Exciting times at the Cosmopolitan Globalist

No, we're not dead! We're just working frantically to make you even happier!

From Claire—Thank you for your emails. No, no, nothing bad has happened to us! No, no, we haven’t had a big feud! And no, we assuredly haven’t forgotten our readers. Quite the contrary. It’s just that we’ve been working so intently on building our new website that we plumb forgot about communicating with them. We’ve been pulled into a vortex of concentration and industry so intense that we more or less figured we were communicating with your souls, so why bother sending our thoughts to your inbox?

This was stupid, of course. You can’t be expected to receive our newsletter telepathically. But it was an easy mistake to make, because what seemed like mysterious silence to you has in fact been a veritable firestorm of activity for us—all focused on you. For the past three weeks, we—that’s to say, me, Vivek, the rest of the team, and Amanpreet, our web designer in Chandigarh, who is the best Wordpress developer in India, and we know this because first we tried all the others and fired them in a white-hot rage—have been in non-stop contact via WhatsApp, text, email, Zoom, Twitter, Slack, Google—Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? I think you’re on mute, Ron—frantically arguing about font sizes, page layouts, colors, headlines, sub-heds, teaser text, banner fonts, captions—We didn’t wake you up, did we? Wait, what time is it in Houston?—all with the goal of better pleasing you.

So for what seems now like months, we’ve spent every waking minute in constant mental communication with our readers. Everything we’ve done, debated, and discussed has been with you in mind. We spend our entire lives, on four continents, talking to each other via every modern modality with the sole goal of increasing your satisfaction and joy. We just forgot to mention this to you, which was a bit silly, but now that you know, you’ll surely be chuffed.

Amanpreet has set up new back-end and front-end page builders and taught us how to use them—no, no, don’t press that button … no, no, oh no—in between teaching us how to edit video and audio so better to seduce and amuse you around the clock. We’ve been test-driving the site to be sure it works on any size screen you might throw at us, no matter how aged your device, all to ensure your entirely seamless customer experience. We’ve been purging and flushing the caches so the site won’t slow by even a nanosecond when millions of new readers flock to it (as assuredly they will the very day we unveil it) so that you are never in any way inconvenienced. No, you shall experience no frustration or aesthetic displeasure of any variety when using our website! Your experience will be smooth as stonewashed Egyptian percale sheets! If only you knew, dear readers, how much time we’ve spent asking ourselves if our pop-up ad will cause you a disagreeable emotion. No, you have not been forgotten. Au contraire.

You are the only thing we think about, and at night, when finally we fall asleep after our eyes begin twitching so much we’re no longer sure what’s real and what’s our hallucination, we dream of you. And our final exams. We don’t know why we dream about those, since Pal is the only one actually taking final exams right now, but we’re all dreaming of our exams. We’re about to take the final, and it is so very important, because our mother paid our tuition this semester, so we cannot screw this up, but we realize with horror that we never opened the book, a thick tome in organic chemistry, and it’s not multiple choice …

We bolt awake, ready for another day of vibrant debate about which applications we must install and what photo editing software we can afford and whether we actually need to buy it at all, given the free application I found that works just fine so long as we don’t mind the watermark, and do we mind the watermark? And where did this photo come from, anyway, and do we have the right to use it, and what on earth’s wrong with these portraits I did for the “ABOUT” page, Vivek, why do you think they look “unserious?”

We’ve been driving poor Pal round the bend by asking her to change the Style Guide every time we change our minds, which is more often than a cat contemplating the front door, and we’ve been making Powerpoint presentations and slide decks and convening marketing meetings to do an exercise called the Business Canvas—Vivek is very keen on this—and above all, we’ve been trying to format our articles properly, because the Devil himself insinuated his foulness into our page-builder such that every paragraph, no matter what we did, wound up drop-capped. And every alternate paragraph emerged in Helvetica. Or worse. I couldn’t figure out why, no matter how I scoured the code, and then I had a meltdown and Vivek had to call in an exorcist. So that’s why I wasn’t writing a newsletter.

It all seemed, from our point of view, frantically busy, and it all seemed focused on you; after all, our every minute has been consumed with the question, “How can we make the readers of the Cosmopolitan Globalist happier? So you can see how it might have slipped our minds that maybe we should write to you now and again to keep you in the loop.

We appreciate very much that you asked, instead of assuming the worst. But not to worry, we’re fine. Better than fine! Positively manic, in truth. The Cosmopolitan Globalist is coming soon, and it will be sensational.

We’ve also got a few excellent articles coming up for you this week. Including one by that longtime Cosmopolitan Globalist favorite—Claire’s Pop.

So please be patient. Just a little bit longer. We’re want everything to be perfect when we welcome you to your new home—a home where the font suggests gravitas, the drop caps are lined up like ushers in their livery, the lute is tuned, and the cassis-ice swan is ready to roll.

Cue the ice swan in three! two! ….