Exciting Announcements
We invite you to a debate. Also, if we're sending you too much email, we show you what to do about it.
FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT
On Wednesday August 23, at 1800 EST,1 the Cosmopolitan Globalist Chat Room will open for a debate:
RESOLVED: TO LIMIT OUR EXPOSURE TO A HOSTILE ADVERSARY, THE WEST’S TRADE WITH CHINA MUST BE SHARPLY CURTAILED.
I’ll be defending the proposition (because someone has to). Jay Burkett of the Neoliberal Standard, whose idea this was, will oppose it.
After the initial (brief) opening statements, we warmly invite all of our subscribers to join and contribute to the debate. The winner gets to determine the West’s trade policy with China.
SECOND ANNOUNCEMENT
I’ve spent the weekend trying to organize this newsletter to make it more useful for our subscribers. We now have a massive archive of essays, and some of them are just sensational—seriously, I re-read them this weekend, and they’re absolutely terrific. A lot of them remain entirely topical. But they’re hard for new subscribers to find, especially if they don’t know that they should be looking for them in the first place. Even our oldest subscribers may have missed them when they were first published.
Substack has now rolled out design features that can solve this problem. So that’s what I’ve been working on all weekend. I’d hoped to be finished by today, but I want to get it just right, so I’ll need another day to figure out exactly how to do it and sort everything into the right categories. So may I ask for your forbearance while I work on this? The appearance of the site might change in alarming or peculiar ways over the coming 24 hours. But don’t worry. It’s just me trying to figure out what all the new buttons do. I’ll fix it: I don’t think it’s possible to break anything permanently.
When I’m done, if all goes according to my plan, we’ll have a new section called “Best of the Cosmopolitan Globalist.” This will be a guide to our archives, and it will be organized in a simple, intuitive way—either by theme, author, or region. (I’m trying to decide how best to do this, and I’m also trying to decide which essays are, in fact, the best. If you have organizational tips, or favorite essays that you’d like to nominate, would you please let me know in the comments?)
Also, since many excellent writers have joined Substack recently, I’ve just rewritten our “Recommendations” section. If you open this newsletter in your browser now, you’ll see five recommendations on the right side of the page, like so:
But these are on rotation from a much longer list of recommendations, which you can see if you go to the lower left of the home page, then click Recommendations. You’re looking for a menu that looks like this:
Clicking on Recommendations will take you to this page, where you’ll find a complete list of Substack newsletters I read regularly and my comments about why they’re useful. Like so:
If you were to read all of the newsletters on that list, you would definitely be better-informed about global affairs than the editor-in-chief of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. But of course, I’ll keep picking the best of the best for you in Global Eyes.
Finally, I’m sure you’ve noticed that I’ve been taking advantage of Substack’s new Cross-Post feature, which lets me send any newsletter on Substack that interests me to you directly. Some of you will love this—after all, if I find the newsletter interesting, why wouldn’t you?—but others will feel it’s just too much email.
If you’re in the latter category, please don’t unsubscribe! Among the things I’m doing now is creating sections that will allow you to opt in, or opt out, of receiving different parts of the Cosmopolitan Globalist. The Cosmopolitan Globalist will henceforth be divided into the following sections:
ESSAYS
GLOBAL EYES
NOTES ON THE NEWS
BEST OF THE COSMOPOLITAN GLOBALIST
CROSS-POSTS
By following these instructions, you’ll be able to choose which ones you’d like to receive in your In Box. But don’t do that yet, because these sections don’t exist yet. I’ll let you know as soon as we’re good to go. No matter which sections you choose to receive, you’ll of course still have access to all of them on the website. So everyone should be happy.
So may I ask for your patience for one more day? I’m pretty sure it won’t take longer than that. The new features all look pretty user-friendly. I just need to play around with them a bit to see how they all fit together, and how they look on the screen and on all the devices you might be using to read this. And then I need to sort all of our past entries into the right categories.
I’m sure it will be a huge improvement. If you have any suggestions for how you’d like to see things organized, they’re very much welcome—and now’s the time to tell me, before I get set in my ways.
See you at the debate!
The original version said “Wednesday, August 22.” That was—obviously—an error.
"The winner gets to determine the West’s trade policy with China."
Very funny, Claire.
Huzzah!