Global Swirl at Dupont Circle • 85
over time, as things settled into some sort of daily rhythm, I received a relatively good overview of who did what and their educational and professional experiences and aspirations. Mike then turned our attention onto the Wonkcast: “We need to think about possible Wonkcasts. Something post-Pakistan.” “What on earth is a Wonkcast?” I asked myself. Jamie, who was in charge of publications, later explained to me that: The Wonkcast is the name we came up with for the podcast. So that’s the weekly audio interview that Mike does, usually with one of our fellows, but sometimes with a visitor. So we tried to come up with a name that— something more interesting I guess than CGD’s podcasts. So I think it was Mike’s idea of the Wonkcast, and I can’t remember who came up with it [at first], but he liked it.
I asked him whether wonk actually meant something, and was told: Well, wonk, it plays off—it might be someone who spends much time studying and has little or no social life, but policy wonks are people who are I guess kinda technocratic and into the details of policies and kind of—I don’t what the word is—it’s probably something like nerd…. Yeah. So there are a lot of wonks in D.C., and I guess we are—we house a few of them.
So, in the Global Prosperity Wonkcast, Mike interviews CGD experts and others on innovative, practical policy responses to poverty and inequality in a globalizing world. This interview is then placed on the website. The CDI, the Wonkcast, and other tools though which the CGD collects, packages, and distributes information and knowledge are crucial to the mission of the think tank. These tools do not just report on the world as it is, but capture particular dimensions of it, and contribute to providing images and scenarios of the world. They provide a narrative of world events and nurture imaginaries of possible trajectories.
The D.C. Bubble: The World Writ Large? Scale-making, Anna Tsing (2005: 88) notes, “is a foundational move in establishing the neutrality and universalism of Nature; only if observations are compatible and collapsible across scales can they be properly described by a universal logic. Yet to ‘think globally’ is no easy task.” Although the focus of her study is a different one, undertaken in a different part of the world (the “zone of awkward engagement” between various organizational and community interests, in the rainforests of