Hi, Hamish Macdonald here.
At times, keeping up with the global news cycle feels like drinking from a fire hydrant.
Over the last couple of years Geraldine Doogue, producer Taryn Priadko and myself have had the immense privilege of choosing a single topic each week, finding a knock-out guest and dissecting, discussing, unpeeling as many layers as we can.
But in truth, it turned out Global Roaming once a week was not nearly enough. With alarming frequency we found ourselves jumping behind the mic for bonus episodes and emergency pod drops. We responded to snap elections, alliance tremors, or moments when a single development suddenly reframes everything we thought we understood. What we learned was that the audience was there: ready, willing, and keen to go deeper than the headlines allow.
We’re all (I think it’s fair to say) slightly overawed at scaling up to a daily show, but we’re encouraged by the response and delighted to be joined by two new hosts. It’s been genuinely exciting to open the floor to your questions, test some uncomfortable hypotheticals, and make space for uncertainty rather than racing toward tidy conclusions.
One of the great opportunities in front of us is that we can now cover more of the globe, getting to our region more, and tapping stories that go well beyond the familiar Trump, China, Russia triangle.
Already we’ve tackled some big, consequential stories, from Japan’s Prime Minister taking her tough talk on China to the polls,
to questions about NATO’s future, Trump and Venezuela,
the rise of Nigel Farage and Reform UK, and why
China is backing Myanmar’s deeply flawed election.
There's bound to be much, much more so please join me, Latika, Kylie and Geraldine this year as we go daily, choosing the global stories that matter most, and taking the time to help you make sense of them.
Hope you have a great weekend.
P.S — Please remember to check out the amazing second episode from Science Friction's Challenger series. Wednesday marked the 40th anniversary of the Challenger disaster, and the episode dives into some of the unanswered questions around what really went wrong, whether the launch should have been stopped, and how that moment reshaped space exploration forever.
