Category: Weekly Wanderings
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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: December 7, 2025
Thanks for joining me this week. Recommendations China Stories Keith Bradsher, “The New York Times Marks the Centennial of Its Shanghai Bureau” Violet Du Feng, “How to Find a Date in a Country With Over 30 Million Extra Men” (video) Oliver Holmes, “‘Don’t say we didn’t warn you’: Beijing summons journalists in Hong Kong after…
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Weekly Wanderings: November 30, 2025
Black Friday Sale! Small-Business Saturday Savings! Maura’s Cyber Monday Mania! Wait, no, that’s not right. I’ve read those words so many times in the past few days, I forgot that I’m not here to sell anything. Nor do I have a holiday gift guide to share. There’s nothing to buy here, just a handful of…
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Weekly Wanderings: November 23, 2025
Thanks for joining me this week. Recommendations China Stories The results of an invasion would be catastrophic not just for Taiwan but the entire globe, with as much as $10 trillion in annual losses to the world economy, according to a recent analysis by Bloomberg Economics. It could wipe out over ten percent of global…
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Weekly Wanderings: November 17, 2025
This week’s post comes a day late and many links short, as I just never got the time to read all the stories I’d been saving. Instead, as is apparent by the number of Goodreads reviews below, I’ve spent most of my free time recently deeply committed to my November novel-reading project. This is not…
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Weekly Wanderings: November 9, 2025
Greetings from the first snow of the season in Ann Arbor. Although I saw one forecast yesterday that predicted 4-6 inches of snow for us today, it has now settled down to 1-3 inches—enough to make for a picturesque Sunday at home, not enough to make life overly difficult for anyone on the roads. My…
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Weekly Wanderings: November 3, 2025
November. The penultimate month of a year that has often felt endless and yet flown by. November always seems like a month that people want to rush through, eager to get to the December holidays and end-of-year celebrations. Christmas commercials are playing regularly on TV now; one of the radio stations I usually listen to…
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Weekly Wanderings: October 26, 2025
Thanks for joining me this week. Recommendations China Stories Chris Buckley, “In China, a Forbidden Question Looms: Who Leads After Xi?” Control over history has been exercised to an even greater degree in the Hong Kong case than others. As in other territories, colonial officials maintained the administration based partly on the extensive information they…
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Weekly Wanderings: October 20, 2025
Thanks for joining me this week. New Goodreads Reviews Recommendations China Stories Eliot Chen, “Laura Murphy on Enforcing America’s Ban on Uyghur Forced Labor” Wang, who has more than 800,000 subscribers on YouTube, is representative of a small but influential part of the Mandarin-language media landscape. He is part of an exodus of media professionals…
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Weekly Wanderings: October 12, 2025
The Phillies season has ended; the Flyers season has begun. Time marches on. Thanks for joining me this week. Recommendations China Stories Emma Belmonte, “A Surrogacy Silk Road: Chinese Parents Head West for Babies” Yangyang Cheng, “No Country for A Woman” While men and boys are perceived to have more potential, are allowed more time,…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 