In August 2021, Yukiyo Kawano, a third generation Hiroshima hibakusha, was refused permission to install her sculptural evocation of the Nagasaki bombing, at the first commemoration of the atomic bombings within the National Park Service's Manhattan Project National Historical Park at Hanford, Washington, where plutonium for the “Fat Man” device was produced. The artist nonetheless raised the piece near the restricted Hanford zone. We consider the work's complex ritual symbolism and the Park's resistance to interpreting the impact of nuclear weapons and the legacies of environmental toxicity associated with plutonium production at Hanford during WWII and the Cold War.

My novel, excerpted here, is set in old Beijing, a city of walls in their contemporary incarnations. By old Beijing I don't mean so much the remnants of the Qing Dynasty capital described by twentieth-century writers. The story is contemporary but much of it is set within the confines of the Mongol Dynasty summer capital described by Marco Polo as Cambaluc, and celebrated by Samuel Coleridge in a euphonic fit of imagination in “Kubla Khan.”