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Eight days before what would have been his 100th birthday, one of the most decorated American photojournalists of the 20th century, Slava ‘Sal’ Veder, has passed away. The retired Associated Press photographer, whose career spanned decades of defining California and national news, died in his sleep on August 22 at his El Dorado County home, located outside Sacramento, California. His death was confirmed this week by his family.

Born in August 30, 1926 in Berkeley, California to Russian immigrants who changed their names to John and Ann after settling in the United States, Veder grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He cut his teeth in journalism as a sports writer and news editor across multiple regional publications before joining the Associated Press’ Sacramento bureau as a staff photographer in 1961. He later transferred to the AP’s San Francisco office, where he was based when he captured the photo that would cement his legacy in 1973.

At 46 years old, Veder was dispatched to Travis Air Force Base in March 1973 to cover the arrival of U.S. prisoners of war released from Vietnamese captivity. Among the returnees was Lieutenant Colonel Robert L. Stirm, who had spent five years as a POW. Working from a crowded press pen packed with dozens of competing photographers, Veder caught a glimpse of Stirm’s four children breaking away from the crowd to sprint toward their newly returned father. In a 2015 interview with The Guardian, Veder recalled the raw, unfiltered emotion of the moment: “You could tell, even at a distance, what they were feeling. It was all over them, their faces, the way they all broke into a run. There was a surge of emotion from the crowd, too.”

Working quickly from a makeshift darkroom rigged inside a base women’s bathroom, Veder developed six shots from the roll of film. One of those frames, titled *Burst of Joy*, would go on to win the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. Veder often pointed out that the image’s power came from its universal everyman quality: Stirm stands with his back to the camera, framing the overwhelming joy and relief on the faces of his children as they rush to embrace him. For the American public, the photograph quickly became an enduring symbol of the end of U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War. What many did not know for decades was the hidden heartbreak behind the frame: Stirm had been given a “Dear John” divorce letter from his wife Loretta by a military chaplain moments after his release, and the pair ended their marriage one year later. Stirm himself passed away earlier in 2025.

Over his 32-year career with the AP, Veder covered nearly every major story to hit Northern California, from Ronald Reagan’s time as California governor to anti-Vietnam War campus uprisings, the high-profile bank robbery trial of heiress Patty Hearst, and the 1978 assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk by former supervisor Dan White. He retired from the news cooperative in 1993.

Beyond his iconic work behind the camera, friends and colleagues remember Veder as a warm, humble mentor who lifted up younger photojournalists. He was an avid outdoorsman who enjoyed ice skating and sailing, and made a point to connect deeply with everyone he met. Brad Mangin, a Bay Area freelance sports photographer, recalled being starstruck when he first met the Pulitzer winner, remembering him simply as “the sweetest man.” Retired AP photographer Eric Risberg, who worked alongside Veder in San Francisco, said Veder taught him that powerful visual storytelling relies on the seamless combination of image and text. “He really, really emphasized the marriage between pictures and words. He encouraged me to dive deeper, and get more into what’s really the story?” Risberg said.

Veder’s death marks the close of a career that produced one of the most recognizable photographs of 20th century American history, a work that continues to capture the messy mix of joy and grief that defines the human cost of war.

Veteran Associated Press correspondent Christopher Bodeen, a tenacious old-school journalist who spent decades delivering incisive, on-the-ground reporting from across China, Taiwan, and global conflict and disaster zones, has passed away at the age of 55.

His death on Monday followed a long fight with cancer and complications stemming from a stroke, his daughter Ingrid Bodeen confirmed Thursday in a phone interview from Taiwan. Fluent in Mandarin with a distinct Taiwanese accent that he openly embraced, Bodeen built his career chronicling one of the most transformative global shifts of the modern era: China’s rapid ascent to a leading economic, political and military power, and the growing regional and international tensions that accompanied its expanding influence.

Born in September 1990 in Missouri, Bodeen was no stranger to global life from childhood. Raised across the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Asia by a foreign service officer father and former diplomat mother, he developed an early familiarity with cross-cultural engagement that would define his professional life. He graduated from Tufts University in 1993 with degrees in history and Asian studies, and joined the Associated Press’ Taiwan bureau in 1996. After a stint as an editor on the AP’s international desk in New York, he returned to East Asia as a Beijing-based correspondent in 2000, going on to work across AP bureaus in Shanghai, Beijing and Taipei.

Over his decades on the beat, Bodeen emerged as the AP’s go-to expert on Chinese politics and military affairs, celebrated by colleagues for his ability to cut through the dense, often opaque language of official government statements to quickly identify newsworthy insights. He was equally comfortable covering a wide range of complex, sensitive topics, from China’s military buildup in the South China Sea to Taiwan’s fractured domestic politics and the nuanced sensitivities surrounding Tibet and Inner Mongolia.

“Chris was a reporter who would go anywhere and do anything for the story,” recalled Charles Hutzler, AP’s former Beijing bureau chief. That commitment was on full display after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, which leveled vast swathes of Sichuan province and took tens of thousands of lives. With telecommunications infrastructure destroyed across the disaster zone, Bodeen dictated his eyewitness account sentence by sentence via text message from a ruined town, producing one of the first on-the-ground reports the AP and global audiences received from the catastrophe.

Ted Anthony, AP’s former China news editor and Asia news director, remembered how Bodeen’s fluent, authentic Mandarin allowed him to report freely when official scrutiny would have otherwise blocked access. “He was the blondest, palest person you’ll ever meet” yet also spoke pitch-perfect Chinese, Anthony said. During the Sichuan earthquake response, Bodeen pulled on one of his signature baseball caps to cover his pale hair, blended into the crowd of local residents, and was able to conduct unfiltered interviews without drawing attention from authorities.

That willingness to take risks for a story extended throughout his career. In 2001, when a U.S. Air Force plane was forced to make an emergency landing on Hainan Island, sparking a major international crisis, Bodeen hid in the island’s hills to secure on-the-ground reporting. “Chris Bodeen was always ready for adventure,” recalled Raf Wober, a video journalist in the AP’s Hong Kong bureau. “He was the best colleague to be with.”

Bodeen also brought a sharp, dry eye to the crafting of state propaganda around China’s top leadership. In a 2017 piece analyzing the campaign to burnish Xi Jinping’s public image, he highlighted absurd details of state media coverage: China Central Television led its flagship evening newscast with more than four minutes of uninterrupted applause as Xi met with supposedly adoring members of the public, and a Russian translator was so fixated on a Xi speech that he skipped both lunch and dinner to finish studying it, per official news agency Xinhua. Bodeen, however, did not frame the moment as merely absurd; he carefully noted that the overwhelming saturation of Xi’s image in official messaging evoked painful memories for many of the personality cult that surrounded Mao Zedong during the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s.

Beyond his professional rigor, colleagues remembered Bodeen for his extensive regional knowledge, wry sense of humor, and contagious enthusiasm for journalism. A conversation with Bodeen “would inevitably turn into a remarkable history lesson,” said Emily Wang Fujiyama, former AP Greater China news director, noting his astounding breadth of knowledge about the region. He was a fan of the Boston Red Sox, obscure 1970s and 80s punk rock, and could recite details of classic comedy films and television shows from the same era from memory. He was also famous among colleagues for his knowledge of the best local food at every posting, and his down-to-earth approach to the craft: he once repeated an old correspondent’s saying that news reporting is “the art of shoving 50 pounds of [expletive] into a 10-pound sack,” Hong Kong-based AP reporter Kanis Leung recalled.

To his family, Bodeen was as devoted a father as he was a reporter. He was deeply proud of his two daughters, Ingrid and Naomi, and loved sharing their artwork, academic achievements, and creative Halloween costumes with colleagues. “Every parent thinks their kids are the best, but, hand to God, these girls are both adorable and seriously tough cookies,” he once wrote of his children. When he was on long reporting trips to Afghanistan during Ingrid’s childhood, he had his wife fax over Ingrid’s spelling lists and homework so they could study together, never missing a weekly spelling test.

Julie Pace, AP’s executive editor, remembered Bodeen as not just an outstanding correspondent, but a colleague who lifted up everyone around him. “Chris cared deeply about his work and the value of on-the-ground reporting in such an important region of the world,” she said. “His expertise informed AP’s audiences for so many years, but also helped lift up so many colleagues.”

Bodeen is survived by his wife Yen Ling, his two daughters Ingrid, 26, and Naomi, 22, his parents, and a sister.

The centuries-old Chinese tile-based game of mahjong is experiencing an unprecedented global renaissance. From designer-branded tile sets to viral social media ‘mahjong parties’ and a rapid expansion of community clubs and beginner classes across Western countries, this traditional pastime has reemerged as one of the hottest lifestyle trends of the 2020s. But its newfound mainstream popularity has sparked urgent conversations about cultural exchange, commercialization, and the responsibility to honor its Chinese roots as it becomes a global commodity.

Mahjong traces its origins to the eastern coastal region of 19th century China, during the final decades of the Qing Dynasty. While scholars continue to debate its exact creation story, most agree the game evolved from much earlier tile-based gaming traditions that existed across China for centuries. By the early 1900s, mahjong had spread across the entirety of China before making its way overseas, gaining early footholds in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom.

During this first international boom, American retailers like Abercrombie & Fitch led commercialization efforts to market mahjong to Western consumers. However, as historian Heather Lynn Heinz notes, that commercial success would not have been possible without the critical contributions of Chinese manufacturers, trade networks, and cultural insiders. Chinese merchants and community leaders imported and sold mahjong sets, and personally taught thousands of white American players the rules of the game – yet these foundational contributions have been largely erased from popular narratives of mahjong’s early history in the West, as captured in a 1924 Library of Congress photograph of young Chinese boys hand-engraving mahjong tiles for export.

At its core, traditional mahjong is a four-player strategy game played with 144 tiles, where participants draw and discard tiles to complete a winning hand. Success relies on a mix of strategic thinking, probability calculation, memory, and the ability to read opponents’ moves, but the social, connection-focused element of the game is just as central to its enduring appeal as the gameplay itself.

Today, more than 40 distinct regional variations of mahjong are played across the world, each with unique rule sets, tile counts, and winning conditions. Iconic Chinese variants including Cantonese and Hong Kong-style mahjong differ dramatically from adaptations like Japanese riichi mahjong. One of the most distinct Western iterations is American Mah Jongg, which was developed during the 1920s boom, incorporates unique joker tiles not found in traditional sets, and adopted the double-g spelling as a commercial branding choice. It was eventually standardized by the National Mah Jongg League, which still oversees tournament play today. In the current revival, American Mah Jongg leads growth in the U.S., while newer clubs like Australia’s Lucky Tiles focus on introducing new players to traditional Hong Kong-style play.

Within China, mahjong’s history has long mirrored larger societal shifts. During the late Qing and Republican eras (1912–1949), the game transitioned from male-dominated gambling spaces like teahouses and brothels into middle-class and elite private homes, becoming a core part of women’s social gatherings – a shift that reflected changing gender norms and attitudes toward leisure in early 20th century China. Even at points throughout history when critics labeled mahjong a vice tied to gambling and excessive leisure, particularly as it grew in popularity among women, those criticisms never erased its deep cultural roots. Today, mahjong remains a staple of Lunar New Year celebrations and everyday social gatherings in households across China and the Chinese diaspora, where it serves as a tool for intergenerational connection and preserving cultural identity for overseas communities.

So what is driving mahjong’s unexpected 2020s boom? Google search data shows consistent year-over-year growth in interest for “mahjong” and related terms, while rising media coverage has further accelerated its popularity. Multiple overlapping trends have fueled this resurgence: in the wake of global pandemic lockdowns, many people are actively seeking offline, in-person activities that foster genuine social connection, filling a gap left by years of remote interaction. Pop culture and social media have also played a major role, with many observers tracing the start of the current revival to the 2018 hit film *Crazy Rich Asians*, which featured a iconic high-stakes mahjong scene that introduced the game to millions of new Western viewers. Today, boutique lifestyle brands and social media influencers have rebranded mahjong as an aspirational lifestyle trend, framing fashionable mahjong game nights as an extension of the viral “Chinamaxxing” trend that embraces Chinese cultural aesthetics.

This commercial boom has reignited long-simmering debates over cultural appropriation, a tension that first emerged during the 1920s American mahjong craze. Back then, mahjong became a fad among wealthy white American women, who embraced what Heinz describes as an Orientalist framing of “feminine exoticism,” adopting stereotypical Chinese-inspired clothing and language to perform an imagined, romanticized version of Chinese culture – all at a time when anti-Asian prejudice and strict immigration restrictions were escalating rapidly across the United States.

Philosopher James Young argues that cultural borrowing is a natural part of human societal development, and is not inherently unethical. The key questions, he says, are whether the origin of a cultural practice is properly acknowledged, and whether adoption of that practice causes harm to the community it came from. Late cultural critic bell hooks, meanwhile, warned against the harm of reducing a living culture to a detachable aesthetic object stripped of its historical context – a debate that played out in a 2021 controversy, when U.S. brand The Mahjong Line drew widespread backlash for selling sets that replaced traditional Chinese characters with Western words and symbols.

There is also the question of financial equity in mahjong’s current boom. Texas-based brand Oh My Mahjong, founded in 2022, reported more than $30 million in revenue in 2025, while luxury fashion houses like Hermès sell high-end designer mahjong sets for tens of thousands of dollars, turning a culturally significant traditional game into a high-margin luxury commodity. As mahjong continues to grow in global popularity, the core challenge moving forward will be ensuring its success remains tied to the Chinese communities and deep history that shaped it, and that those communities get to have a meaningful voice in how the game evolves around the world.