about

— me eeekkk

so someone asks what my site is.

attaché is a geopolitics journal. that's the short version. the longer one is that i'm 21, i just finished college, and i was tired of reading about the world in the only two voices that seemed to exist. either a 40 page academic paper on nuclear nonproliferation that almost killed me halfway through, or a magazine that thought what i wanted to read about was a celebrity's water intake. neither one was wrong about what i wanted to read. they were both just missing half of it.

if i'm being honest, this started for me. i love this stuff. i went into my capstone thinking i'd write something stiff and finish the semester, and somewhere in the research i realized the actual problem isn't the topic. the topic is fascinating. people doing wild things to other people in the name of states that didn't exist a hundred years ago. the problem is how it gets taught. you take something genuinely interesting and bury it in passive voice and footnotes until even the person who cares about it can't get through.

and i'm tired of pretending it doesn't need saying: it's insulting to women to assume they don't care about how the world works. we live in it. it affects what's in our pharmacies, what's at our borders, who's running our governments, what's on the screens we look at. of course we care. the question was never whether women would read this. the question is whether anyone would write it the way we'd actually want to read it.

so here's the bet. nuclear nonproliferation is one of the more boring sounding phrases in the english language. but look at it for ten minutes and it's the story of countries going through the most elaborate backdoor meet cute to try to score the thing that could wipe out a population. or take red lipstick, which made hitler go bonkers. women in the french resistance wore it because he hated it. these are things the girls can chat about. and once you can chat about them, you can actually think about them.

so that's what i'm doing. or trying to. i don't have a model for this. there are magazines i love and academic writers i love and none of them are doing quite the thing i'm reaching for, which means making it up as i go is the only option. fine. i'm 21, this is my first step, i don't have it all figured out, and i don't think anyone who's done anything interesting did either.

if any of that sounds like a place you'd want to spend your sundays, you're in the right room.

— xx, m

the questions i get most.

● Why 'attaché'? +

From the French attacher, to attach. Originally a diplomatic role: a junior staffer assigned to an embassy who specializes in something. Cultural attaché, press attaché, military attaché. Close to the work without being the center of it. That's the position I'm writing from.

● Is it really free? +

Yes. The Sunday Dispatch, every article, the glossary, all of it. No paywall, no premium tier, no patreon thing. If you ever want to buy me a coffee one day, lovely. But it isn't required for anything.

● Why women specifically? +

Because the way geopolitics gets written assumes you've already been in the room, and most rooms have historically been men. The version of geopolitics-for-women that exists out there defaults to consumer-facing global trends or which world leader is hot. I wanted the version that treats us like we can hold a paragraph about the Strait of Hormuz.

● Is this real journalism or your opinions? +

Both, openly. I read primary sources. I cite them in every article. Then I tell you what i think about what I read. The fiction is when publications pretend the second part isn't happening. I'd rather have it on the page.

● What happens when you're wrong? +

I write a piece called where i was wrong. Not as a retraction. As a record. The internet rewards confidence and punishes course-correction, which is why so much commentary stays bad. I'd rather show my receipts and my updates than pretend I had it right the whole time.

THE NEWS SHOULDN'T REQUIRE A YALE PHD.
JUST CURIOSITY.

geopolitics, filed weekly. sources, opinions, and the occasional note on what someone was wearing.

— sundays, free, forever xx