Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

A few short updates to start:

In late March, I wrote about the PWHL game I attended in Detroit and how enthusiastic the crowd was for the city to get its own women’s hockey team. That enthusiasm has now officially paid off, as the PWHL announced on Wednesday that a Detroit team will start playing in the 2027-27 season. Another woman at my gym told me that evening that she had already placed a deposit on her season tickets; she was one of 4,000-plus people to do so in the first 24 hours after the announcement. (I only signed up for the team’s newsletter.) Most of the launch merchandise at the online shop is sold out, too. The Motor City looks more than ready to welcome its newest team.

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I’ve been posting on Goodreads for more than a decade, but the site’s janky functionality has finally driven me away. The last straw came when Goodreads stopped allowing people to see reviews without being logged in, which I find highly annoying. I migrated all of my data over to The StoryGraph and have started posting new reviews there, so please give me a follow if you’re interested in my intermittent fiction-reading binges.

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And finally, I also wrote earlier this year that I had resolved to follow through with more reviews of new non-fiction—a resolution that I have entirely failed to keep. I had this idea in mind that I was going to write a bunch of reviews and then start releasing them on a weekly schedule sometime this spring, to make it regular and predictable. But that hasn’t worked out, and I’ve come to realize that I need to stop waiting for perfect conditions (hahaha) and just … start writing. I’ve been reading so much good non-fiction, and I need to tell people about it, on whatever schedule I can manage. So: soon.

Thanks for joining me this week.

Recommendations

China Stories

Yoko Kubota, “I’m Leaving China After 8 Years. Suspicion of Outsiders Is Rising.”

Vivian Wang and Jiawei Wang, “How A.I. Is Transforming China’s Entertainment Industry” (and take another look at this article I recommended a few weeks back, Chang Che, “Inside the World-Conquering Rise of the Micro-Drama”)

Wanderings Around the World

John Eligon, with photographs by Tommy Trenchard, “What a Bike Ride Showed Me About Apartheid’s Legacy”

Reo Eveleth, “How Did An AI-Generated Mural Wind Up in This Vallejo Alley?”

Samantha Schmidt, “Cuba’s influencers give rare window into daily struggles: A growing cohort of mothers are using Instagram and TikTok to share unmoderated coverage of the beleaguered island under a U.S. fuel embargo”

Karin Wulf, “Everyone Remembers Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride. But His Forgotten Race to Secure a Trove of Documents Reveals How Government Records Helped Win the War”

Featured photo: A fountain show at Longwood Gardens, Kennett Square, PA, July 22, 2017.