"'Take me, too.'
These three words plunge a young white woman named Diane into the world of Baghdad in 1937. A 20-year-old nurse, she falls in love with physician Ibrahim Haddad in London and follows him home to Iraq. Baghdad comes alive in vivid detail as she navigates her interracial marriage to Ibrahim, her in-laws, her high-profile but politically sensitive job as a nanny for the Iraqi royal family, and eventually, her relationship with her own biracial children."

"On Dec. 16, 2022, China extended its threats against Taiwan to include a more direct move against Japan—and its treaty ally, the United States. The Liaoning aircraft carrier sailed quietly east between Okinawa and Miyako islands, of Japan’s Okinawa Prefecture, sandwiching the Japanese territory with China’s mainland to the west..."

A. A. Bastian navigates the commercial and Christian aspirations of Euro-American trading empires in 19th century Asia, through a Water Splotch from the Bay of Bengal in Levi Savage’s ship diary. Hugging India’s glistening Bay of Bengal, Euro-American ships like the Monsoon and Fire Queen carried goods and peoples to and from India and Burma.

“You’ll pronounce Himālaya properly after reading John Keay’s new book. Keay, known for contextualizing broad sweeps of Asian, in particular South Asian, history, tackles the iconic mountain range in Himālaya. His long career writing histories from west to east Asia sets us up comfortably to delve into all the borders of this vast region...

"As U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi landed in Taiwan today, rumors and false stories flew around the Chinese language online sphere. Claims that PLA Su-35 fighters had crossed into Taiwanese airspace were promptly dismissed by Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense. Online assaults, meanwhile, targeted Taiwanese websites...."

"When responding to threats against Taiwan, U.S. leaders generally assume that Chinese leaders actually want to annex the island—as a recent report by the congressionally mandated U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission concluded. ...But over the last few decades, threatening Taiwan has been advantageous for China, often gotten it what it wanted, and has been more fruitful—and far less costly—than seizing the island by force would have been."

Abstract: A new source reveals Burmese bravery at the Shwedagon pagoda following the hostilities of the Second Anglo-Burmese War in 1853. Once buried in the Mormon archives in Salt Lake City a brief journal describing events in and around the Shwedagon Pagoda of that period has surfaced. The journal, written by a man situated in the Shwedagon Pagoda, strengthens postcolonial scholarship focusing on counter narratives to colonial conquest and dominance not easily found in primary sources to date. Destruction or suppression of primary sources served a strategic agenda as another type of bayonet for colonial conquest. Through this new eye witness, we can now glimpse amidst desecration and hostilities into Burmese rebellion against their aggressors.

"A literary friend bans the mere mention of career and the two-fingered clasp of that must-carry calling card. A self-proclaimed “New Yorker in exile,” she hosted a dinner party for artists in Washington, DC. She abhors the city’s drabness and its dark-suit-wearing crowd of lawyers who represent a place in which she’s endured far too many so-what-do-you-do’s?

She’s not the only disgruntled literary New Yorker I’ve met in DC, but I can’t relate."

"A day after Elam Luddington baptized his first and only convert in Siam, Captain James Trail, the King of Siam thrust the convert into a debtor’s prison without food. The captain’s crime was misunderstanding a command and firing a salute from his ship in the rhodes of Singapore. With only one baptism, is it possible that Luddington's apparent failure washed him from our collective Mormon memories?"