Hello Future Southeast Asia readers! This week I am launching a new section of the newsletter - Dispatches from Southeast Asia. The current format is that I publish a minimum of one article a week at futuresoutheastasia.com and a free weekly news roundup in this newsletter. This format will remain unchanged.

When I first started publishing the newsletter it was once a month, and even then it was thin on content. As my news curation system has grown, so too has the amount of information I collect every week.

I am now at the point where there is more than enough news to publish every week. This news roundup is also taking longer to edit, so I will make the weekly news roundup just for news links, and remove comments and editorials.

The new section is going to be a weekly or fortnightly post for paid subscribers. It will feature thoughts and observations from the road, and editorial about construction, transport, and infrastructure in Southeast Asia. It will include blog-style reports about my research trips around Southeast Asia, while sticking to the main theme of the site

I don't know what it will become yet, or when and how often to publish, but I know that I need to start writing it to find out. I saw this Tweet recently which summed up what I mean…

Billy Oppenheimer @bpoppenheimer

8/ Just start Before I started my newsletter, I told Ryan I was just waiting until I knew for certain what I wanted to write about. "Just start," he said. “You're better off starting imperfectly than being paralyzed by the hope or the delusion of perfection.”

10:09 PM ∙ Aug 24, 2022

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I know that once this section gets started it will evolve and show its future format.

One of the reasons I started this site was that I couldn’t find a site that writes about what I want to read about. I want to continue that with this section of the newsletter.

I have a lot of notes for future article ideas, some of which may never come to fruition. Some notes probably don't warrant a full blog post either, so they will fit in this newsletter section of collected thoughts. I will use this writing as an anvil for ideas, where I can hammer out concepts for future writing.

The topics for this first edition include the Dubai of Danang, thoughts on a rail bridge to Koh Samui, and the spread of LED lighting on skyscrapers in Southeast Asia.

[James Clark - Future Southeast Asia.]