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Weekly Wanderings: February 9, 2025
Good morning and happy Super Bowl Sunday to all who celebrate. I’m not a football fan, but I am a forever Philadelphia fan, so Go Birds. Something I’ve been wrangling in my brain these past few weeks is how to approach writing and sharing and, well, living during a time that feels very unstable and…
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Weekly Wanderings: February 2, 2025
Thanks for joining me this week. Recommendations China Stories Helen Davidson and Chi-hui Lin, “Taiwan’s next generation takes on its fear of the deep” Howard W. French, “What China Got Right About Big Tech” In 2023 alone, over 55 million tourists were reported to have visited Tibet—more than 15 times the Tibetan population. The Chinese Communist…
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Weekly Wanderings: January 26, 2025
I was supposed to leave New Orleans late Tuesday afternoon, but by Monday I knew there was little chance my flight would take off as scheduled. The forecast called for 4-5” of snow on Tuesday, in a place unprepared for those sorts of winter conditions. Schools announced closures, the mayor held a press conference, and…
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Weekly Wanderings: January 20, 2025
A raw wind swept down Baton Rouge’s North 4th Street, threatening to wrench the baseball cap off my head as I waited with 3,500 other people for the Louisiana Marathon to get underway. Wearing ankle-length leggings, a tank top, and a long-sleeved t-shirt, I wished I had brought gloves and a knit hat with me…
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Bookshelf: The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom
Longtime China journalist John Pomfret regards the relationship between the United States and China as a grand, sweeping epic marked by many highs and lows. “If there is a pattern to this baffling complexity,” Pomfret writes in his 2016 history,* The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present, “it…
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Weekly Wanderings: January 12, 2025
Thanks for joining me this week. Recommendations China Stories Chinese leaders often proclaim that “the East is rising and the West is declining”; some U.S. leaders now also seem to accept this forecast as inevitable. Arriving at such a broad conclusion, however, would be a grave mistake. China’s progress and power are substantial. But it…
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Jakarta and Yogyakarta: A Trip Told Through Photos
The biggest trip I took in 2024, in terms of distance traveled, was to Indonesia, where I spent a week in July. Since I traveled there for work, however, I didn’t have much of a chance to play tourist—I flew in a day early at the beginning, then took off a few hours one afternoon.…
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Bookshelf: After the Last Border
Books published in 2020 often didn’t get the attention they deserved. Kept at home by Covid-19 restrictions, authors weren’t able to tour and promote their new books in person; instead, they tried their best to reach readers through Zoom, podcasts, and social media. Unfortunately, a lot of wonderful and important titles fell through the cracks.…
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Weekly Wanderings: January 5, 2025
Two weeks without recommendations meant I saved up a bumper crop for today—I hope everyone can find a story or two in the links below to read with their coffee on a cold winter Sunday. Thanks for joining me this week. Recommendations China Stories The recent shift in exile rhetoric suggests a realization by the…
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Niagara Falls from (Almost) Every Angle
Eight years after moving to Southeast Michigan, I finally made the four-hour drive to Niagara Falls, Ontario last June. During our five days there, my brother and I saw the falls from virtually every vantage point available on the Canadian side. We started off on our first morning there by walking down Clifton Hill to…
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Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 