect.

I have heard the sirens before, actually, as the city tests them once a month. But the brief test wail at a scheduled time is easy to hear, then ignore, on a beautiful day. It’s a totally different experience to wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of continuous sirens, one rising as another falls in an overlapping cacophony meant to command the attention of everyone within hearing distance.

Later on Wednesday, the National Weather Service confirmed that a tornado did touch down in Ann Arbor a few miles away from my neighborhood and left a swath of destruction in its wake (most notably to two local ice rinks). My section of the city experienced lots of rain and wind, as well as an extended lightning storm and power outage, but nothing more serious than that.

I was grateful that the sirens worked as intended—especially since the city government had recently proposed sunsetting the system, not sure its occasional use warranted the expense of maintaining the 22 sirens located around town. Wednesday’s events and public response to them prompted the mayor to reassure residents that the sirens will remain in place, thankfully. With climate change causing more extreme weather events, even a place like Ann Arbor, with a relatively scant history of tornadoes, needs to be prepared for them in the future.

Thanks for joining me this week. Go Flyers 🏒

Recommendations

China Stories

Melanie Abrams, “He Taught Himself Watchmaking and Left the Factory Floor Behind”

Mengzhu An, “Is It Possible to Be an Independent Scholar in China Today?”

David Bandurski, “Taking Liberties with AI”

Fan Yiying, “The Decade Comedy in China Grew Up, Seen From a Stage in Kunming”

[Lu Xun’s] prickly character and sharp views have been smoothed as flat as the refrigerator magnets sold across town as souvenir tributes to him. — Andrew Higgins, with visuals by Qilai Shen, “China’s Most Famous Modern Writer: From Fiery Rebel to Cute Communist Mascot”

Wanderings Around the World

Timothy Garton Ash, “In a joyful Budapest, with the populists routed, I saw the chance of an unprecedented transition”

Jaclynn Ashly, “A Different Kind of Historical Labor”

Unfortunately, the types of people for whom such fellowships might represent the greatest departure from their everyday experience—and whose career trajectories might be most dramatically shifted given freedom from their usual constraints—are infrequently their beneficiaries. — Dominique J. Baker and Christopher T. Bennett, “Who Gets Guggenheims?”

Jonathan Cheng, “The Surprising Source of North Korea’s Enduring Power”

Ivan Krastev, interviewed by Jacobson, “The Mittel Man: What was Viktor Orbán’s vision for Europe?”

The ties between Harvard University and the Caribbean are myriad and consist of densely layered networks of wealthy families, trade, political power and violence. Dozens of university presidents, overseers (governing officials), donors and staff grew their wealth off of enslaved labor and the transatlantic slave trade. Researchers that have attempted to make the university’s connections – and potential obligations – to the Caribbean explicit say their efforts have been stymied. Officials in Antigua have tried to engage in a dialogue with the university about reparations for nearly a decade. “The conversation is not happening,” said Carla Martin, a Harvard professor of African and African American Studies. “We all have tried.” — Michela Moscufo, “Why are Harvard’s slavery researchers quitting or being fired?”

Alice Speri, “Hampshire College was ‘a magical place’ for a progressive education. It couldn’t survive this era”

Mikhail Svirin, “The Red-White-Blue Bag”

Standout Stories

For all its history and heritage, the Casbah has been neglected since Algeria won its independence from France in 1962, ending 132 years of colonial rule. The state’s absence is obvious in the Casbah’s crumbling and collapsed urban fabric; nearly a third of all Ottoman-era buildings “have fallen into ruin.” Vacant, rubble-strewn lots now break up many of the Casbah’s traditionally tight, meandering alleyways, which are also spanned by makeshift buttresses that hold up buildings and keep even more of them from falling down. Some 50,000, mostly poor residents still live precariously in the Casbah, some of them squatting in the ruins. — Abd-el-Kader Cheref, “The Casbah of Algiers, a Museum in Ruins”

In Myanmar today, civilians are petrified by the military’s relentless bombing and burning campaign, which last year made the Southeast Asian nation the most severely affected by conflict on earth, after Palestinian territories, according to the conflict monitor A.C.L.E.D. They are panicked by a conscription law that can dispatch any young man or woman to the front lines. They are nervous every time a soldier at a checkpoint demands to see a phone, lest an offhand message or meme land them in prison. This is a country of averted gazes and unanswered questions. People speak in code, or not at all. — Hannah Beech, with photographs by Daniel Berehulak, “Where Even Flowers Stoke Fear”

Featured photo: “The Keystone Rivalry,” an exhibit focused on the contentious relationship between the Philadelphia Flyers and Pittsburgh Penguins, at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, PA, May 2, 2025.