WELCOME TO YOUR BEAUTIFUL NEW HOME

Come in. Pull up a chair.  Make yourself at home. We’re a new publication that treats events of global significance from a cosmopolitan perspective. Please have a look around.

Knowledge is power. There is power in understanding events that affect us—war, peace, a plummeting dollar, soaring inflation, or a virus in a faraway place—and grasping their causes. To understand our lives, we have to see far beyond our villages. We want, as you do, to understand our lives. That’s why we bring you the Cosmopolitan Globalist.

The idea was borne of our lament that global news coverage has all but disappeared from the Anglophone media, and what coverage remains is shallow, silly, and meretricious. Information flickers incessantly across our cellphones, but absent its wider historic and global context, it is of no use. The media has ceased to connect the dots.

We propose to connect them again.

It began with this exchange:

That’s often true for US coverage of India as well. It’s usually slanted by opinion writers arguing for their pet peeves, rather than reporters looking at events objectively.

— Vivek Y. Kelkar (@VivekYKelkar) November 8, 2020

In the era of Walter Cronkite, more than 40 percent of the Anglophone broadcast news was international. It is now barely four percent. Foreign coverage in the Anglophone print media has declined by 80 percent. The world desperately needs serious journalism. We are living through a time of revolutionary upheaval and unprecedented globalization. But as we most need it, sophisticated international news coverage has all but vanished.

The phenomenon is non-partisan. The wider world has disappeared from CNN and Fox News alike. There is no regular, in-depth analysis of events overseas in any major English-language newspaper. What little is published lacks insight. Much of it is produced by journalists in Washington, D.C., who echo each other—or stridently oppose each other—even as they discuss countries none of them have once visited.

The effect has been to place the Anglosphere behind a new kind of Iron Curtain, one where readers and viewers receive as little news from abroad as Soviet citizens at the height of the Cold War. It makes sense that readers respond to the world, in turn, with apathy, isolationism, and the occasional choleric outburst.

In recent decades, media organs have been in a race to the bottom, delivering ever-more-foolish and sensational stories in the hope that readers will click on them. We don’t propose to enter this race. It can’t be won. We believe the more editors try to please their readers with drivel, the more their readers despise them.

We won’t replicate the old model of journalism. We won’t fly bright, inexperienced college graduates into countries they know nothing about. We are the people to whom journalists turn for quotes. We’re native speakers, country experts, analysts, academics, politicians, diplomats; we know our countries like we know our own faces. We have in common a shared cosmopolitan sensibility and the sense that reading a newspaper article about the countries where we live has become an exercise in dismay and frustration. Apart from that? We often disagree with each other. But we are never vulgar or barbarous about it.

We are not nationalists or partisans. We are not in the service of any cause, however worthy. We hold by tolerance, the rule of law, free trade, and a free press. Beyond that, we are not strident. Our disposition is curious and friendly toward the world.

We seek to be the world’s leading forum for the serious discussion of global affairs. Our remit is any subject of genuinely global import in politics, diplomacy, history, economics, culture, and technology. We aim to provide deeper, more sophisticated, and more literate coverage of these topics than any other publication.

Our editorial process is exacting. We believe slovenly language leads to foolish thoughts. We demand of our writers precision; we forbid the use of dead metaphors, meaningless words, and pretentious diction.

We assume our readers’ literacy and intelligence.

We do not explain our jokes.

We are scrupulous about fact-checking. If you read it in The Cosmopolitan Globalist, you may be reasonably certain it is so.

What you see on this site is only the beginning. We will soon debut features that take advantage of extraordinary advances in machine translation and instant, globally networked communications to create an international news superhighway. No one else, to our knowledge, has tried to build what we have in mind.

Though we will always be committed above all to the rigor of the written word, you will also find podcasts and video documentaries here—and a vibrant calendar of social and intellectual events: seminars, classes, debates, parties, and our book club.

We are The Cosmopolitan Globalist. Welcome home.