And...We're Back!

Some Announcements

After a week’s vacation followed by a week with Influenza, I’m back in action. The vacation was great. The Influenza, less so. But I am excited to be back because we are about to enter my favorite season of the year: The craziness that is the United Nations General Assembly!

I wanted to share with everyone some fun announcements for the weeks ahead.

Geneva! I am headed to Geneva from September 8 to 13th for a live taping of the Global Dispatches podcast at the World Trade Organization’s Public Forum. We will be discussing the perils of decoupling and the promise of “re-globalization.” Please join us! If you are in Geneva and would like to meet up, please send me a note.

UNGA! I am a bit of a free agent this year. We won’t be doing daily podcast episodes, but I still plan on publishing tons of content. As always, my rule-of-thumb for covering UNGA is to bring my audience the genuinely important and substantive events, ideas and debates that are happening around New York. This is opposed to simply reflecting on the spectacle of UNGA, which is the unfortunate reflex of many of my colleagues in media. Historic stuff happens at UNGA! I like to cover it for you.

In the next week or so, I’ll be publishing my personal UNGA preview for paying subscribers, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, if there’s an event you think worth covering or people you think I should meet, please send me a note.

Partner with Us! One of the ways we fund Global Dispatches is through partnership with like-minded organizations that want to showcase their expertise, ideas and interests to our high-impact audience of global affairs professionals. We’ve done dozens of these partnerships over the years, with organizations large and small. Please reach out if you would like to learn more about our content partnerships.

Stories I’m following! MPOX is officially a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern.” This is the loudest alarm the WHO can summon during a fast moving outbreak. Today’s episode features my interview with Dr. Eric Toner, a health security specialist with Johns Hopkins University who explains how this particular outbreak is evolving and how vaccines can quell this emergency if we can summon the political will to deploy vaccines to central Africa in sufficient numbers.

Other episodes on the horizon: Fitful peace talks between the warring sides in Sudan’s Civil War just concluded in Geneva at the behest of the United States. I also have a forthcoming interview with Zuhra Bahman, the Kabul-based NGO leader who explains how she manages to do her job despite restrictions imposed by the Taliban. You can get those episodes as soon as they available by following Global Dispatches on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Finally, our new UN-focused podcast To Save Us From Hell turns two months old in September. It’s building momentum and we have some great episodes lined up. If you want to learn more about the UN, or if you have a personal or professional interest in keeping up with news and events from around the the UN system, this show is for you.

A paid subscription to Global Dispatches gets you full access to To Save Us From Hell. Support our work AND keep up with the UN.

Thank you! It’s good to be back!

Mark