🚨🚨‼️‼️BLACK FRIDAY SALE‼️‼️🚨🚨

🌶️ Grab your credit card, it's time for our INSANE BLACK FRIDAY BLOWOUT !

This is a day late because I completely forgot. So we’re going to have an even bigger sale to make up for it.

People who’ve been around here for a while know this happens but rarely. But when it does, it’s spectacular.

Just for this weekend, you can subscribe to the Cosmopolitan Globalist for half the usual price.

Yes, 50 percent off.

That’s so cheap that it actually pains me, to be honest, but I think it’s good to have a sale like this every now and again—albeit very infrequently—because I’m sure we have readers who just can’t afford the regular price, and who have, for ages, been pressing their noses against the windowpanes of the Cosmopolitan Globalist Store, whimpering with longing for the dazzling wares inside, until their moms take them firmly by their threadbare mittens and march them away. “That’s only for the swells, Joey. Not for the likes of us.”

This weekend only, the Cosmopolitan Globalist is for everyone, no matter how short on cash you are.

I’m offering this at a positively Marxist price.

In return, I expect all of the people who’ve been reading this for ages, without paying, to subscribe. It’s only fair.

I know a lot of broke people. I’ve been a broke person. I’ll be a broke person again soon, at this rate, if I don’t stop buying toys for my cats. But I don’t think I know anyone who’s so broke he can’t afford to buy a cup of coffee once a month.

If you subscribe in the next 48 hours, reading this newsletter for a whole month will cost you less than a cup of coffee.

(A decent cup of coffee, admittedly, not absolute swill, in a mid-to-major urban area in the West. But not a seriously elaborate cappuccino in Belgravia, say, the kind where the coffee comes with a square of bitter chocolate in gold foil and the foam is poured to look like your family’s coat of arms. Just decent filter coffee, in a coffee shop that’s not too depressing, in a city like Gdansk or Milwaukee.)

And for a price like this, if you’re not broke, you can afford to buy subscriptions for all of your family and friends, right? Instead of just forwarding your copy to them? I’d really appreciate that. I spend pretty much every waking minute researching or writing or editing this newsletter—I like to think it’s really quite valuable—so if you were to pay for it, I bet we’d both feel better about it.

Heck, it’s so cheap, this weekend, that you can afford to buy two, just in case you misplace the first. You never know when you’ll need a spare. Or give one to your local high school. Send one to each of your elected representatives. (This is an excellent idea. They need it.) Send one to the guy in your office with annoying, ill-informed opinions about Ukraine or the Middle East: Let us sort them out.

It’s less than the price of coffee in many cities, actually. (My commitment to fact-checking is so scrupulous that I actually just looked up the price of a cup of coffee in every major city of the world. You would pay a lot more in many places. Like Vienna, or Doha, or anywhere in the US.¹)

So that’s the good news.

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The bad news is that after this weekend, the price goes up. So grab this chance now, while you can.

We founded this newsletter just before the beginning of the pandemic. Since then, the price of everything—except this newsletter—has gone up. So to keep pace with inflation, from now on we’ll be charging an extra buck per month. (This won’t affect the price if you’ve already subscribed, of course.)

So it really makes sense to take advantage of the sale.

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Now, you may be asking: What exactly do I get if I subscribe that I don’t get if I subscribe to the free version? Could it really be worth it?

Our readers think so. Before showing you what they say, though, let me clearly spell out the benefits:

1. You’ll receive all of our genuinely GLOBAL NEWS AND ANALYSIS, written by people who know what they’re talking about. If you haven’t yet read our About page, have a look at who we are and why we think the Cosmopolitan Globalist fills a critically important niche—especially now.

2. You get access to five years’ worth of paywalled ARCHIVES, with essays, podcasts, lectures, and discussions by not just me (although that should be enough, for God’s sake—for the price of a cup of coffee?) but all of the Cosmopolitan Globalists, including but not limited to Vivek Kelkar, Peter Zeihan, Tecumseh Court, Robert Zubrin, Judith Levy, Vladislav Davidzon, Bob Holley, Michael Oren, Adam Garfinkle, Adnan Hadad, Tanju Yürükoglü, David Hazony, John Oxley, Monique Camarra, Philip Obaji, Casey Handmer, Simon Franco, Ken Opalo, Cathy Young, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Nicolas Tenzer, Steve Schmidt, Yuri Deigan, Habib Abodunrin Zakari, Andre Goffinet, Steve Schmidt, Gaby Mitchell, Cristina Maza, Cristy Quirk, Livia Ponzo, Michael Weiss, Bertie Lintner, Bill Walsh, Joshua Treviño, Meron Gebreananaye, Saba Mah’derom, Honore Mvula Kabala, Dina Kaphaeva, David Patrikarikos, Thomas Gregg, David Agren, Arun Kapil, Michael Totten, Shay Khateri, Julian Lindley-Finch, David Volodzho, Chris Zappone, and Oren Kessler, just for starters.²

3. You get full access to our podcasts: THE ELEPHANT CAGE and THE COSMOPOLICAST.

4. You get access to videos of our ZOOM DISCUSSIONS, DEBATES, SPECIAL FORA, LECTURES, SEMINARS, AND SPECIAL EVENTS—like our Q&A with Peter Zeihan, our discussion of the Six Day War with Michael Oren, our seminar on Russian information operations with Chris Zappone, our Great Energy Debate, and many more.

5. Better still: You’ll get invited to events like that, too. Yes, all of this is included in the price of the subscription.

6. You get access to MIDDLE EAST 101, an online class that offers you everything you need to teach yourself about the Arab-Israeli, from Theodore Herzl to the present: reading lists, study guides, study questions, videos, podcasts, and videos of our class discussions, all included in the small price of your subscription.³

7. You get access to MIDDLE EAST 201, too, where we explore the wider Middle East in the same way—and this class is ongoing, so you can even join it live (provided you do the reading).

8. You get access to WAR 101, Marine Corps veteran Tecumseh Court’s guide to making deadly war on your enemies. (You may need this more than you think, the way things are going.)

9. You get to tell me why I’m wrong about everything in the comments. (Our subscribers seem to like this feature a lot.) Our comment section tends to be much more intelligent and civilized than other forums on the Internet. (Though readers’ nerves frayed a bit in the run-up to the US election—I assume this was temporary.) Better still, you get access to the LIVE CHAT. Come join us—you’ll make unusually intelligent friends.

10. You’ll get GLOBAL EYES, our weekly,⁴ comprehensive survey of all the news from Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas, with special sections on the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Plus, you get an amusing survey of lunatic propaganda from the Russian and Chinese media. Sometimes from the Iranian media, too. (Not so much from the North Korean media because there is none.)

11. You also get a carefully chosen selection of cross-posts from the most interesting and useful newsletters I’ve been reading.

12. You get my promise to answer your email personally, if not punctually. (If you’re not a subscriber, I’ll still try, but I wouldn’t hold out much hope.) I love hearing from my subscribers.

13. You’ll read one of the last remaining English-language publications to uphold exacting standards in English usage and style. We never beg questions at the Cosmopolitan Globalist, but if we did, we’d assume our conclusion.

14. You’ll even get occasional essays by and podcasts with my father, David Berlinski. (And now, my brother, Mischa Berlinski, too.)

15. You’ll randomly receive news quizzes, AMAs, travelogues, childrens’ poems written by my father, literary criticism, documentaries about North European Apartment Cheetahs (Felidae juvenilis delinquentibus), or some other random and delightful thing that will leaven the otherwise generally grim global news.

16. If you become a founding member, you get a bespoke TOUR OF THE CITY when next you’re in Paris.

    

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Our Happy Subscribers

Here’s what our happy subscribers say about us.

First, read this email from Jonathan Blake, which he sent me just this morning, and which is one of the nicest things I’ve ever read.

Claire, thanks to you:

• My days are filled with exciting, engaging intellectual activities, instead of doomscrolling and trying to figure out what to read next.

• I acquired a dozen new friends for whom I feel genuine affection even though we've never met (yet!), instead of being enveloped by loneliness.

• I get regular (well, maybe not so regular 😉) injections of your enthusiasm, your passion, your yearning for justice, your compassion, and your love for your “apartment cheetahs.”

This subscription was the best investment I ever made. …

… Thank you, thank you, thank you. On this uniquely American holiday of gratitude, one of the biggest things I thank God for is you and the Cosmopolitan Globalist community.

Isn’t that lovely? I didn’t make it up. You can even ask him.

Next, here’s a collection of nice things people said when Substack asked them why they subscribed to The Cosmopolitan Globalist:

If you’ve subscribed, you don’t have to read the rest. You get the picture, I’m sure. But if you haven’t yet subscribed, keep reading.

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These responses were from a Substack quiz that asked readers what they liked about this publication:

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Have you subscribed yet? No? Keep reading, then.

Here’s what readers said when Substack asked them to send me a note telling me why they’d subscribed:

🎁🏷️☞ You, too, can be a happy customer—and it will never, ever again be so cheap to become one … ⇲

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FAQ

—“Wow, Claire. I had no idea your readers loved the Cosmopolitan Globalist so much!”

I didn’t either, until I put this list of recommendations together! It’s really touching, isn’t it?

I wish I could show that to my mom.

—But why are you giving this away for the price of a cup of coffee? That seems absurd, seeing as your readers love you so. Shouldn’t you be charging three hundred bucks a subscription?

I do see your point. If, having read this, you feel it’s only right to pay 300 bucks, you can become a founding member. That way, next time you’re in Paris, I’ll take you on the walking tour of your choice—a chocolate tour, a perfume tour, an art deco tour, a pâtisserie tour, a Louis XIV tour, a French Revolution tour, a cheese tour, Paris by Smell, a tour of the banlieues, Little Africa, the flea markets, Roman Paris, the impressionists … just give me a bit of advance notice, and the tour will be yours.

—It’s still not enough. Claire, it’s just not right that some wantwit cockwomble like Jackson Hinkle makes tens of millions by shilling for Vladimir Putin while the editor of a publication like this—a woman so scrupulous and upstanding that yes, she really did just look up the price of coffee in every city of the world—sells her work for the price of a cup of coffee in Mobile, Alabama.

It’s a terrible thing. What kind of society will we live in if we reward the perfidious and punish the virtuous this way? I should hate to find out. If you’re concerned about this perverse system of incentives—and by Gum, you should be; at this rate we’ll wind up with a reality television star ensconced in the White House—you could always support me on Patreon, too.

—I’m curious, though. Don’t your readers ever complain?

On occasion. Here’s a (genuinely) representative sample of what readers said when they were asked what they didn’t like about this publication:

(“More free content?” Dude.)

Being a bellicose, politics-centered liberal is a feature, not a bug. But I can’t be wasting time with that negative energy. I figure if all of this still isn’t enough to make a reader happy, I’ll never make him happy, and it would be for the best if he looked for another newsletter, one better suited to his emotional needs. (I understand Bari Weiss is very popular, try her.)

If you still haven’t subscribed. …

Thank you for subscribing!

And for those of you who already subscribe—and who send me lovely notes like the ones above, which mean the world to me—thank you, thank you, thank you, and thank you again, a thousand times over.

1. Whoa, coffee is expensive in the US. I guess that’s why Trump won.

2. If I didn’t list you, it is not a slight. These are just the first names I saw when I looked through the archives. The full register of people who’ve written for us—or spoken to us on the podcast, or joined us for a special event—would go on for pages. I decided not even to try to list everyone, because then, if I accidentally missed someone, it really would look like a slight.

3. Some of the class discussion videos haven’t yet been posted because it takes an agonizingly long time to upload them (during which my Internet is slow, which is near- unbearable). It’s a measure of the class’s popularity that some of these videos are more than three hours long. They will be uploaded, though.

4. This is aspirational. I won’t pretend I don’t occasionally miss a week.