Category: Books
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(Mid-)Weekly Wanderings: March 19, 2025
I should have known that there was no way I’d get a Sunday post done just as the AAS Annual Conference was wrapping up, but I persisted in that belief nonetheless. And then it was going to be for Monday … then Tuesday … and now, here I am, writing this on a train to…
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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: February 23, 2025
Thanks for joining me this week. New Goodreads Reviews Recommendations China Stories Eliot Chen, “DOGE’s Latest Target is Seen as a Gift to the CCP” Michelle Kuo, “Found in Translation” Grace Marion, “In Taiwan, a Growing Cohort of ‘Preppers’ Readies Itself for an Uncertain Future” Dalia Parete, “Feminists Without Borders” — interview with Jinyan Zeng,…
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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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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: December 1, 2024
December! Well, Decem-brrrr here in Michigan … it was 19 degrees outside and snowing lightly when I woke up this morning. In addition to the links below, I have a new piece just up at the Los Angeles Review of Books: The creation of character input methods, and how thinking about them has changed our…
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Weekly Wanderings: November 24, 2024
Thanks for joining me this week. Recent Goodreads Reviews Recommendations China Stories Kelly Ho, “Benny Tai, Joshua Wong among 45 Hong Kong pro-democracy activists jailed up to 10 years in landmark national security case” Joyce Jiang and James Legge, “Young Chinese flock to ‘academic pubs’ as space for free expression shrinks” Dalia Parete, “For Mang…
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Weekly Wanderings: November 17, 2024
@mauracunningham (2010-2024) I deactivated my Twitter account this morning. It finally felt like time: I hadn’t posted there in months, and the post-election surge in Bluesky users has created a critical mass of other historians, writers, China folks, Ann Arborites, and Phillies/Flyers fans—the people I most want to connect with. Time to officially move on.…
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Bookshelf: Her Lotus Year
After the relationship between American two-time divorcée Wallis Simpson and Britain’s King Edward VIII became public knowledge in December 1936, rumors about Simpson’s past flew thick and fast. One alleged source was the so-called “China Dossier,” a British government file (likely apocryphal) said to include prurient details about the year Simpson had spent in Hong…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 