Intrigue
In a previous post I talked about GlobalPost, a daily newsletter covering global news. In the last paragraph I said:
So overall this is a great resource and I'm glad I found it. Maybe I'll get tired of it in some months, but for now I'm always happy to see a new email arrive, which is the ultimate praise a newsletter can receive.
Well, I did get tired of it eventually. I think the problem was both in the structure and the prose: three news items of roughly the same length, written in an impersonal voice. It started to feel very samey. So I ended up unsubscribing.
But I still wanted something to keep me somewhat aware of what's happening in the world. Luckily I ran into Intrigue soon after. It's also a daily newsletter with global coverage, but it improves on the things I didn't like about GlobalPost:
- Each edition has a central, longer piece, followed by 6-7 very short news items about other parts of the world. This gives a useful hierarchy to the content.
- The writing has personality. Even if I often find the humor a bit cringe, I prefer that over the neutral, journalistic tone of GlobalPost.
They also try to separate the "facts" (if we can still use that word in 2025) from their take on them, an approach I really like. I guess it makes them less neutral, but since their values (or biases) align with mine, I don't really mind.
The authors make a big deal of the fact that they are former diplomats. At first I didn't really care about that, but after reading it for a while I get it: in diplomacy there seems to be a lot of what people say vs. what it really means, and the Intrigue team clearly speaks that language. A journalist can report that "the ambassador of Ruritania said that X" and then maybe quote someone commenting on what X means. But the authors of Intrigue just say "the ambassador of Ruritania said that X, which everyone knows means Y".
There is one aspect in which Intrigue is worse than GlobalPost: they have ads instead of being a paid subscription. But I didn't find these ads intrusive, nor did I get the impression that it could affect their honesty in any way.
One criticism that some people (from their own readers) apparently bring up is that they are "Western-centric". But if that means things like calling the invasion of Ukraine a, well, invasion, then that's fine by me.
I've been subscribed for more than four months now, way longer than the time I had been subscribed to GlobalPost when I wrote about it. I still like to read it and it never feels like a chore.