More than a decade ago, as Nicholas Lemann wrapped up his 10-year stint as dean of Columbia Journalism School, the global narrative seemed to be moving in a single, reassuring direction. Globalization and liberal internationalism were the reigning faith, and there was hope that defeating terrorism would reaffirm a stable, American-led order—if not the so-called “end of history,” then something close to it. Economic recovery from the 2008 financial crisis was held up as evidence that growth had returned for good. Big Tech was treated as a national miracle. The Obama years had fostered a belief that institutions could bend toward justice, and that the future would bring the steady, technocratic march of progress.
But inside Pulitzer Hall on the Columbia Morningside campus, Lemann sensed something else: a tremor beneath the surface. Populism rising at the margins. Trust in institutions thinning. Inequality calcifying into anger. Work becoming more precarious. Silicon Valley more destabilizing. Democratic guardrails bending. Nativist, authoritarian forces stirring. Newsrooms were shuttering foreign bureaus, reorganizing around the 2016 election horse race, “pivoting” to video and podcasts, and chasing quick-hit stories that rose and fell with the day’s metrics.
“The stories that mattered most,” Lemann said, “were the big-picture, long-term ones most outlets weren’t looking at yet.”
That instinct became Columbia Global Reports (GCR). When then-Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger approached Lemann seeking a way to bring global issues to a wider public, they co-founded a publishing imprint based on a simple premise: commissioning, editing, and publishing short, deeply reported books on emerging global trends—stories not yet recognized as the forces shaping the world.
Ten years later, CGR’s early subjects look less like curiosities and more like warnings. Atossa Abrahamian’s The Cosmopolites (2015) exposed human rights inequality by looking at the lucrative global trade of citizenship rights. Haley Sweetland Edwards’s Shadow Courts (2016) examined the trade tribunals that fueled anti-globalization anger. John Judis’s The Populist Explosion (2016) charted the political revolt that would soon sweep the U.S., Europe, and beyond. Tim Wu’s The Curse of Bigness (2018) ushered in today’s antitrust battles with Big Tech.
“As a writer, Columbia Global Reports made it possible for me to explore important, complicated stories,” said Adam Kirsch, the author of two CGR books (The Global Novel, 2017, and The Revolt Against Humanity, 2023) and a forthcoming one (We Want to Believe). “As a reader, it has brought me insights about the world that I couldn’t have found anywhere else. In the landscape of American journalism, there’s nothing else like it.”
Read more at Columbia News.
