Longform’s Picks of the Week

Every weekend, Longform highlights its favorite international articles of the week. For daily picks of new and classic nonfiction, check out Longform or follow @longform on Twitter. Have an iPad? Download Longform’s new app and read all of the latest in-depth stories from dozens of magazines, including Foreign Policy.

“Time, Gentleman: When Will the Last All-Male Clubs Admit Women?” by Amelia Gentleman, the Guardian.

The Garrick Club in London is preparing for a bitter struggle over whether to admit women members. How long can the British establishment fend off modernity?

“The Garrick is one of a handful of London’s gentlemen’s clubs that do not admit women as members. (‘A club,’ wrote Anthony Lejeune in his 1979 book, The Gentlemen’s Clubs of London, ‘is a place where a man goes to be among his own kind.’) Women can go as guests, but are not allowed to join in their own right, and club convention still dictates that they don’t sit at the central dining table. Members describe the club as a place of sanctuary, away from the 21st-century grime of Soho’s casinos and bars. Most enjoy the club’s maleness, explaining that it is a peaceful environment where men can relax, uninhibited by pressure to turn on the ‘peacock behaviour’ that comes when there are women to be impressed.”

“Three Days in Beijing With Three of the World’s Most Famous Dissidents” by Kashmir Hill, Fusion.

A visit with Ai Weiwei, Laura Poitras, and Jacob Appelbaum, three people who live in justifiable paranoia of government surveillance.

“As a result of their activism, Ai, Appelbaum, and Poitras have become three of the most justifiably paranoid people in the world. They have faced detentions and, in the case of Ai, jail time. Every day, the possibility of government retribution casts a shadow over their lives. Every communique they send is presumed to be monitored, every movement tracked. ‘When I was writing those three names in one email, it’s a red flag immediately and you have to assume that’s happening,’ says Rhizome director Heather Corcoran, who arranged the meeting. (Corcoran also invited me to China to witness the meeting, and document the project the three would create together.)”

“Do You Understand That Your Baby Goes Away and Never Comes Back?” by Kathryn Joyce, the New Republic.

Adoption is embraced in the Marshall Islands, but in the Ozarks, it means something very different. The tragic consequences of cultural misunderstanding. 

“Months passed, and no photos came. Depression took hold of Maryann. ‘Every day I’m always crying, and my husband [asks] ‘What happened to you?” Maryann said. ‘I’m worried because I don’t know where she is right now.’ She began to call Woodruff regularly, asking for the adoptive parents’ phone number. She wouldn’t try to take the baby back, she promised, she just wanted to know the child was OK. (Woodruff said that Maryann only called to argue that she hadn’t signed a consent form, but that if she had asked for the adoptive parents’ phone number, she would have told Maryann that information is confidential.) Dexter said they offered to repay the money they’d received from Woodruff, but Woodruff told them that wasn’t a possibility. Woodruff stated that she makes sure all the birth parents she works with understand the terms of their agreement: ‘I have never promised open adoption to anybody because, to me, that would be misstatement of Arkansas law.’ At one point, Maryann tried to go back to Aine, hoping to reconnect with the first set of adoptive parents—the ones who had promised to stay in touch. But, of course, it was too late.”

“The People’s Republic of Cruiseland” by Christopher Beam, Bloomberg.

The cruise industry is coming to China. Tai Chi on the lido deck, anybody?

“Local governments have already built cruise terminals in Sanya, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Xiamen, with more on the way in at least four other coastal cities. Cruise companies are bringing ships to China as fast as the ports can squeeze them in. But the hardware is the easy part. The software—the onboard experience of the Chinese customer — is still in beta. Localization itself is nothing new; brands from KFC to Oreo as well as Hollywood studios have tailored their products to the Chinese market, with varying levels of success. For cruise companies, it’s more complicated than hiring a Chinese celebrity spokesperson or throwing in a green tea flavor. They must rethink the entire cruise experience, from food to décor to how a rapidly capitalizing society thinks about class and luxury.”

“The Communists That China Forgot” by Robert Foyle Hunwick, Foreign Policy.

Not an hour from Beijing is a hard-core leftist’s “utopia,” free from modern Chinese materialism. Welcome to Righteous Path Farm Academy.

“That model has a tortured antecedent, for those words evoke the anarchic 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, when Mao diffused warring bands of youth known as Red Guards across the country to become ‘educated youth.’ Instead, Most saw their lives and educations derailed. One folk songs of the era paints a less-than-bucolic picture of life in the country: ‘You’re dead if you piss off the Secretary. You’ll get the heavy job if you piss off the Team Leader…. Your lunch is halved if you piss off the Security Guards.’

That bitterness remains. In a March 2012 press conference, then Premier Wen Jiabao took aim at the red-singing, Mao-praising Bo by warning that China faced another ‘historical tragedy’ if it did not heed the lessons of the Cultural Revolution. Within days, Bo’s disgrace was official and he had disappeared into the internal machinery of Party discipline, not to be seen again until his trial in the summer of 2013.”

Getty Images; LIU JIN/AFP/Getty Images; PHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP/Getty Images; Robert Foyle Hunwick; STR/AFP/Getty Images