• Geopolitical black eyes:

Chinese officials are demanding tough punishment for an American who stole the thumb of a terra cotta warrior on display in Philadelphia. (The 24-year-old sneaked in while attending an ugly-sweater event at the museum.)

And Steven Lee Myers, a veteran Times correspondent, traveled with a photographer high into the mountains of the Tibetan plateau to write about holiday traditions. But his topic had to shift.

“By detaining us, and ultimately expelling us from the region,” he writes, “the authorities succeeded in preventing that. So I am writing this instead” — an account of a 17-hour journey into what was, in this case, the absurdity of Chinese detention.

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