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Weekly Wanderings: May 31, 2026
Don’t Try This at Home My book club is discussing Kiran Desai’s third novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, tomorrow night. The book is nearly 700 pages long—so when did I start reading it? Friday morning. 🙄 The past few days have been a throwback to graduate school, with me racing through the book…
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Weekly Wanderings: May 26, 2026
Thanks for joining me this week. Recommendations China Stories Chang Che, “Mistranslations at the Trump-Xi summit” Chen Yiru, “Before WeChat, There Were Qiaopi Writers” Rachel Cheung, Noah Berman, Savannah Billman, and Tom Mitchell, “Assessing the Summit” J. Michael Cole, “After All the Noise: The Trump-Xi Meeting and What It May Mean for Taiwan” Ella Creamer,…
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Weekly Wanderings: May 17, 2026
Mr. Trump Goes to China China analysts were working overtime last week as Donald Trump flew to Beijing for two days of meetings with Xi Jinping. While there are innumerable issues causing friction around the edges, it seems to have been a cordial and uneventful trip overall. Both men made some carefully planned remarks (Trump…
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Weekly Wanderings: May 10, 2026
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…
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Weekly Wanderings: May 4, 2026
Back to the Archives Because my job is largely office-based and administrative, I don’t often have the opportunity to stretch the archival research muscles I trained in graduate school. But I’ve long had the idea of digging into the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) historical archives, which are held at the Bentley Historical Library—just a…
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Weekly Wanderings: April 26, 2026
It’s How Old?!? Most notable event of my week: yesterday’s Phi Beta Kappa Greater Detroit Association “glacial geology of Ann Arbor” field trip, which introduced me to this glacial erratic boulder that’s 2.4 billion years old and just sitting along a trail at the Fox Science Preserve. No big deal. Two point four billion years.…
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Weekly Wanderings: April 19, 2026
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…
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Weekly Wanderings: April 12, 2026
Mid-April is always when I start to feel like I have a handle on things again. The AAS Annual Conference takes place in the middle of March, and then for various reasons I inevitably have some sort of travel a week or two after that. My schedule takes weeks to calm down to the point…
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Weekly Wanderings: April 6, 2026
Thanks for joining me this week. Recommendations China Stories James T. Areddy, “U.S. Court Ruling Keeps Mao Documents Out of China” Amy Hawkins, with photographs by Ding Gang, “The ‘Third Front’: China resurrects Mao’s military capabilities” Andrew Higgins, with visuals by Qilai Shen, “‘City of Parasites’ or ‘Glamorous Metropolis’? China’s Cosmopolitan Contradiction.” Tyler Quillen &…
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Weekly Wanderings: March 29, 2026
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…
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Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 