Weekly foreign policy brief, with some context, reading recommendations, sometimes interviews, sometimes film and show reviews.
Welcome to Atri’s Newsletter by me, Atri Prasad Rout, writer and editor at Woven, a publication on nonfiction writing. And this is my weekly newsletter on everything from zeitgeist, but more specifically international affairs, policy, some history, and storytelling.
After the Black Death, the bubonic plague, of the middle ages, followed the period known as the Renaissance, a period of innovations and creativity that gave us new forms of governance and novel approaches to thinking and collective problem solving. The plague, by weakening the hold of the Church on the affairs of knowledge, and by reordering the social and economic hierarchies, also enabled mass publishing and the spread of knowledge.
What we have now is a pandemic of the age of the internet. Every tragedy is recorded and shared, every time a leader acts on poor judgement, people notice, and they remember. But, will this pandemic be followed by a renaissance? Will there be more cooperation, new reforms, new institutions, legislation, and new solutions?
I am not an optimist. I don’t believe that necessarily better outcomes will always materialize. But what I do believe is that better outcomes are worth striving towards, working towards, strategizing towards.
This reminds me of something Stacey Abrams recently said in an interview, something that deeply resonates with my values. Abrams is a political activist from the state of Georgia who works to ensure that the voting rights of the African American people is safe secured, as Black people often get disenfranchised in states across America. When the interviewer asked her if she is an optimist, she said that she isn’t. But she is an ameliorist:
“I am an ameliorist, which is something I made up. I believe that the glass is half full. It’s just probably poisoned. And so my job is always to be on the hunt for the antidote.”
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From the About section of this publication:
Every week, through this newsletter, I’ll brief you on the major shifts happening around the world. These shifts are not news items, which often are snapshots from evolving processes that haven’t yet reached any significant conclusions. But the shifts are the major consequences of long unfolding processes, or the inflection points, developments that represent change, that signal breaking away from existing trends.
Each newsletter will also contain: synopsis of, and links to, some enlightening articles from around the web, links to informative interviews, sometimes as embedded podcasts, some video content, a documentary or an video essay, and a movie or show recommendation.
In future, with the Substack sections feature, this website will also host my essays, features, and interviews etc.
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