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Weekly Wanderings: October 8, 2023
About a year after I moved to Michigan, one of my co-workers—who must have noticed that I spent nearly every lunch hour reading—invited me to join her book club. She hastened to add, though, that the book club actually didn’t ever meet, nor did its members ever discuss the books they read. A veteran of…
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Weekly Wanderings: October 1, 2023
No commentary and only a few recommendations from me today because for the past week I’ve been mostly occupied with preparing for and then attending the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs. It’s been years since I’ve written and presented a conference paper based on original research, and happily I haven’t forgotten how to do so—but…
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Weekly Wanderings: September 24, 2023
Even as Twitter crumbles into irrelevancy, it remains populated enough to set one’s mentions aflame in reaction to a quick post—as David Brooks learned this week. But I was also reminded of this when on Friday I retweeted a photo from the Shanghai History Museum, tweeted by Lingnan University historian Peter Hamilton, and have spent…
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Weekly Wanderings: September 17, 2023
For all the talk of spring cleaning, mid-September is when I like to get organized. I’m full of back-to-school energy, determined to wrangle my to-do list into submission and read through the stack of library books I’ve renewed multiple times already. I’m doing some actual cleaning, too, filling a bag for Goodwill with t-shirts that…
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Weekly Wanderings: September 10, 2023
At the AAS #AsiaNow blog, I interviewed sociologist Bin Xu about his 2021 book, Chairman Mao’s Children: Generation and the Politics of Memory in China. In the later years of Mao’s rule, 17 million young Chinese were sent out of their urban homes to labor with and learn from rural peasants, in what was termed…
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Weekly Wanderings: September 3, 2023
It’s a long weekend here in the United States as we mark Labor Day and the unofficial end of summer, and I’ve been on vacation for the past week. So in lieu of chatter and recommendations from me, please enjoy some snapshots from my wanderings around Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Feature photo: Waiting in line to…
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Weekly Wanderings: August 27, 2023
I’m usually a fast reader, but I took my time last week with a collection of essays by historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash. In Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, Garton Ash blends his firsthand observations of political movements in various European countries (mostly in the former Soviet bloc) with broader analysis of European…
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Weekly Wanderings: August 20, 2023
Following freelance journalist Jen A. Miller on Twitter (whatever, X) and Instagram led me to purchase a “Passport to Your National Parks®” a few weeks ago. Why? First of all, I love both notebooks AND checklists. More seriously, Miller’s posts made a convincing case that filling her book with passport stamps helped her expand the…
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Weekly Wanderings: August 13, 2023
My knowledge of U.S. Presidents in the late 19th century is … a little shaky. If pressed, I could probably name all of the men who came between Grant and McKinley; no promises I’d have them in the correct order, though. The single thing I previously knew about James A. Garfield was that he served…
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Weekly Wanderings: August 6, 2023
Just links this week—I’ve been in Philadelphia, visiting with family and friends, and am getting ready to head home to Ann Arbor. China StoriesKeith Bradsher, “Anger Builds in Towns Deliberately Flooded, in Part, to Save Beijing”Chang Minxiao and Fan Yiying, “In China’s Dance Schools, a Dangerous Obsession With Weight Loss”Kit Fan, “‘I don’t know if…
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Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 