The Shipping News Stars
With the Strait of Hormuz crisis raging, experts in commercial maritime traffic are having a moment.
Sal Mercogliano appears on my video call screen looking precisely how you’d hope one of the internet’s foremost shipping experts would: surrounded by nautical paraphernalia, wearing a shirt so riddled with parrots and margaritas that it would have made the late Jimmy Buffett weep with pride. A military- and maritime-history professor at Campbell University in North Carolina, Mercogliano runs What’s Going On with Shipping?, a YouTube channel where he cheerily explains dark fleets, blockades, and tariffs. When he started the show, in 2021, he had a hundred and thirty-seven subscribers. (Up to that point, he’d mostly used his account to post academic presentations.) Now, boosted in part by the world-shaking events in the Strait of Hormuz, he’s at more than seven hundred thousand subscribers and gets several million views a month. “It’s nuts,” he told me. “I’m always shocked.”
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