This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers.
It’s Christmas. I’m not going to bang on for ages about the geopolitical situation, or the collapse of the global rules-based order, although there is a little of that further down this newsletter. You’ve got Christmas shopping to do, unless you’re one of those people who did it all weeks ago, in which case you can relax and watch Elf again or start drinking decent dry sherry, one of the best value great wines that is mystifyingly out of fashion. Either way, no one needs a long essay from me and Reaction about the state of the world, which is very interesting but will still be very interesting when the Reaction team returns on 3 January. I’m off for two weeks, and this newsletter returns in mid-January. Thank you for being a Reaction subscriber. As you know, a small group of us founded it in 2016 with two aims in mind. First, we wanted to create a space (I didn’t say safe space) where in an ever more fast-moving, crazy news environment propelled by the digital revolution a group of writers could provide analysis and commentary in a style that, we hope, helps our readers make sense of a world that is changing – a lot. And we wanted to offer training and mentoring to the next generation of journalists, because the Reaction founders, editors and board think it matters – a lot.
