Category: Ann Arbor
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Weekly Wanderings: December 14, 2025
Two housekeeping notes to start: (1) If you’re in Clawson, Michigan, on Sunday, January 4, I’ll be the discussant for a talk by Joseph Torigian on his book, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping (read my write-up of the book from earlier this year). Tickets are free,…
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Weekly Wanderings: March 2, 2025
March! Where did you come from?!? Thanks for joining me this week. New Goodreads Review Recommendations China Stories Natasha Bertrand, Katie Bo Lillis, and Zachary Cohen, “US intel shows Russia and China are attempting to recruit disgruntled federal employees, sources say” Choe Sang-Hun and Muktita Suhartono, “On Chinese Tuna Boats, North Koreans Trawl for Cash…
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Weekly Wanderings: October 13, 2024
What a week. I try to think of everything that’s happened around the world in the past seven days and it feels like a grim verse from “We Didn’t Start the Fire (2024 Version).” I can barely keep up with the news, let alone read in-depth stories about it. And, in some ways, I just…
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Weekly Wanderings: May 26, 2024
If you regularly scroll through Instagram, it’s almost impossible not to know that we’re in peony season. Explosions of pink and white and purple appear in post after post, everyone trying to find the best shot before the petals suddenly drop off and we’re once again peony-less until next spring. Maybe it was due to…
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Weekly Wanderings: April 22, 2024
Ann Arbor is not an especially large place. The city occupies just 29 square miles, and without football game traffic no point is more than 20 minutes away from another by car. Yet those 29 square miles contain 162 parks—some just tiny patches of grass squeezed in among rows of houses, others expansive nature areas…
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Weekly Wanderings: June 10, 2023
The theme for this week’s collection of links is summer. Readers who follow me on Instagram have probably noticed that between April and October, most of my weekends involve 5K, 10K, and even half-marathon races. This is a relatively new activity of mine; as I wrote several years ago (in a post that still reliably…
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Weekly Wanderings: Still Wrapping Up 2018 Edition
■ I have a minor flurry (a squall?) of new pieces to share this week, as several things I wrote in late 2018 got published all at once: At Dissent Magazine (subscribe!), I have a long review essay about new books by Carl Minzner (End of an Era) and Elizabeth Economy (The Third Revolution) that…
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Looking Back, Moving Forward
Happy New Year! January 1, of course, is a day traditionally spent thinking about the year that has just ended and making plans for the one that lies ahead, and I have been doing exactly that. I feel like 2018 was several years crammed into one: both in my own life and in the world…
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Weekly Wanderings: Ringing in the Year of the Dog Edition
• 新年快乐！狗年大吉！(Happy New Year! Happy Year of the Dog!) Most of my Western New Year’s resolutions have already fallen by the wayside, but the Lunar New Year on Friday gave me the chance to start fresh all over again. My #1 resolution—a recurring one, I suppose—is to write here more, and to write more regularly.…
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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…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 