Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

In the Hot Seat

The Phillies have been very up-and-down lately, so I went to yesterday’s game against the Tigers in Detroit with some trepidation. The Tigers had won the first game in the series, 10-2, on Friday, before the Phillies rebounded on Saturday to eke out a 4-2 victory. I would see almost-All Star Zach Wheeler pitching for the Phillies, so that was promising—but Detroit’s hurler was Tarik Skubal, also an ace (though still recovering from recent elbow surgery). I had gotten a great price on a ticket, paying only $30 to sit 11 rows up from the field, and happily took my seat as the game got underway.

My cheer didn’t last long, though not because of anything the Phillies did. I had known my seat would be in the sun and armed myself with SPF 50 sunscreen, a hat, and a bottle of cold water. But by the end of the second inning the water bottle was empty and I could practically feel my sunscreen failing. Southeast Michigan is getting hit with another heat wave this week, and even my desire to see the Phillies is no match for unrelenting sunshine and breeze-less conditions. I bailed, heading up the stairs to join others standing at the concourse railing. Not an ideal solution, though at least I had a shady spot to watch the Phillies score their first run in the third inning.

I walked around a bit before finding the best spot in the ballpark to enjoy what became a 5-0 Phillies win: a seat inside at The Corner Tap Room, where I could watch the game on TV while drinking a beer and reading the book I’d brought (Land, by Maggie O’Farrell; that’s an affiliate link). It was not perfect. I had wanted to see the game in person, after all! But yesterday was the second time this summer that I’ve gone to a baseball game on an exceptionally hot and sunny day, and I’ve realized that my enjoyment of afternoon games might have fallen victim to climate change.

The next time the Phillies visit Detroit, in other words, I’ll make sure to get a ticket for one of the evening matchups.

Thanks for joining me this week. ⚾️

Recommendations

China Stories

Henry Cheng, “Rethinking Comrade and Foreigner: Joan Hinton and the Boundaries of Belonging in Maoist China”

To further help us put into perspective the scale of what we do and what we don’t know about Ming China, nothing among the millions of Chinese characters in all the texts that come down to us from the Ming dynasty even mentions the ordination of Empress Zhang. If the scroll had not fortuitously survived, we would have no idea that it had happened, indeed we would never be in a state of imagining it could have happened – it would be another ‘unknown unknown’. What else don’t we know about? It’s a reminder to anybody today that there are limits on our knowledge of the past, and that humility, as well as iron rigour, needs to be part of the historian’s reflexes. — Craig Clunas, “‘The Emperor Is Far Away’”

Emily Feng, Diantha Parker, and Hannah Bloch, “In China, the Dongbei region’s cultural renaissance is a nationwide phenomenon” (audio)

Ian Johnson, “Who Is China? Beijing’s Self-Inflicted Identity Crisis”

Li Tian, interviewed by Beimeng Fu and Zhaoyin Feng, “The King of Fruits: My life as a durian influencer”

Simone McCarthy, “China tells its ethnic minorities to integrate or face consequences with sweeping new unity law”

Shen Lu, “Picking up the Threads”

It is now common knowledge that what those of us living with the so-called “free” internet see online is carefully curated by large corporations—entities that seek control in less visible but similarly profound ways. Meanwhile, the capacity of corporations and states alike to surveil our every swipe and keystroke seems as complete in “free” spaces as it is in those deemed unfree. Certainly, some nations guarantee more individual privacy protections and broader access to information than others. But the contrast today feels less like a black-and-white dichotomy than like a range of shades of gray. — Gina Anne Tam, “Dancing in Shackles”

Wang Juyi, “134 Days, 68 Places, Zero Internet: One Man’s Journey Through Digital China”

Yaqiu Wang, “The Missing Resistance in China’s AI Debate”

Psychiatry departments in China usually follow the American model, and few practitioners are willing to spend time studying new methods. Chinese hospitals are some of the most systematised places in an already-highly systematised society. More importantly, the lack of resources means doctors are only able to spend a tiny amount of time with each patient. Data shows that even at Peking University Sixth Hospital, which has the best-known psychiatric department in China, the average time spent on each consultation is between five and fifteen minutes. The patient is reduced to simple questions: Am I getting better? What medicine do I need to take? Given all this, it’s easy to understand the difficulty of deploying time-intensive forms of psychological analysis. A lack of definite answers might only leave the patient uneasy. Exploratory diagnosis would be met with resistance. — Zhang Yueran, Translated by Jeremy Tiang, “The Chinese Psyche”

Wanderings Around the World

Ed Augustin, with photographs by Lisette Poole González, “How a Four-Generation Cuban Family Survives on $60 a Month”

Adhiti Bandlamudi, “The Bay Area’s National Archives Office Is Closing. Researchers Are Worried”

Ron Charles, “Inside Dua Lipa’s Library of Banned Books”

In 1946, while Frederick Trump’s son (Donald’s father) was making millions selling homes in military boomtowns, the United States tried to acquire Greenland and its new archipelago of American military bases from Denmark again, in exchange for Alaskan oil and gold rights. By then, 40 percent of US territory had been acquired with cash. The idea of buying Greenland in 2026 is less a historical deviation than a revival of a longstanding practice of buying sovereignty, one that goes hand in hand with the expropriation of land by force. — Bathsheba Demuth, “Strategic Amnesia”

Nick Holdstock, “Blind Dating in Bishkek”

Edmund J. Malesky and Viktoria Zlomanova, “Can the Private Sector Save Vietnam? Why the Communist Party Wants Business to Boom”

The US government had a significant role in the chaos that took over Cambodia for almost 30 years, and in that time more and more temples were looted. What really astounded me in my research was seeing how often during the 1980s you could read the latest news from the Cambodian civil war on the front page, and then if you turned to the culture section, you would see a review praising an exhibit of Khmer sculpture that had just appeared as if by magic in New York City or some other American metropolis. No one was asking how those two were connected. — Matthew Campbell, interviewed by Erin L. Thompson, “Inside the Mind of an Antiquities Looter”

Standout Stories

Pennsylvania Dutch and German are for the most part not mutually intelligible, even if they share many similar words and structures. Still, the Amish consistently compare their language unfavorably to standard German. A thousand times my cousins and I have spoken about our language derogatively, to each other or to non-Amish people, saying, “it’s just a mix of English and German” or “it’s wrong German.” We believed that over the past few hundred years we had disfigured what was originally correct. “There are so many English words mixed in, it’s really a dialect, not fully a language on its own,” my cousin Abigail said in her interview, when I asked her about her mother tongue. — Eythana Miller, “Our Amish Language”

For all the cut-throat brutality Xiao describes in his memoir, he encounters a good deal of generosity and fraternity too. For every highway bandit who preys on his vulnerability as a migrant, there’s a kindly foreman who shuffles the production line to place him next to a girl who likes the same rock songs he does. — Poppy Sebag-Montefiore, “The poet of China’s factory floors”

Featured photo: The Philadelphia Phillies play the Detroit Tigers at Comerica Park, July 12, 2026.