Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Thanks for joining me this week. 🍂

Recommendations

China Stories

Jonathan Cheng, with photographs by Gilles Sabrié, “In China, Battle Is Raging for the Soul of Tibet”

Helen Gao, “China’s Stressed People Are Starting to Turn on One Another”

Jordyn Haime, “A ‘Red Tourism’ Push for the Long March”

Dalia Parete, “‘Airing Chinese State Propaganda Does Not Get You Anywhere’”

Wanderings Around the World

Anna Fifield, “North Korea’s Dictator-in-Training”

Diaa Hadid, “Greetings from Lahore, Pakistan, whose high court offers an oasis for chatter and chai”

Charlotte Higgins, with photographs by Julia Kochetova, “Incinerated novels and destroyed warehouses: Russia’s war on Ukrainian books”

Standout Story

What can be recovered or renewed, I hope, is the sense of possibility that the Oloffson represented. Over the past three decades, as the country jounced along a transition that never went the direction it was supposed to, the hotel had played host to visions of alternate Haitian futures. On its premises, people of different stations and allegiances were jammed up against one another and forced to mix, something impossible to imagine in the elite- and expat-dominated clubs of Pétionville. Strangers bought one another drinks, danced together, belted out the lyrics to the same songs; they argued grandly over the efficacy of foreign aid and squabbled picayunely over who’d pick up the check. On a good night, with the drums reverberating in my chest, Lunise’s voice beckoning up to heaven, Richard leading a single-line parade through the veranda, and the right amount of rum in my system, I could believe that Haïti Chérie would turn out all right. — Pooja Bhatia, “After the Dance: When the Hotel Oloffson burned to the ground, a dream of another Haiti died”

Featured photo: Fall colors in Southeast Michigan, October 24, 2020.