Category: Weekly Wanderings
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Weekly Wanderings: December 22, 2024
In lieu of musings and reading recommendations, this week I’m sharing photos from an August 2021 visit I made to the house from A Christmas Story in Cleveland, Ohio. Open for tours (you can also stay the night!), the house is dressed for Christmas year-round and features all the iconic props from the movie—including, of…
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Weekly Wanderings: December 8, 2024
On the morning of Tuesday, December 3, I got up early and started writing right away. I was working on a book review and had suddenly hit the zone where words were flowing, so my focus was unusually unshakeable. At 9:00, I reluctantly left that document and switched to Zoom, where I spent the next…
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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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Weekly Wanderings: November 10, 2024
What a week. I don’t have any deep insights or grand analysis to share about the election. Since Wednesday, my inbox has been filled with newsletters and articles titled “What did Harris do wrong?” and “What this election means for America” and so forth. I’ve opened all those emails and mostly skimmed over them before…
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Weekly Wanderings: November 3, 2024
I thought about putting together a full post for today’s Weekly Wanderings, but let’s be honest: there’s only one big story this week. Everyone’s attention is trained on Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election. Most of us are either devouring every scrap of news about the latest shifts in polls, or doggedly avoiding social media and news…
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Weekly Wanderings: October 30, 2024
Thanks for joining me this week. #AsiaNow Author Interview Recommendations China Stories Emily Feng, “An opera troupe in Taiwan is preparing a lavish performance for the gods” The journalist’s report centered on the Franklin County Jail, a three-story, brick structure with six steel cells that had been “properly condemned” by the state commissioner of prisons…
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Weekly Wanderings: October 20, 2024
When I turned 39 in October 2021, I decided that I would celebrate my 40th birthday the following year by finishing the Detroit Half-Marathon. I had done a large number of 5K and 10K races by that point, and practiced yoga since moving to Ann Arbor in 2016, so I felt like a race of…
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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…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 