What is compelling about this piece is how it makes obvious that Californians are getting raped in multiple ways. It is also compelling in that it calls things by their true names. Pension fund = ponzi scheme, for example. I personally find the story interesting in how it reveals the weakness of civic nationalism when pitted against actual nationalism.
Of the sources it used, the greater part of the story is probably in this piece, but it is lacking in failing to acknowledge the fraudulent nature of pension funds, and is rather circumspect in its criticisms of Yu Meng.
I don’t know if this aspect is particularly compelling or not, but I like how the last paragraph tied everything together with a line starting with a seemingly innocuous statement of geography.
What I find compelling in this story is how it presents plainly the massive fraud that is foreign aid and the fraudulent nature of those involved. The USG appropriated billions ostensibly for influence in Africa, but only accomplished moar Africans.
The compelling apsect of this story is comparison of the cost of being defrauded. It is obvious at this point that paying any amount for an education outside of the Ivy League is a travesty1. I would also call Larry Ray a fraud since his pupils, according to what they say in the New York magazine article, seem to have learned nothing.
What I found compelling about this story was how it made plain what was left out of the MSM bullshit articles, namely the reason this particular name had to be unhappened, through the contextualization of publicly available hatefacts.
- At least if you pay for the Ivy League you have a shot at becoming a Pompeo. [↩]
The reverse chronological order recounting is an interesting choice, and putting your strongest piece first is sound. I'll work back in the other order.
The Boalt Piece: I heartily agree with you on the "mainstream" refusal to engage the obvious facts makes for particularly infuriating meat to hook into. On the re-read there's a lot of layers to the lulz that can be unpacked. Here's this Boalt fellow. In his time he did things, and after he died his wife decided to "commemorate his legacy" in a manner very popular among a certain sort in the US in the means to do so. Nevermind that US buildings aren't particularly immortal, the actual physical building survived in this case. It's not fire, flood, earthquakes, or derpery removing the memorial to Boalt. It's that his name is coming off because Boalt's Yankee worldview is the loser.
There was that Yankee push a few years back that lead to the destruction of a bunch of dead Southerners, and on my first read, this piece clashed against that filter as a novel variation. The reality could not be further from that. As the generations have come and gone, the Yankee industrialists became Yankee post-industrialists, and they lost. I'm reminded of the case of the regional Chinese bureaucrat and his ~38 billion USD fortune caught in a Chinese anti-corruption case. Meanwhile Biden gets a bunch of mainstream noise while only managing ~2.5 percent of that haul, not even directly to himself, as Vice President of the US. There's wealth in this world, but it isn't in the US.
Sarah Larry Ray: You kept a nice tight scope on this one. There's a lot of layers going on here, and I'm not the best person to plumb all the depths. Still, in light of the #MeToo fuss centered on socially awkward Pantsuits... Here's a man who fought the system, was laid low by the system, and after getting out of prison he walked into the Pantsuitist Citadel that is Sarah Lawrence where he captured enough of their girls to get by. The mainstream fuss was a lot of terrified "OMG this isn't how university girls are supposed to work" coming out of the Pantsuits that push the same "Putin doesn't know how the world works!"
Madame Pompeo: The old "Welfare Queen" return to the motherland story. This strikes me as your weakest story, but it does add to the collected indictments of this particular Madame Secretary being much the same as the older models. Swap war in Syria for war in Iran and "Global Initiative" for "Aerospace". Strip off the branding and they've both guilty of trying to ride their big dumpy secretary butts on a terminally arthritic horse. Altogether Pompeo's no so different from Bernie Sandals or Bill Deblasio getting themselves comfortable by signing government checks for their wive's hobbies.
Chinese Hand In California Pensions: So many hooks, and that seemingly statement of distance at the end... It's information. It does something to sweeten the punch given California contributed investment for a missile capable of covering that distance. It contributes to highlighting the what of the story. These bits of information, artfully placed, really put some weight into the punches without crossing from reporting to opinion. It helps to tie the story together.
In your review of this one, you also hit on an important point with regard to sourcing. The information landscape in the muck is thoroughly, and consulting multiple sources of is important when the sources are of dubious quality. Taking multiple, potentially hostile writeups, stripping them down to the basics, and building a report off of what little information was actually there is the craft.
Thank you for your comment. I can see the welfare piece was my weakest. This one was selected essentially at random from the AP feed, there really wasn't much to build a hook from and nothing all that surprising happening. Everyone pretty much knows populations in Africa are exploding. On top of that I've not been there, and I know very few Africans.
Hm yes I can see the counter narrative with the Larry Ray story.
The poverty of corrupt US officials vs. the Chinese is an excellent vein to mine.
Slow news days happen, but knowing when to move on from a story that's short on information or lulz to hook is also something that can also be refined with practice.