Introducing the Cosmopolitan Globalist

Claire's thoughts are soon to be bigger, better, faster, and open longer

In the coming days, I’ll be unveiling the secret project upon which I and my team of 68—at last count—have been laboring throughout the pandemic. I’ll do this slowly so that you don’t faint with exhilaration.

The idea was borne of my endless lament that global news coverage has disappeared. If you’ve been reading what I have to say about this for a while, you know the story. If you’re new, start here:

Less-than-Splendid Isolation: The world is vanishing from Americans’ awareness …

Something has gone very wrong in American coverage of news from abroad: It is shoddy, lazy, riddled with mistakes, and excessively simplistic. Above all, it is absent …

The International News Superhighway: Let us return to one of the most morbid and perplexing problems in the annals of the deterioration of American liberal democracy: the death of journalism …

Manufacturing outrage: It turns out that everything you hate about the media is your fault.

Mid-November, I issued an exasperated tweet:

I can no longer remember what outrage prompted me to say that. The astonishing thing is that almost immediately, dozens of people responded. Perhaps it was the combination of the pandemic, lockdown, and unemployment: Old friends and complete strangers alike responded to my anguished call.

Vivek Kelkar, my colleague at the original Asia Times—a quarter of a century ago—said “Yes.” The former president of Estonia said, “Yes.” My friend Piero said, “Why not?” I couldn’t quite believe how many people answered.

My DMs were suddenly overflowing, so I started a Slack channel. Slack, if you’ve never used it, is a platform that in its own words “[brings] the right people and information together in channels,” so that you can “[s]hare ideas, make decisions and move work forward with a common purpose and place.” It’s an absurdly aggravating platform and we all hate it. But in fairness, it did allow us to share ideas, make decisions, and “move work forward” with a common purpose. (The advantage of the phrase “move work forward” over the verb “work” is unclear to us. We have banned that locution and any like it at The Cosmopolitan Globalist.)

The Slack channel acquired a life of its own. We all knew what we hated about the way global news was reported. But did we know what we wanted to do, instead? After negotiating for a solid 72 hours over the time zone, we managed to get at least a fifth of our members on the same Zoom call. If you’d like to listen to the call, here it is. Midway through, one of us remembered that we should record the call, given that the rest of the team wasn’t there, owing in part to the impossibility of finding everyone awake at once. Only after we got off the call did it occur to us that the conversation should have been a podcast. So the whole thing is a bit ad hoc and the sound quality isn’t great, but unlike rival podcasts, ours wasn’t scripted or rehearsed, or even planned ahead. It just happened.

Rachel Motte’s husband, Tim, volunteered to edit it. (Thank you, Tim!) The only thing he took out were the incomprehensible parts where we were all talking over each other. This is the conversation in which we decided what The Cosmopolitan Globalist was and what it ought to do, and if you think otherwise, let us know.

“The Cosmopolitan Globalist? I don’t really like that name. Have you considered—”

Yes, we have. It’s taken already.

---

Here’s what we’ll be rolling out in the coming days and weeks.

First: Meet the team! I’ll introduce you to Alex, Brian, Casey, Casey, David, David, David, Jacob, Jon, Jon, John, John, Kamalhaq, Le Cagot, Piero, Rachel, Robert, Simon, Shaun, Shay, TZ, Vivek, and the rest of the Globe. (How do I tell them apart? I don’t. I just say, “Jon, Casey, my dudes, what do you think?”)

Vivek’s remit is everything between Hawaii and the Urals and I’m the editor for the Western hemisphere. Direct your complaints to Vivek, not me, and before you point out that Paris is not technically in the Western hemisphere, you should know that I’ve officially moved to Greenwich Mean Time. Spiritually, I mean. My body is in Paris, but I identify with GMT. In fact, the Cosmopolitan Globalist runs on GMT: We decided GMT had a certain dignified, old-world, globally irrelevant prestige.

Robert Zubrin is our intergalactic editor: If a story is extra-global, so to speak, he’s in charge. Piero Castellano is in charge of photos but not proofreading because he’s dyslexic, though his spelling of Fecakoob is now our official house style.

I remain your host, Dr. Claire Berlinski. And from now on, I insist you call me that. From here on in I only answer to “Western Hemisphere editor Prof. Dr. Madame Claire Berlinski, BA First Class MA M.Phil D.Phil (Oxon),” and if you don’t get it right, I’m cancelling your subscription. And you with it.

What? The very thought you just had was so sexist I cannot believe you uttered it in the year 2020.

---

What else do we have planned for you? So much! In the coming week I’ll introduce you to our ongoing overview of the seas where the next world war is most apt to break out. Piero will be on Medwatch, and I forget who’s on South China Sea watch, but he’s watching it like a hawk. We’ve got articles in the pipeline about global trade, the global pandemic, global agriculture—did you realize that there is no such thing as a free market in agriculture?—the future of war, the future of censorship, the Bomb, and Venezuela. We’ve got a great piece for you about Venezuela. We’ll be doing a piece on global policing and global riots. We’ll be asking, “Whither the primacy of the US dollar?” “How do we prepare our infrastructure for solar storms?” “Why has Africa done so much better at combating Covid19 than the West?” and “Why did Google disappear for 45 minutes and where did it go?”

Soon, we’ll have our own website—although we’re starting with the newsletter for now, and from now on, you’ll get the newsletter regularly: bigger, better, faster, open longer. One day, we’ll have a forum where subscribers may talk among themselves and with us. It will be like our Slack channel, only better. (Vivek knows a couple of guys in Bangalore who say they can do something terrific for us. When Vivek told us they were willing to do the demo at 3:30 a.m. Bangalore time, I decided I was in love. Though I probably shouldn’t admit that yet.)

Nishant Nadkarny designed our logo—isn’t it beautiful? Rachel is our ace proofreader and arbiter of taste. We’ll have a regular podcast. Maybe even a regular videocast. And one day, when this cursed pandemic is over, we’ll invite you on a cruise, or something like that. Something at sea, with cigars. Because, of course, we aim to monetize you.

---

The Cosmopolitan Globalist will strive to provide educated, erudite, and credible reporting and analysis from the world around, treating issues of global import. It is not nationalist, partisan, narrow-minded, or provincial. Our outlook is cosmopolitan and worldly.

We are attached to 18th-century Enlightenment ideals: rational inquiry, free speech, free trade, progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional governance, the rule of law, and the separation of state from church, temple, and mosque. We wonder how these ideals will survive the digital age. We will deliver world-class coverage of consequential events even as we consider every issue from an informed local perspective. Our writers live in the countries from which they report. They understand local politics intimately. We will seek insight from academia and other experts: We value expertise. But we do not worship it.

We will not chase breaking news. It breaks, we shrug. Instead, we will strive for our coverage to be more intelligent, more astute, and more accurate than that of any other media outlet.

---

The week in prospect, a preview:

Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown

Four years and several months ago, the United States stood on the verge of commanding the Pacific by means of a vast trade zone that would exclude China, forcing it to bend to America’s will or be frozen out. But on November 15, 2020—twelve days after a slight majority of the United States waved Donald Trump goodbye—China announced that it now commands the Pacific by means of a vast trade zone that excludes the United States ...

Vivek Y. Kelkar in Mumbai, Claire Berlinski in Paris, and the Cosmopolitan Globalists examine China’s new trade pact and shudder.

Coronavirus and the Narcissism of Small Western Differences

While Americans and Europeans eyed the other’s response to the pandemic with condescension and incomprehension, both spectacularly failed the test. Meanwhile China and Russia raced ahead in the vaccination propaganda war …

Jon Nighswander in Vienna and the Cosmopolitan Globalists wonder why the West is obsessed with Sweden, which flunked the pandemic test, and not Ghana, which didn’t.

We’ll be publishing both articles, and unveiling our new features, in the days to come.

Please stay tuned and please share this newsletter.

And please, do, subscribe.