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.
"High brow" is work intended for public consumption by well educated and perhaps a bit snobby laymen. Scholarly journals by contrast are intended for specialist audiences and are considered "academic", not "high brow".
both seem straight-up scientific journals ("the world’s first and longest-running scientific journal") for specific disciplines. Calling them "high-brow literature" and comparing them with The New Yorker (and its essays on random topics) seems... strange?
> 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.
Oof my bad; thanks for pointing it out. I got a bit confused about what you were referring to, since I believe that GP didn't think of New Yorker as highbrow, given the quotes on "liberal intellectual".
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.
Throwing over a government like in Ukraine is a bit more then having a base.
I get it, it's funny, but US destroyed so many unnecessary lives it;s not really. Im in favor of a strong US as a leading power of the World, instead of China or Russia, but there needs to be a lot more accountabliity.
It depends on your threshold of meddling, although I suppose you're right that those 2 countries are on the lighter side. There was a big kerfuffle with Singapore in the late 80s re: Francis Seow, and the US supplies weapons to both of those countries.
> 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.
My entire point was America pokes around. You’re mentioning more cases. Yes. We do that. Sometimes, mostly around WWII, we did it well. Since Vietnam, the record has been crap. (Question mark for the first Gulf War.) Ukraine and Taiwan look more like the work our Greatest Generation did than the Boomer years.
The conflicts we hear the least about tend to be those we were least involved in. Myanmar. Tigray. Whatever the fuck South Africa is currently up to.
As far as I know, South Africa hasn't been involved in anything since Angola. The current military probably couldn't find enough working vehicles to even get to a conflict let alone fight one.
> civil war in former Yugoslavia (instigated further by supporting the separatist forces)
I don't think you understand this topic at all (also seeing your other, flagged, comment). Two major things I'd say you get wrong:
1. The break-up of Yugoslavia wasn't so much a result of the civil war, it was rather a process that led to the war. The Yugoslav Federal institutions (except the Army, JNA) were weak, perhaps so weak that the constitutional order was simply not sustainable. As the leaderships of each constituent republic drifted apart from each other, so the country, too, gradually split apart (effectively). The important thing about the Yugoslav constitutional order that is often missed is that the Army (JNA) was something of a constituent republic in its own right: apart from other kinds of power, the Army had representation in the federal government as though it were a constituent republic. So the Army was basically the last thing binding the country together in practice, and it was naturally aligned with preserving the country, which led to the war. Furthermore, by something like 1992, the Serbian side (Milošević) basically usurped the Army (in what some called a coup). This situation, among other things, made it almost inevitable that a war will break out.
2. It doesn't seem like the USA supported any side in the war very much. For example, the US President (Bush) objected when Germany recognized the independence of Slovenia and Croatia.
To answer your first point, I agree. But having weak Federal institutions isn't a reason to break up the country, it is a reason to strengthen them.
"Furthermore, by something like 1992, the Serbian side (Milošević) basically usurped the Army (in what some called a coup)."
Explain this please. How did the Serbian side "usurp" the army? By trying to prevent the separatists from leaving? Isn't that what any country's army would do?
"It doesn't seem like the USA supported any side in the war very much."
The US politicians cheered on with glee seeing how once one of the most powerful countries in Europe, the last bastion of socialism, fell apart. And of course they supported and trained and equipped the separatist forces. First in Croatia, then in Bosnia, and finally in Serbian Kosovo and Metohija.
Please, don't try to educate me on my own country's history. I've lived through all the MSM propaganda and bullshit, I know a lot more than you. Including the entire process of NATO's preparing for the war. You can't just mobilize 27 countries on a whim to bomb one country. You have to have plans. And they had them, for a long time. Maybe even before Tito died.
Xi has made the usual noises that Taiwan would be reunited with China by some date far in the future.
The traditional Western way of dealing with this not exactly novel situation was to say that in principle there is One China, but it should be resolved peacefully. We could have continued like this. Instead, Pelosi traveled to Taiwan last year, which was entirely unnecessary and has increased tensions.
Since then, hawkishness on China has bipartisan support. The winner will be Biden, who will be reelected as a strong leader despite having ruined the world economy.
Yeah, the whole mainland full of Chinese people sure is a minority when compared to one tiny island. Those people aren't real Chinese, the Taiwanese are! /s
> the whole mainland full of Chinese people sure is a minority when compared to one tiny island. Those people aren't real Chinese, the Taiwanese are
What? That isn’t what’s being asked. It’s whether Taiwanese identify as Taiwanese exclusively, Chinese exclusively, or both. And following Xi’s mistakes, the fraction identifying as the last has quartered.
And I'm saying that the metrics they used are bullshit.
It is also important who made the survey. If it was one of the pro-West NGOs, then the results will be skewed in their favor. Opposite if the Chinese government did it. As is the usual with these kinds of surveys.
I don't. I blame The French and the British (Sykes–Picot Agreement) at the end of WW1, which drew borders on maps of the Near East using rulers. Those arbitrary borders are, of course, not the only cause of the enduring troubles and wars in the Levant; but they have been a major contributing factor.
"Serbia very definitely started the Yugoslav war of fragmentation and its associated genocides."
How? As far as I know, it was Slovenia that separated first, followed by other republics. Serbia was the only one who wanted to keep Yugoslavia united.
But I knew this forum was dominated by brainwashed people when it comes to the civil war in Yugoslavia, even before making this comment.
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.
I would posit that public pressure on politicians to support an ally in trouble does indeed constitute a form of 'friendship', if that pressure is enough to provoke action.
> "America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests" - Henry Kissinger
Nobody has permanent friends or alliances. The point is we, a maritime power, tend to be mutually supportive in our alliances in a way land powers are not. (We prefer them to have strong economies and militaries, for instance, and are generally okay, if not thrilled, when they compete with us.)
And the weaponization of the dollar really spooked a whole lotta other countries and just added fuel to the fire of them looking into alternative non-dependent systems (trading in non-usd, swift alternatives, etc).
At this rate, we’re going to isolate ourselves (Europe is already feeling significant pain). The West is only around a billion people out of what, 8 billion?
I would say that Britain (maritime power) has been playing off European continental countries against each other, certainly up to WWI.
The U.S. still does this. Now the Eastern European countries are used as a wedge against the Western ones. Pipelines are blown up, which is not supportive.
> 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.
Bullshit.
The American strategy with Iran has been to surround it with enemies, including the Saudis. It took China to come in and make peace between the two. In that instance, and many others, the clear USA strategy was to make enemies.
There's a difference between alliances and proxies. The USA likes having vassals, it does not like having alliances with equals. Like in Ukraine the USA likes to have its proxies do its dirty work. And like in its growing bombast towards China, the USA would gladly sacrifice Korea and Taiwan if it hurt China.
> The American strategy with Iran has been to surround it with enemies, including the Saudis. It took China to come in and make peace between the two. In that instance, and many others, the clear USA strategy was to make enemies.
I’ll concede that our strategy with Iran makes zero sense to me. But I never said we don’t make, or even seek out, enemies. Just that we build alliances. That’s true in our approach with Iran, which leans heavily on our Saudi, Emirati and Israeli allies.
> USA likes having vassals, it does not like having alliances with equals
We like both. Our alliances with Canada, the U.K. and Australia are ones of supreme, to the point of vulnerability, mutual respect. Our alliances with France and Germany approach co-equal status–we regularly disagree without abandoning each other. We obviously don’t give a shit about the people in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or, frankly, Ukraine, the way we do about Western Europe or Korea.
> the USA would gladly sacrifice Korea and Taiwan if it hurt China
Just got back from Taipei. Don’t think anyone there sees our committing to defending their homeland as sacrificing them.
> "We'll back your military coup if you ally with us" seems fairly domineering and imperial from my perspective. Not naturally aligning us to others.
We have allies of colour and allies of convenience. They’re easy to differentiate because we care deeply, almost genuinely, about the internal politics of the former (e.g. the U.K., Germany, Japan, et cetera). They’re discussed as a prize to be contested for. And we tend to welcome their immigrants. With the latter, we don’t, they’re closer to assets, and as a result we tend to prefer the efficiency of autocracy with them. The Gulf and Pakistan fall into this bucket. I understand why we do it, strategically. But I agree it tarnishes our reputation.
The difference is, most countries don’t have any relationships in the first category. (Think: the Scandinavia, the Baltic sisters.) Certainly not superpowers.
"We're nicer to some of our allies," is an interesting take, but I also find it amusing that two of those we care deeply about needed a military occupation to naturally align to our interests.
… a military occupation in the wake of the most destructive war of the last century, started by both of those occupied countries.
I bring that up not to crow about the USA’s bygone righteousness, but to highlight that the people of Japan and Germany were ready to embrace a new paradigm, because the old one had resulted in so much suffering and death.
> 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.
A "bipartisan coalition cut from the same cloth" does not sound very "bi", nor very "partisan" to me, beyond the absolute barest colloquial use of the term to describe the fact that there are two choices of the flag you can raise in order to functionally participate.
What you are describing to me sounds a lot more like a single powerbase with a few disagreements of narcissism amongst its participants, with a dramatic hegemonic control over the broader citizenship.
The self interests of this neoliberal consensus include empire-building, and have since the cold war that spawned and shaped it. A program to spread that hegemony broader and broader to preserve the flow of resources into the imperial center.
I'm trying not to assign morality here per se; just give I think a better model with, I think, more explanatory power.
I disagree with your characterization because I don't think it's accurate. I come from a country where the government has "hegemonic control over the broader citizenship." That's not what's happening in America. It's much more akin to different infighting sects of the same evangelical religion.
I also disagree that your model has "more explanatory power." We spent $6 trillion going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we certainly didn't get $6 trillion in oil. We opened up trade with China, gave them our technology, and put them on a path to leapfrogging ahead of us. Your theory is that America is an empire trying to direct "the flow of resources into the imperial center"--but if that's the case then our imperial leaders are extremely incompetent.
What happened in Iraq and China makes much more sense under my model. It was an attempt at converting those countries into our religion of liberal democracy, human rights, and capitalism.
I don't think even the US believes in democracy. For example, in Afghanistan there were 68 parliamentary seats reserved specifically for women. That is very undemocratic and naturally the US doesn't talk about that or the corruption it tolerated from people it propped up, and the anti-democratic measures it put in place in Afghanistan to achieve a desired outcome. The public was misled about the success of the Afghani government but expected to pay for it all. It seems Ukraine is not hugely different if we believe recent reports. I am sure some people in power profited very handsomely while everyone else paid. It's not very different from how the US is run either actually.
> 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?
For anyone who liked this article, I'd really recommend Tooze's book, "The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy". Aside from being an extremely high-quality, genuinely ground-breaking new look at a fascinating old subject, it's also exceptionally well-written.
I think that is a very naive at best, discriminatory view at worst of Sudan.
Many African countries face extremely unique challenges, which can only be assisted with empathy, education, and awareness as a part of their nation building program.
> many African countries face extremely unique challenges, which can only be assisted with empathy, education, and awareness as a part of their nation building program
Interpreted generously, it might be a reference to Africa’s borders being halfway nonsense. If we swapped eastern Canada and western Mexico into the United States, it would be difficult to build the sort of common empathy and identity that countries require to persist. (Not going to touch adding back the indigenous population.)
> If we swapped eastern Canada and western Mexico into the United States, it would be difficult to build the sort of common empathy and identity that countries require to persist.
How would that be harder than it is with the parts of Eastern Canada and quite giant portion of Northern and Northwestern Mexico, including over a quarter of its west coast, that actually were “swapped into” the United States?
> how would that be harder than it is with the parts of Eastern Canada and quite giant portion of Northern and Northwestern Mexico, including over a quarter of its west coast, that actually was “swapped into” the United States?
Territories. Not substantial foreign populations. Hence the parentheticals.
Mostly those borders were always going to be nonsense no matter who came up with them. One village is this group, another village is that group then the next is also to the first group. It's like that in almost every country. Obviously the British and French really screwed up a lot of stuff but there's a reason people who criticize the borders never offer any suggestions of where they actually should have been.
>Many African countries face extremely unique challenges, which can only be assisted with empathy, education, and awareness as a part of their nation building program.
This line is such vapid mishmash that it is hard for me to believe it wasn't generated by GPT.
I stand by my words even if they are hard to stomach in this site.
Wait, how exactly is the US to blame for any of what's happening in Sudan? Would it really have been better if they had just wholesale ignored the Janjaweed massacres? As it stands, both sides just seem to trying to court anybody who can support them, be it the US, Russia, Egypt, UAE etc.
This is absolutely the continuation of the Great Game (which the English passed the torch to America post WW2). With neo-imperalism resource control as well as controlling the sea lanes thrown in the mix.
Make no mistake, this is similar to Crimea (Black Sea dominance denial). The West does not want Russia gaining a foothold on the Red Sea. Especially now that they are friendly with the middle eastern powers.
> Within weeks (of the meeting of al-Bashir with Putin), Russian geologists and mineralogists employed by Meroe Gold, a new Sudanese company, began to arrive in Sudan, according to commercial flight records obtained by the Dossier Center, a London-based investigative body, and verified by researchers at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies.
Does anyone know how a non-profit "London-based investigative body" obtains call logs, commercial airline tickets, entry permits, visa applications, and browsing history of people they are investigating [1]?
In practice that often means they do "parallel reconstruction" to launder information they receive from special services. This "investigative body" in question is owned by a disgraced russian oligarh
I am aware of "probiv" where on Runet forums people advertise services where they basically pay people who work at phone companies or government agencies for data on people. This is mostly an ex USSR thing from what I can tell. I don't know how they got the records from Sudan/CAR though but I assume it's through some combination of bribery and their backers.
Just so you know mintpressnews is a website that publishes disinformation and leans heavily into conspiracy theories and regularly publishes pro Russian propaganda.
I wouldn’t use it as a source of anything that the Russians would want to discredit (such as bellingcat).
I do believe that over the last year words "disinformation" and "propaganda" lost 90% of meaning and turned into generic insults. Do you think this wiki article is written in a neutral manner?
> Do you think so even after the "Trump-Russia" fiasco and Twitter Files?
No I think so after the very obvious Russian propaganda that is being pushed all over the internet.
There was even a notable uptick of Russian propaganda being pushed here after the war started.
> Trying not to engage in binary thinking
You haven't really addressed any of my points but thats okay, ill add some more for you, why do so many writers for MintPress Media have a history with working for Russias stated backed propaganda media arm RT?.
> On a serious note, I fail to see how RT is considered state-propaganda, but BBC is not
I have yet to see a single article on RT saying that maybe the war in Ukraine isn't a good thing and Russia should leave.
> MintPress hiring ex-RT -> it's propaganda arm
RT just serves as an extension for the Russian intelligence services as a propaganda arm, so if you have a problem with ex spooks working at bellingcat you should have a problem with ex-RT working at MintPress.
The original question was about how various "investigative bodies" get their information. My problem with them is that they are marketing themselves as private citizens using widely available data while it's often not true. RT is transparent about its funding and sources at least
Bellingcat's investigation on Navalny's poisoning was entertaining as hell and I enjoyed it a lot, and I am not accusing them on lying in their reports. However they funded by National Endowment for Democracy which is CIA in disguise
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 :)