The Monday Media Diet with Atoossa Abrahamian

On The Cosmopolites, local media, and Teux Deux

Atoossa (AA) has been a longtime friend of WITI and just wrote a new book: The Hidden Globe. We’re happy to have her with us this week. Be sure to read her Arctic Edition from the archives. -Colin (CJN)

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a journalist who writes about the weird side of globalization—the cracks between nations, the laws above and beneath them, the new shape of sovereignty, and pretty much anything that involves louche characters who speak many languages and operate in multiple jurisdictions. 

My first book, The Cosmopolites, was the first major investigation into the global market for passports. I spent a year following citizenship brokers from Toronto to Singapore to the Comoro Islands, and interviewing both billionaires and stateless people about how they got, or lost, their passports.

My new book is called The Hidden Globe, and it’s all about the world’s unknown jurisdictions: special economic zones, freeports, the oceans, outer space, and more. For this one, I traveled to Dubai, Laos, Svalbard, Luxembourg, Seattle, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. You can get it on October 8 anywhere you buy books.

I live in Brooklyn with my husband and our two small boys. I moved here from Geneva, Switzerland when I was 18. Most visitors who go to Geneva say it’s boring, pretty and expensive—and this all is true—but it’s also full of exceptions and loopholes and spies and money. I still can’t quite wrap my head around it. 

Describe your media diet. 

I read the NYT nearly every day—my husband works for Styles so I’ll often start there and make my way to harder news. I avoid the health section, though. It’s clickbait for hypochondriacs and I am susceptible. 

My true love is for small and smallish magazines. I have about a dozen subscriptions including Lux, Dissent, The Drift, n+1, LRB, NYRB, Harper’s, The Nation, and so on. They litter my house until I give myself a biannual amnesty and put them in the recycling. I don’t read every article - who has the time? But it’s such a treat to always have something rich and interesting to pick up, and I love to support these publications because that’s where all the best young writers get their start. 

Besides that, Mayor Eric Adams’ antics have turned me into a diehard local media consumer. Hell Gate and The City are my go-tos. I love Curbed because real estate is endlessly fascinating. And I have WNYC on pretty much all day when I’m not writing or on the phone. Even when I lived in Paris, I tuned into the Brian Lehrer show daily. This is a weird thing to say but he feels like family.  

I treat social media as something that can be incredibly valuable if you put a lot of effort into not seeing what you don’t want to see. For example, Facebook groups are an amazing resource (especially for reporting), but the site makes you wade through ads and crap and wedding photos from someone you met once sophomore year of college. It’s off-putting and unnatural. 

My solution has been to manually unfollow every person on my feed who isn’t a source or interesting to me for non-social reasons. It took a couple of hours but my experience of the site has been much better ever since. 

With Instagram, my hack is to only use the browser version, to avoid a lot of the reels and suggested nonsense. It also makes it more annoying to post - which is good, ultimately.

What’s the last great book you read?

Mating by Norman Rush. By far the highlight of my year in reading. It’s perfect. 

What are you reading now?

Septology by Jon Fosse. Massive slog (sorry) but I’m too stubborn to put it down and it is curing my insomnia. 

I otherwise read a lot of new fiction. A lot of it is pretty forgettable, kind of like your average Netflix show.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

So many of my friends are writers, so I’ll normally start with their bylines. I love my friends, they’re brilliant, and even if they were total dummies, reading their work would be the polite thing to do.

Then I’ll go through the TOC and pick out what sounds most interesting. The only subjects I don’t read about are sports and TV. I used to do the crosswords but I get too obsessed so I’ve stopped. 

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

Elisa Albert. She is completely outrageous. 

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?

Teux Deux is my to-do list, calendar, and reminder system in one. It’s super low-fi and I’ve been using it for more than a decade. 

Plane or train?

Train, but nothing beats a good airport bar. 

What is one place everyone should visit? 

The Comoro Islands. Very dysfunctional place, but there’s nowhere like it. 

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into. 

Mosquitos are a huge problem for me. They find me through my clothes and when I’m wearing bug repellent. They get me after the city sprays my neighborhood, day and night, inside and outside, and well into the fall, sometimes as late as November. Did you know a mosquito can stay alive in your apartment for 100 days? 

Because they torment me so much, I spend a lot of time and energy researching and testing ways to protect myself and also to kill as many of them as possible. I also hunt. I once got one with my bare hand (singular) while nursing an infant. Someone give me a trophy. 

I find a lot of new products online. I read all the reviews but by now I know that most of them lie, especially the products that claim to be “all-natural”. And because New York is a subtropical cesspool with negligent leaders, I cannot leave the house without an arsenal of prophylactics: DEET or Picaridin spray; hydrocortisone cream; a Fenistil stick from Switzerland that takes the edge of bites; and this weird little device that gets really hot and burns off the itching.

If you’re staying put, Thermacell is pretty good but not perfect, and it’s expensive. Sitting directly in front of a strong fan is OK, because mosquitos can’t fly very well. None of these solutions is perfect. Right now I’m experimenting with something called a “dunk bucket” outside the house, which purports to kill the larvae by luring the bugs into water dosed with chemicals. Does it work? Unclear. But this is war, and I’m ready to try anything. (AA)