I've enjoyed the growth of expert blogs like this one in the last few years!
I've generally felt that traditional news falls into several traps of writing style that turn me off completely:
- an insufferable mixture of informational coverage with character profiles (e.g. I come to read about the Sahel gold rush but I am confronted with paragraphs of vibe-setting introduction as the author interviews a person of interest).
- coverage that assumes the same level of contextual knowledge for complex and distant conflicts as for recent national news.
- dull "long reads" that I just don't feel like spending a hour on.
On the other hand this piece is just informative, concise, and engaging :)
If you like this sort of coverage, I highly recommend The New York Review of Books.
Contrary to the name, their articles aren't book reviews so much as excuses to write solid, expert articles on topics that happen to be written about in recently published books. The articles are almost always interesting even when they are about books, because of their extremely high-quality contributors — Joyce Carol Oates, Tony Judt, Gore Vidal, Zadie Smith and J. M. Coetzee come to mind. They also publish lots of global, topical analysis. During the Egypt conflict of 2011-2014, they had some of the best coverage, for example.
I also enjoy the sheer lack of pretentiousness. They have world-class writers, yet they never seem full of themselves the way some other "liberal intellectual" publications (The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Monocle, etc.) do.
(Their book coverage is great, though. They also publish books, and are responsible for keeping a lot of obscure out-of-print stuff in print.)
The New Yorker does come off a bit odd because it's a middle-brow publication aimed at a mass audience and sold as 'what high society reads', hence it's motivated to try to look 'intellectual' while being as unsophisticated as possible to maintain a high school, or nowadays middle school, reading level. Since people are most comfortable at a few grades below their actual reading level.
It's a common paradigm for many 'intellectual' publications
Actual high-brow literature, such as the Physical Review Letters or the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, have no need to pretend but then they assume a bare minimum of a college graduate reading level, plus specialized knowledge on top of that for their niche. Hence they're impenetrable for the vast majority.
Oh god that first one… It’s really nice in podcast form on the way to work or in the bathtub, absolutely terrible to keep my attention when trying to understand news in readable form, and always suspect of being mere anecdata and generally wrong. Especially when it concerns a country or industry or phenomenon I have no experience in.
Headline: <something that sounds really interesting about the war in Ukraine>
First para: For the uninitiated, it's easy to mistake Ilya Shevchenko for an everyday middle-aged Ukrainian man. His short-cropped brown hair, mild paunch, and gentle demeanour are disarming. When we first met, he insisted that we finish our cup of tea before we discussed important matters. [And so on]
I think it depends a lot on where (and how) you buy your news. Here in Denmark most of the online resources are fairly terrible, even the paid ones, and a lot of their content is often just a translated Reuters brief. Sometimes it’s even an article that’s written after something blew up on a social media site, if this blog post about Sudan gets popular enough in the right places, and enough people click on their current Sudan content, then a version of this blog could end up as a story in some of our online news sites. A lot of that is sort of useless, at least in my opinion.
But there are alternatives. We have a Newspaper called Weekendavisen which only comes out on Fridays, and it has long throughly written articles. Because it only comes out once a week, it’s often also filtered away a lot of the “breaking” news that wasn’t actually important because they don’t have to deal with feeding the live stream 24/7.
This isn’t really related to the blog post, I too think it’s great to see investigative and informative journalism thrive despite of what’s been going on with a lot of news outlets, but there are still some good ones, and I doubt they are all going away.
Agree. It may make me a bad person, but I hate wanting to learn something about a complex new topic, and half of it is random quotes and interviews from people who know even less (with accompanying detail in their physical appearance, personality characteristics, employment history, and lovely anecdotes about their sister in law). There is a time and place for a human story, but I've lived long enough and experienced enough crap to understand there's human impact to everything, and sometimes I want to start with high level understanding.
(Though to be fair, now that I think about it, I've also lived through enough crap to understand how incredibly misleading and over simplifying high level overviews inevitably are :-/)
I’d go further and say that most mainstream print journalism is in a competence crisis.
I simply no longer trust journalist in places like the Guardian to have sufficient background knowledge, networks or expertise to surface dramatic stories or assess sources.
Most of what they have online are “live blogs” just repeating whatever some rando tweeted (with no context or analysis) or some clickbait-y opinion pieces that are demonstrably incorrect.
Substack is much better but then the whole task of filtering and assessing sources is put back on to the reader.
> "Today, new protests in Sudan are approaching a new boiling point, and Lyman’s story is history. But it suggests the still very relevant and largely untold story of the relationship between Sudan and the United States—ties largely based on the clout of the powerful intelligence services in both the Trump and Obama administrations."
> "This article is based in part on interviews and documents from 13 current and former American officials serving in the State Department, Pentagon, CIA, and other areas of the U.S. government."
A more balanced perspective would note that at present, Africa is viewed as a natural resource hotspot by all the world's major industrial countries, including China, America and Russia, while African countries are themselves struggling to climb up the value chain (i.e. it's better economically to develop industry yourself rather than to just export raw materials).
> "Another source of concern for the Biden administration is Sudan’s part in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Sudan and China have deep economic ties in various fields, including agriculture, energy, and mining. Sudan’s exports to China in 2020 reached $766 million, accounting for 19% of its total exports and making China its second-largest trading partner."
I spent a few weeks driving the length of Sudan back in early 2019, just before the coup that happened back then.
As I learned all around Africa, government warnings about a county tell you little about the people there - while the government of Sudan at the time was no doubt evil, the people were some of the friendliest and kindest I've met anywhere on the planet.
Not only did locals help my buy bread, they refused to let me pay for it. They invited me into their homes repeatedly, etc. etc.
The currency was in such a free fall I was getting a different rate literally every day. It's one of the countries in the world that is cut-off from global markets, and so regular credit and bank cards do not work. Still, people were smiling, laughing and getting on with life.
Interesting article with disappointing comments so far.
I'd heard that the war in Sudan had started up, and this explains why: the resource curse. Physical control becomes so valuable that the country tears itself apart to get at the money.
> "The regime would license production by a handful of large companies on the enclave model familiar from the oil industry. This was both “modern” and it would leave the existing structure of politics and society in place"
Very good way of looking at it. This is how oil works in various Gulf states. Westerners are brought in for technical expertise, but kept away from the rest of the country and in particular its power structure.
> Physical control becomes so valuable that the country tears itself apart to get at the money.
The article, however, does not have any concrete thoughts on how exactly the gold is connected to the current round of fighting. Other analyses suggest that it was inevitable anyway since (i) the agreed-upon scheme of transition of power to the civilian government did not entail any actual transition of power to the civilian government (the scheme must have been implemented by the military, which does not want to relinquish power) and (ii) the proposed scheme to combine two military factions into a single one was unworkable. Given that RSF already seems to control the gold-producing region, there is no self-evident resource-based reason for it to try and capture the capital.
> good luck finding a conflict where the US wasn't poking around before it started
The Cold War saw the U.S. and USSR take geopolitical positions with global remit. There is no conflict where either “wasn’t poking around before it started” because there was no place either wasn’t. In some cases, e.g. the banana republics, we can clearly trace causation to one party. Sudan is more complicated: there is a mix of foreign interests, some American-aligned, some not.
The United States does not do anything other than what serves it's own interests. If those interests align with what is moral it's just convenient and an easy way for the US to get other to go along with what they are doing.
> if those interests align with what is moral it's just convenient and an easy way for the US to get other to go along with what they are doing
Sure. But the American strategy relies on building alliances. That naturally aligns us to others in a way a more-domineering imperial approach doesn’t.
> The United States does not do anything other than what serves it's own interests.
That's a common belief, especially among people outside the U.S. But I think it's totally wrong. I don't think you can look at the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, our our support in Ukraine, and say that's serving America's interests. George W. Bush and Hilary Clinton exemplify a bipartisan coalition, cut from the same cloth, that believes in liberal democracy and individualistic human rights as a religion, and who think America is justified in using war to promote that religion around the world.
> But there is one gizmo of which the Sahel’s gold miners can claim to be the most important users worldwide - the cheap portable metal detectors, which became widely available in the region around 2008-2009
The article (which I quote above) argues that the artisanal mining in central Africa is often called "primitive" but is actually a modern phenomenon based on the availability of metal detectors. Certainly these devices have been around since much longer than 2009. What changed? Manufacturing cost? Regional distribution networks? Trade agreements with China?
Mining by hand with metal detectors is primitive even if the technology is modern and the practice is new. It is non-industrialized, low complexity, and unsophisticated compared to modern mining operations.
Well, yes, nobody is claiming that artisanal mining is state of the art. Just that it's a modern phenomenon at this scale. I thought it was interesting, but it also lead me to more questions.
The world is a very large place; it probably took this long for people to realize that using a handheld metal detector in those particular areas would find a useful amount of gold. It's not clear whether they're just for prospecting or actually finding meaningful quantities of gold as nuggets? Traditionally it's in tiny specks.
"Sudan’s gold production surged to 70 million tons" Given that less than a quarter million tons of gold have been mined in history, I find this difficult to believe.
That one line made me question all the facts presented in this article. Might be unfair, but according to wikipedia[1] - total gold ever is ~ 250k tons
I read the article and while I have little reason to doubt what's been reported, it strikes as the usual one-sided US trying to do do good things while $competitor doing bad things. What is this, Hollywood? Or do I have to read between the lines?
Readit News
I've generally felt that traditional news falls into several traps of writing style that turn me off completely:
- an insufferable mixture of informational coverage with character profiles (e.g. I come to read about the Sahel gold rush but I am confronted with paragraphs of vibe-setting introduction as the author interviews a person of interest).
- coverage that assumes the same level of contextual knowledge for complex and distant conflicts as for recent national news.
- dull "long reads" that I just don't feel like spending a hour on.
On the other hand this piece is just informative, concise, and engaging :)
Contrary to the name, their articles aren't book reviews so much as excuses to write solid, expert articles on topics that happen to be written about in recently published books. The articles are almost always interesting even when they are about books, because of their extremely high-quality contributors — Joyce Carol Oates, Tony Judt, Gore Vidal, Zadie Smith and J. M. Coetzee come to mind. They also publish lots of global, topical analysis. During the Egypt conflict of 2011-2014, they had some of the best coverage, for example.
I also enjoy the sheer lack of pretentiousness. They have world-class writers, yet they never seem full of themselves the way some other "liberal intellectual" publications (The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Monocle, etc.) do.
(Their book coverage is great, though. They also publish books, and are responsible for keeping a lot of obscure out-of-print stuff in print.)
It's a common paradigm for many 'intellectual' publications
Actual high-brow literature, such as the Physical Review Letters or the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, have no need to pretend but then they assume a bare minimum of a college graduate reading level, plus specialized knowledge on top of that for their niche. Hence they're impenetrable for the vast majority.
Headline: <something that sounds really interesting about the war in Ukraine>
First para: For the uninitiated, it's easy to mistake Ilya Shevchenko for an everyday middle-aged Ukrainian man. His short-cropped brown hair, mild paunch, and gentle demeanour are disarming. When we first met, he insisted that we finish our cup of tea before we discussed important matters. [And so on]
But there are alternatives. We have a Newspaper called Weekendavisen which only comes out on Fridays, and it has long throughly written articles. Because it only comes out once a week, it’s often also filtered away a lot of the “breaking” news that wasn’t actually important because they don’t have to deal with feeding the live stream 24/7.
This isn’t really related to the blog post, I too think it’s great to see investigative and informative journalism thrive despite of what’s been going on with a lot of news outlets, but there are still some good ones, and I doubt they are all going away.
(Though to be fair, now that I think about it, I've also lived through enough crap to understand how incredibly misleading and over simplifying high level overviews inevitably are :-/)
I simply no longer trust journalist in places like the Guardian to have sufficient background knowledge, networks or expertise to surface dramatic stories or assess sources.
Most of what they have online are “live blogs” just repeating whatever some rando tweeted (with no context or analysis) or some clickbait-y opinion pieces that are demonstrably incorrect.
Substack is much better but then the whole task of filtering and assessing sources is put back on to the reader.
Some experts are publisher now. How many subscriber pay?
(1970 circulation of "The Economist": 100000)
https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-is-sudans-genocidal-regime...
> "Today, new protests in Sudan are approaching a new boiling point, and Lyman’s story is history. But it suggests the still very relevant and largely untold story of the relationship between Sudan and the United States—ties largely based on the clout of the powerful intelligence services in both the Trump and Obama administrations."
> "This article is based in part on interviews and documents from 13 current and former American officials serving in the State Department, Pentagon, CIA, and other areas of the U.S. government."
A more balanced perspective would note that at present, Africa is viewed as a natural resource hotspot by all the world's major industrial countries, including China, America and Russia, while African countries are themselves struggling to climb up the value chain (i.e. it's better economically to develop industry yourself rather than to just export raw materials).
See also:
https://www.mei.edu/publications/us-priorities-sudan-stabili...
> "Another source of concern for the Biden administration is Sudan’s part in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Sudan and China have deep economic ties in various fields, including agriculture, energy, and mining. Sudan’s exports to China in 2020 reached $766 million, accounting for 19% of its total exports and making China its second-largest trading partner."
As I learned all around Africa, government warnings about a county tell you little about the people there - while the government of Sudan at the time was no doubt evil, the people were some of the friendliest and kindest I've met anywhere on the planet.
Not only did locals help my buy bread, they refused to let me pay for it. They invited me into their homes repeatedly, etc. etc.
The currency was in such a free fall I was getting a different rate literally every day. It's one of the countries in the world that is cut-off from global markets, and so regular credit and bank cards do not work. Still, people were smiling, laughing and getting on with life.
Here's some of my footage and experiences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pqtfwlfDAw
Dead Comment
I'd heard that the war in Sudan had started up, and this explains why: the resource curse. Physical control becomes so valuable that the country tears itself apart to get at the money.
> "The regime would license production by a handful of large companies on the enclave model familiar from the oil industry. This was both “modern” and it would leave the existing structure of politics and society in place"
Very good way of looking at it. This is how oil works in various Gulf states. Westerners are brought in for technical expertise, but kept away from the rest of the country and in particular its power structure.
The article, however, does not have any concrete thoughts on how exactly the gold is connected to the current round of fighting. Other analyses suggest that it was inevitable anyway since (i) the agreed-upon scheme of transition of power to the civilian government did not entail any actual transition of power to the civilian government (the scheme must have been implemented by the military, which does not want to relinquish power) and (ii) the proposed scheme to combine two military factions into a single one was unworkable. Given that RSF already seems to control the gold-producing region, there is no self-evident resource-based reason for it to try and capture the capital.
Wagner has no morals at all.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/20/sudan-civil-war-biden-b...
Good luck finding a conflict where the US wasn't poking around before it started.
The Cold War saw the U.S. and USSR take geopolitical positions with global remit. There is no conflict where either “wasn’t poking around before it started” because there was no place either wasn’t. In some cases, e.g. the banana republics, we can clearly trace causation to one party. Sudan is more complicated: there is a mix of foreign interests, some American-aligned, some not.
Dead Comment
Sure. But the American strategy relies on building alliances. That naturally aligns us to others in a way a more-domineering imperial approach doesn’t.
No country does. Countries don't have morals, countries have interests.
Actions by countries are of course almost always justified based on the former, rather than the latter.
A nation is comprised and guided by people
Thus, unless something extraordinary happens, nations will act in their own interest
That's a common belief, especially among people outside the U.S. But I think it's totally wrong. I don't think you can look at the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, our our support in Ukraine, and say that's serving America's interests. George W. Bush and Hilary Clinton exemplify a bipartisan coalition, cut from the same cloth, that believes in liberal democracy and individualistic human rights as a religion, and who think America is justified in using war to promote that religion around the world.
In fact they mostly don't work at all.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2023/04/11/1169072190/why...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hell_of_Good_Intentions
Dead Comment
The article (which I quote above) argues that the artisanal mining in central Africa is often called "primitive" but is actually a modern phenomenon based on the availability of metal detectors. Certainly these devices have been around since much longer than 2009. What changed? Manufacturing cost? Regional distribution networks? Trade agreements with China?
https://unherd.com/2023/04/how-wagner-plundered-sudans-gold/
They are also active in the rest of Africa:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%C3%AFgbado_massacre
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_reserve