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Weekly Wanderings: Snow Globe Edition
▪ We got our first significant snowfall of the winter in Ann Arbor last Sunday—just over 11 inches—and it has snowed a little bit more nearly every day since. In the Mid-Atlantic, of course, a snow accumulation in double digits would bring cities to a standstill; here, though, nobody seems at all fazed. I was…
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Weekly Wanderings: Gilmore Girls Edition
▪ After months of waiting and speculating and standing in line to get a promotional cup of Luke’s coffee, it’s finally here! All four 90-minute episodes of Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life were waiting for me on Netflix when I woke up on Friday morning, begging to be binge-watched. And binge-watch I did.…
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U.S.-China Relations under Trump: A Reading Round-Up
We’re now in Day 3 of reaction pieces to Donald Trump’s election to the presidency (a sentence I never thought I’d write; it’s certainly no secret that I was a strong Clinton supporter), and I don’t expect the spilling of ink to slow anytime soon. My Twitter feed has been full of posts about what…
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Weekly Wanderings: Leftover Halloween Candy Edition
▪ I think Halloween is a fun holiday. I haven’t dressed up in a long time, but I like seeing the costumes that people devise, and who doesn’t enjoy handing out candy to (mostly appreciative) children? As an adult, though, I haven’t lived anywhere with active trick-or-treating: I was either in grad student housing (Yale…
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#GTDNovember
If you’re a writer, there might be a hashtag guiding your work in November. Quite a lot of people participate in #NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, an exercise that pushes writers to hunker down and produce a draft of their novel in just 30 days. I know many participants in #AcWriMo, or Academic Writing…
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Weekly Wanderings: Not a Kid Anymore Edition
▪ I turned 34 in the middle of October, meaning that I’m now in the last year of ever qualifying for any “____ under 35” lists. Getting older doesn’t, in and of itself, bother me, although I have been having a few more “Whoa, [incredibly successful person] is only X years old, what have I…
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Weekly Wanderings: Nittany Lions Edition
▪ I spent last Tuesday and Wednesday visiting Penn State, where history professors David Atwill and Kate Merkel-Hess (a fellow UCI History graduate) had invited me to talk with their grad students about getting a PhD and then going into a non-academic career. I also gave a presentation on the Zhang Leping biography that I’ve…
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Weekly Wanderings: Failure and Success Edition
I’ve made the executive decision (because it’s my blog and therefore I’m the executive) to abandon the pretense that these “Weekly Wanderings” posts are always going to be published on Fridays, because the past month has shown me I can only manage that 50% of the time. So now my goal is to get them…
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Weekly Wanderings: Delayed October 7 Edition
Delayed because I spent the majority of last week moping around with the worst cold I can remember having in years (I’m mostly better now), and because the first item was supposed to be its own blog post but the damn thing just didn’t sound right and yesterday I finally had to admit that the…
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Bookshelf: The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright
Publishers like it when a book falls into a clearly defined category, especially if that category is a popular one that might rate a table display at a bookstore. A biography of George Washington, obviously, gets shelved with those of other Founding Fathers, and they are all, unquestionably, grouped under the larger heading of “American…
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Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 