What Is Going On in the World?

In partnership with

Today’s ad is for 1440 Media, which is making a possibly vain attempt to present the news in a nonpartisan manner. Let’s wish them the best of luck by clicking their ad (or even that link right there) and sending me $1 for every one of you who does so!

Long, long ago, when I lived in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, I used to buy the International Herald Tribune almost every day. This wasn’t always easy: There weren’t a ton of English-language newsstands, and the relatively few copies of the IHT that arrived in Vietnam were occasionally censored, sometimes with stories blacked out, sometimes removed from circulation entirely. But in my neighborhood, there was a roaming newspaper and magazine seller, a deaf man who I always thought of as Anh Báo—Mr. Newspaper—and I bought from him regularly enough that he came to recognize me and remember my “order.” That was nice. Some days I couldn’t find him, though, and I’d go around asking other street merchants if they’d seen Anh Báo. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

I needed the paper, in those very, very early Internet days, because I’d developed a craving for news. There was so much going on, in so many far-flung locales! And this paper seemed to contain it all, with serious reporting out of Algeria, Zaire, Indonesia, and beyond. This, I think, was the beginning of my news addiction—my habit of trying to keep up on everything, everywhere, all at once.

Today, with so much damn U.S. news flooding our brains, it’s easy to forget that elsewhere life—and the news—goes on. It’s warped by the gathering forces of fascism, of course, but it’s broader, deeper, and more complex than that, and lately I’ve been relying on a host of smartly written newsletters to keep up with everything that’s going on, to make sense of the world, and to give my brain a break from You Know Who. Read to the end for a couple of newsletters written by good friends of mine!

Note: Obviously, this is an incomplete list! If you’ve got good newsletter sources for stories from, say, North Africa, Central Asia, South America, Scandinavia, and so on, please let me (and everyone) know by posting a comment.

Newsletters to Read

• Everywhere: International Intrigue

• Southeast Asia: Future Southeast Asia

• Spain: The Bubble Newsletter

• Africa: The Baobab

• Friends: Matt Davis Reads the Newspaper So You Don …

• Friends: Not Invisible

Everywhere: International Intrigue

Written by a group of former diplomats who served in Beijing, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, Lima, Mexico City, and elsewhere, International Intrigue feels like catching up on world events over drinks with your well-traveled, well-connected best friend who’s just in town for a night or two. In-depth write-ups range from today’s “What’s Israel doing in Syria?” to the Paris AI summit to a possible economic pact between China and the Cook Islands, which New Zealand is none too happy about.

This is the newsletter that’s going to let you know Russia’s former defense minister is touring Southeast Asia, that Bolivia’s Evo Morales is running for president again (probably unconstitutionally), that Egypt has a plan to rebuild Gaza without displacing Palestinians, and that:

Southeast Asia: Future Southeast Asia

To understand a place, you can’t just read the big stories about politics, wars, and natural disasters. No, you need to get nerdy and dig in to infrastructure projects, which is what Future Southeast Asia, from travel writer James Clark, is all about: highways, rail lines, metros, airports, canals, construction, and more, from Myanmar to Brunei to Cambodia to Singapore. Did you know a $130 million hotel project was just abandoned in Yangon? Or that Indonesia is planning a 700-kilometer sea wall stretching to East Java?

Clark’s in-depth emails on topics like regional airports and high-speed rail projects are beautifully thorough (and often only for paid subscribers), and I really appreciate his photo-heavy construction reports on places like Phnom Penh and Poipet, Cambodia:

Spain: The Bubble Newsletter

As I wrote recently, Spain has never really been on my radar—yet has lately been popping into my consciousness with increasing frequency. Part of that is due to The Bubble, a newsletter written by my old crony Ian Mount and his comrade Adrian Bono. Based in Madrid, they cover everything that’s going on in Spain, from the rise of far-right political parties to an intricate central-government debt-forgiveness scheme, from Spain’s falling birth rate to an adorable dwarf goat that appeared on a Madrid windowsill.

I love that one section of the newsletter is called “Five things to discuss at dinner parties this week.” Thanks to The Bubble, I am well prepared for such things! Now: Who’s going to invite me to a dinner party in Spain? Anyone?

More after the highly clickable ad…

Africa: The Baobab

Insightful, surprising news about Africa—all 54 countries—is a rarity in much of Western media. But The Baobab, named for the famed, enormous tree (which I first encountered in Le Petit Prince), manages this consistently and beautifully. The latest edition, for example, talks about:

• the racial politics of the movie Conclave, noting that “the screenplay pins its biggest scandal on the only major African presence in the room”

• the weirdness of John Legend performing in Rwanda at a time when Rwanda-backed militaries are causing havoc in neighboring Congo

• the meaning of a witchcraft trial in Zambia:

For me, the measure of a news outlet is whether it tells me things I did not already know, and that’s what I get in every issue of The Baobab.

Friends: Matt Davis Reads the Newspaper So You Don’t Have To

One of my dad’s friends has completely sworn off reading the news, and I’m sure he’s not alone: It’s challenging and depressing facing the world every day. That’s where Matt Davis steps in. Every morning he buys an actual on-paper newspaper (spoiler: it’s the NYT), reads the biggest story on the front page, and tells you what he finds within, giving it his own sardonic spin. I read the paper myself (online, not on-paper, of course), but I still like having Matt read to me. You will, too!

Friends: Not Invisible

I’ve known Abby Tegnelia since 2001, when we both worked at New York Magazine, and over the years, as our media careers developed and decayed and redeveloped, we’ve crossed paths in a million different ways and places, from Costa Rica to Las Vegas. These days, with Not Invisible, she’s trying! in her own way to figure out the things we writers are always trying to figure out: is our work any good, are we being too complacent, how do we get jobs, what o what is to become of us? Reading her experience reminds me we’re not alone in the struggle. Pretty sure that’s the kind of thing we all appreciate.

OK, that’s it for this week! Back on Monday with what I think is going to be a really good piece about Key West—and why you should never, ever become a travel expert. 🪨🪨🪨

Read a Previous Attempt