I find Wikipedia such a useful resource, but unfortunately it's a much less useful resource when it comes to the Global South. For example, relative to the size of their populations, there are 44 times more articles discussing France than India timhirschelburns.substack.com/p/youre-igno...

Which countries get the most attention? Which get the least? I ran the numbers here timhirschelburns.substack.com/p/youre-igno...

Two-year-old Mohammed Hashim died a year ago today. His family were Rohingya refugees, and they went from three meals a day to one after US aid cuts. His father, who Hashim begged for food as he grew weak, told the AP that Marco Rubio lied when he said no one died due to the funding cuts

Don’t be a liberal Democrat about it. Adopt energy efficiency measures and limit fossil fuel consumption!

Breaking News: A panel of federal judges on Thursday blocked President Trump from imposing a 10% tariff on most U.S. imports, dealing yet another legal setback to the White House in its efforts to tax foreign goods and wage trade war without the express permission of Congress. nyti.ms/4da1dzv

Read it people. This really is so good

Well this is awkward for the IMF: Bc the Trump admin is now justifying tariffs under Sec 122, which rests on a balance-of-payments justification, the US is initiating WTO consultations on the tariffs. And per WTO rules, the IMF will have to weigh in w/ an opinion! insidetrade.com/daily-news/u...

I looked at how much the New York Times covered different countries in 2025, compared to those countries' populations. The bars for many lower-income countries are functionally invisible—much like their citizens are to readers of The New York Times

"A climate monster is growing in the Pacific Ocean, perhaps the most fearsome El Niño since before scientists even began modeling them. It will give us at least a brief preview of a hotter and more chaotic world — a 2027 like we might’ve expected to see in 2035." www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/o...

Battery storage will change the global energy system forever. Battery pack price: down 45% in 2025, first time below $100/kWh Battery storage deployment: ~250 GWh, up 46% year-on-year

Which countries get the least attention relative to the size of their population? I looked at metrics like media coverage, Wikipedia depth, Google searches, and travel statistics. Bangladesh generally comes out as the country that's most overlooked. The DRC and Nigeria are up there too

Well this is interesting www.ft.com/content/1f0c...

The Global South is home to a large majority of humanity, but it typically occupies just a corner of our brains. I ran the numbers. For example, relative to population, last year the NYT covered developed countries 25x more than developing countries timhirschelburns.substack.com/p/youre-igno...

We know some of their names. I wrote about them here open.substack.com/pub/timhirsc...

Mood

We absolutely Simeoned that second half. Astonishing smothering

dems should explicitly pitch "reducing" US international aid to only 5% of GDP, a reasonable proportion that the median voter would approve of

This is a good thread *and* it’s always striking how people’s worldviews allow comparisons to the American/European past and not the global present. “Ppl used to spend a huge share of their income on food.” What do you think happens today in Bangladesh or Ethiopia!

Developing country officials really prefer renewables. Via @ed-king.bsky.social's Climate Diplomacy brief climatediplobrief.substack.com/p/climate-di...

Some people say we don’t build beautiful things anymore and, like, lol. Motherfuckers, we built this:

So much elite opinion just derives from social proximity. Reactionary centrists spend a lot more time around highly-educated left-wing people who the get into personal conflicts with than right-wingers who’d happily throw those centrists in the gulag. So campus radicals become the great threat!

And this is how correspondents should be covering Africa today.

This is a child that might live its entire life with HIV unnecessarily. USAID cuts forced a clinic to cut staff from 11 to 1. Precious Mulenga's blood test got lost, there were no community health workers to let her know once it was found, and she only learned the results 7 months into pregnancy

Chinese solar panel exports to Africa and SE Asia were 67% higher in March 2026 compared to March 2025 www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

And as I’ve written, when the destruction of USAID did get attention, it was often through sanitized and rationalized versions of what happened, because the truth was too sinister and idiotic to acknowledge open.substack.com/pub/timhirsc...

It's not hyperbole in the least to say Musk purchased a six-month shadow presidency for $280 million and used the power of that shadow presidency to 1. Steal the government’s data, 2. Permanently damage the state’s ability to regulate his businesses, and 3, kill non-white people.

It's CBC official: I'm a "World Cup nerd" www.cbc.ca/news/world/f...

War is creating a global south food and fuel crisis exacerbated by major cuts to foreign aid by top global north donors made in part to fund rearmament in preparation for more war

I HAVE WORLD CUP TICKETS!!! My wager was right: I didn't believe 68,000 people were willing to pay $400+ to watch Curacao (population 150k) play Côte d'Ivoire (shamefully, its citizens are essentially banned from visiting the US). Indeed, today $140 tickets became available

Remember when Kenya (under an IMF program) tried to pass a finance bill that sparked mass protests, with protesters even storming Parliament? Kenya's Finance Minister at the time, Njūgūna Ndūng'ū, is now speaking out on the flaws with IMF programs www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/i...

A little known system of secretive tribunals allows corporations to sue governments outside of national legal systems over laws and policies they don't like It's called ISDS and it's written into investment treaties It's been used to sue over climate, health, chemical safety - everything really

This is in line with some important nuances about public opinion on international aid, which usually get flattened in lazy discourse. As found here, people think way more is spent on aid than is actually the case. BUT 🧵 www.ft.com/content/055e...

Is social media dying? How much did Twitter change as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has changed Here are the key take-aways 🧵 Full paper out now in in JQD:DM!

The US is looking to give former Afghan support staff and their families currently stuck in Qatar the choice of moving to war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo or back to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, rather than the US, an activist says. u.afp.com/SE9m

I'm still making up my mind on how much China is crowding out developing countries by hanging on to lower-value industries even as it expands in higher-value ones, but the textiles figures are pretty striking: China's share of the global textile market is higher now than in 2010

In 2025, renewables overtook coal in global electricity generation for the first time in over 100 years. Renewables: 33.8% Coal: 33.0% Coal fell below a third of global electricity generation for the first time in history.

US elites decided, like a school of fish, that climate concern is old, boring, "woke," square, not hip & popular any more. As usual, it was based almost entirely on internal elite dynamics. It had nothing to do with the actual public, which is more concerned than ever.

I reviewed Noam Scheiber's "Mutiny." There's a lot of reason to think college grads could swing behind transformative political projects in the near future, especially given the composition of the jobs most exposed to AI

New @nbcnews.com poll: 33% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the Iran war. 67% disapprove. A majority “strongly disapprove.” www.nbcnews.com/politics/don...

Yikes

The Global Progressive Mobilisation just concluded here in Barcelona. An impressively global gathering - with representatives from Europe & US but also across Latin America, Africa, Asia. My observations:

The process for destroying USAID was just unbelievably, murderously dumb. This is from Nicholas Enrich's new book Into the Wood Chipper, describing a meeting with Trump-appointed USAID leadership *after* they had largely gutted the agency

Logged on thinking I had the funniest and most original JD Vance joke

Chart: Confidence in Trump's foreign policy decisions, by party Among Americans overall, "There is no issue on which a majority express confidence in Trump." www.pewresearch.org/global/2026/...

Spotted in Dahiyeh. #beirut #lebanon

So @jderbyshire.ft.com asked @philgordondc.bsky.social if the Iran war is the US’s Suez moment. He said no, but then pithily and pitilessly sums up how it has been a comprehensive strategic failure. Oof! www.ft.com/content/0cbc...

Heard on @thepolycrisis.bsky.social podcast: “The real question to my mind is how many EVs can China actually produce this year? Because I'm quite certain for if they could produce 50 million of them, they could sell them all this year.” Doesn’t sound like Chinese overcapacity to me!

Haven’t had to use this one much this year but we’re back

Just weeks before the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, Colombia announced plans to withdraw from ISDS. 🌎⚖️

Absolutely remarkable statement from Pope Leo today. One for the history books www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...