so I had a brainwave I was going to explain it all but I looked back and realized I already explained it here (basically dominant media and politics are disconnected from the reality of people's lives out there especially in developing countries). So I was like let me start reading some other stuff→[More:]

Cause I mean, in the grand scheme of things, stuff I spend ages reading about like legislative wrangling around economic plans or geopolitics are such an abstract and macro concern for most people right? Let me read what less centrist writers are muckraking about. So I read a bit of counterpunch, n+1 and another Indian magazine I'd discovered Motherland.

And I'm reading some of these pieces and I'm like, this is dumb. I mean yeah, you're writing about something offbeat, but you're serving tendentious opinions and a tendency a towards creative writing aesthetic. Basically another type of abstraction, when I'm trying to get more 'on the ground'.

Then I realized, actually, things like newspapers, general interest magazines, etc. might be macro and and all, but in a way they're wedded to the type of concrete journalism you need if you're trying to cast about for dispatches from afar. There are some people who make an effort of it--say The Nation in the US, or this magazine I discovered in India called The Caravan, but it's not that different from regular wire stories. "Out there", far from power centers and media gaggles, is after all not primordial--it's just people. Someone from the Associated Press straight asking someone, anywhere, "so... what's going on here" is as much as "reality" as you're going to get.

That has been the story of my brainwave and its counter-intuitive conclusion.