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Raise a Glass of Pumpkin Beer to La Rentrée in October
Over the past few days, I’ve been working hard to gain control of my ever-exploding inbox, which is in even worse shape than usual because somewhere around mid-September I fell behind on the dozens (seriously) of email newsletters I subscribe to. I love reading all these newsletters, which regularly lead me to interesting links that…
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Weekly Wanderings: Random Things I’ve Read Edition
A bunch of things I’ve read and want to share, with a bit of commentary here and there … ▪ Wait inside the McNamara Terminal at Detroit Metropolitan Airport and you’ll notice the same announcement playing every ten minutes or so: a reminder (first in English, then in Japanese and Chinese) that Detroit is in…
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Finding My Way in Seoul
That Old Familiar Feeling I am not, I admit, all that good with maps—the old-fashioned, non-digital kind, that is. I’m generally okay with directions and excellent at using landmarks to re-trace a route I’ve already traveled, but maps and I have never clicked. Before the blessed arrival of smartphones, I spent enormous amounts of time…
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Weekly Wanderings: Censored Bear Edition
▪ It’s not often that my longtime love of Winnie the Pooh has much to do with my career as a China watcher, but the two finally converged a couple of weeks ago, thanks to the PRC government’s decision to censor online images of one Silly Old Bear because he allegedly resembles President Xi Jinping…
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Weekly Wanderings: Heavy and Light Edition
This has been a very weird week for me: although I’ve been surrounded by a bright and cheery Michigan summer filled with fun things to do, I’ve also been preoccupied with the many dark and dispiriting news stories surrounding the death of Chinese Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, who died on Thursday while still serving an…
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Weekly Wanderings: Roadblocks, Detours, and Roundabouts Edition
▪ How many times this spring did I tell myself, “Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll get up and start writing again. Tomorrow for sure”? Pretty much every day. But as the near-silence around these parts indicates, I never followed through. The #1 reason for this is that for the past several months I’ve found it nearly impossible…
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#HongKong20 Reading Round-Up
In the United States, the past five days have been all about the Fourth of July holiday—an extra-long weekend this year that led many people (including me) to step away from the news for at least part of the time. But in Hong Kong, journalists were putting in overtime to cover the July 1 events…
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Screen: I Am Not Madame Bovary
Confession: I don’t often go out of my way to watch Chinese movies because I generally can’t relax and enjoy them. I don’t watch them as movies; I scrutinize them as texts. Questions fill my mind as I stare at the screen: What does this film say about Chinese society? What image of the country…
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Weekly Wanderings: Too Many Words Edition
▪ Usually, when I start skipping weeks here it’s because I’m too busy and/or traveling. Although I am, as always, looking at an overly ambitious to-do list and an overly crowded travel schedule, those aren’t what has kept me from writing as much lately. A lot of writers I know have spoken about running into…
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Women’s March Ann Arbor
I wasn’t among the thousands of women filling planes and buses headed to Washington, D.C. last weekend for Saturday’s Women’s March. Instead, I was able to participate closer to home, as Ann Arbor hosted one of the hundreds of marches in solidarity with D.C. While we may not have had the numbers of D.C., New…
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Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 