News Letter V
Life; Victory!; Garbage
We are alive! Due to the response to our appeal in March, we have officially launched North South Notes. My sincere thanks to everyone who has subscribed or offered support.
But this means we have a little bit of housekeeping. Anyone signed up as a Founder has a right to two signed books, sent anywhere in the world, if you want them. On Thursday (May 28) I will send everyone in that subscriber class an email (using the address registered with Substack) to get your mailing address. So check that inbox, or send me a DM (on Substack) if you don’t hear from me by Friday. You can still sign up before Thursday, of course, and I will probably move to periodic shipments after this round.
And then, on Sunday May 31, at 13:00 EST, we will have our first (experimental) “editorial meeting” for the people funding this thing. What this means is that I will open a thread in the chat. I will stick around for a few hours answering any questions about the publication, and leave it open for a few days for paid subscribers to drop their input on the shape that the mini-magazine should take, and offer ideas for potential stories. Entirely optional, obviously.
Finally: I do not use the Substack app. You can if you want I guess, but I find the experience is better if you ignore all the prodding to download the application. However, I strongly recommend that you do not use the app / iOS if you choose to kindly upgrade to a paid subscription. The Apple Store will charge you extra, and will keep me from interacting with you directly. I just do everything in a browser.The North South Notes community would like to congratulate Shakira for her victory against the government of Spain. We did it! The Spanish high court ruled that authorities must return 55 million euros in tax penalties to the Colombian artist. They found that she was not actually a legal resident of the country in 2011, as she was on tour and using the Bahamas as a tax haven instead.
Though officially fiercely opposed to the global system of tax havens, we at North South Notes make an exception for Shakira.
In February 2025 I wrote that postal services oligarch Jeff Bezos had made a strange move at the Washington Post (the newspaper that kept my own journalism career alive from 2017 to 2019) when he violently remade the Opinion section:
He did not just want to go to war with the newsroom and make the paper more right-wing. It would have been very easy to starve the paper of reporting resources, and to secretly privilege hiring decisions that serve his agenda; that’s the standard script for things like this. He wanted to be seen to be going to war with the newsroom and using his money to make the paper more right-wing.
If we are honest, ownership is very capable of nudging journalists to become more pro-capitalist. In a way, this is the history of the political economy of media. You can create implicit incentive structures that generate certain stories and make others impossible; and everyone can remain “objective” and professional, making the final product all the more effective. Bezos instead chose a very public and confrontational attack on his own staff. My theory, inchoate back in early 2025, was that he didn’t care very much about creating effective right-wing propaganda. He just wanted it to look like it — and there is a very powerful man in the United States that cares a lot about how things look, and is not very concerned about their substance.
More evidence for this thesis emerged this month, when the Post Opinion section began publishing a series of laughably ineffective, misleading, and world-historically annoying little videos on social media. Much of what remains of the U.S. media class spent last week gawking at the facts that: the clips are flopping, getting less engagement than your average Brazilian teenager; they don’t even make their ideological points; all of this is driving away subscribers. But we can “make it make sense" if we accept that for Bezos, owning the newspaper has always been about serving his other, real interests. He is not trying to do ideological engineering and create a hegemonic bloc. He doesn’t care, the theory goes, if this works. He just needs the state to notice that he has crushed the anti-Trumpist faction.Make sure to check out the commissioned features that we have already run! The latest, from Bahrain, came out this month (and you can listen to Aamer discussing Gulf politics and the feature on Turbulence or The Nation podcasts). Someone needs to get Gaby on a show to discuss art and the internet in Mexico.
Cuando son casi la una, la loba en celo saluda a la luna.
Sinceramente,
Vincent
