At The Common Sense, we write from the assumption that each of our readers is the best and most wonderful person who works very hard to offer a good life to their family while doing their best to make their community and country better for all their fellow citizens. They are investing their time and money to watch and read – which, in keeping with who they are, is a very generous thing to do. In exchange, we take so seriously the responsibility of offering the most thought-through and researched insight and analysis with which to make sense of both South Africa and the world. Calm, centrist, sensible. That is the deal, as it were – building a relationship between the best and most important person in the world and our best insight and analysis. It would never be tolerated to preach down at the reader, denigrating them and their values and communities as deplorables – as has become the disgusting habit in so many publications. What is it with journalists and editors that because they have pen and ink they think they are both entitled and qualified to preach and moralise against people and dictate to them how to live their lives – lecturing them about what terrible people they and their communities are and how they need to be better people? The one indulgence this newspaper allows itself is an editorial line stressing that, in so many respects, it is a great time to be alive.

The Common Sense’s news and current affairs reporting is evolving into deep-dive, researched, fact-based writing that laces polling data and socio-economic trends into explanations of what is happening, why it is happening, and what is likely to happen next.

A good example was yesterday's report, Just How Dangerous Is a South African Farm? We Ran the Numbers, where The Common Sense compared data on attacks on farming households with armed house and business robberies affecting the broader population. It found that farming households are attacked at roughly twice the general household rate and that farmers are nearly seven times more likely to be killed during such an attack. Farm attacks and violence have become such a divisive local and international flashpoint, with emotive conjecture from all sides. Now the facts exist, so the conjecture can be put away.

Another example came ten days ago in In a Great Omen for SA's Future the Number of Black Engineering Graduates Explodes, where The Common Sense relied on decades of engineering graduate data to show how positively South Africa's middle class has grown and changed. In the early 1990s there were almost 14 white engineering graduates to every black graduate. Today there are 5.82 black graduates for every white graduate, while the total number of engineering graduates has increased by around 300.0%.

That report was one of a number setting out how South Africa's middle class has grown since democracy in 1994 – and just how much better a society South Africa is for it.

At times, the newspaper has gone even deeper. To answer the much broader question of where South Africa is headed, The Common Sense published South Africa in 2034, The Latest Scenarios last month. Drawing on political, economic, and demographic trends and projections, it explored three plausible futures for South Africa over the next decade and assigned probabilities to each.

A major theme the newspaper has come to pursue, a testimony to just how great South Africa’s people are, is that South Africa is on a very different track to that of most post-colonial African economies. Unlike many of those countries, as South Africa got into economic and political difficulties, vacuums leading to collapse were not the main thing that emerged. Instead, society is balkanising into enclaves as the Union of 1910 fractures in the absence of a convincing authority in Pretoria. The people are pulling together to do what the politicians are not.

As an example, in The Enclavisation of South African Security, The Common Sense used almost three decades of police and private security data to show how South Africans have increasingly replaced state protection with private security. In 1997, there was roughly one private security officer for every police officer. Today the ratio is more than four to one. Given that a state's monopoly on violence is one of the defining characteristics of statehood, there is no stronger dataset showing how South Africa is balkanising.

Next to the news writing and analysis, the columnist stable has expanded to include the most incisive opinion writers from South Africa and around the world.

Agricultural economist Wandile Sihlobo joined last month, and last week in Southern Africa Must Avoid Agricultural Trade Friction and Focus on Collaboration he explained why several of South Africa's neighbours have blocked imports of South African agricultural products.

Richard Tren writes weekly from his home city of Washington DC and last week, in The Dispatch from Washington, wrote on the remarkable contents of Dr Anthony Fauci's diaries.

Also last week, following The Economist's very iffy interview with Elon Musk, in The Mad Attack on FM and Currency, the irascible Simon Lincoln Reader wrote on why attacks on Musk are so idiotic. Can there be any doubt that Musk is the most extraordinary man alive and that no one living has personally done more good for their fellow man?

And also last week, writing from Kyiv, in The Empire Strikes Back, Greg Mills examined Ukraine's history of resistance to imperial domination and the determination of Ukrainians to defend their independence.

Benji Shulman provides calm world-class sense on South Africa and the Middle East. Last week, in What Colombia's New President Means for South Africa, he examined how Colombia's political shift could weaken an important part of South Africa's international campaign against Israel, demonstrating how quickly international alliances can change when governments change.

Koos Malan wrote deeply last month in The Withering Away of the State and New, Civilised Dispensations, exploring the implications of South Africa's withering state and arguing that the emergence of stronger civil society institutions and local communities may ultimately prove to be one of the country's greatest strengths.

The editorial board of this newspaper in turn provides sharply argued assessments of South Africa and its place in the world.

Yesterday, in Zille, Running in Parks, and How the ANC Made an Enemy of the Middle Classes, it argued that Helen Zille's appearance at a Johannesburg parkrun illustrated the increasingly multiracial character of South Africa's middle class and why the country's political divisions now reflect class more than race.

Last week, in This Is How to Tell Whether the Media Is Lying to You, it warned readers about fake news and information operations in the mainstream media and the damage these have done to South Africa – the ultimate disrespect. Drawing on Johann van Loggerenberg's experience during the SARS rogue unit controversy, the editorial board set out a practical framework for recognising misinformation campaigns, untested allegations, and coordinated media narratives.

Also last week, in Washington's Crass Read of South Africa Gets It Wrong, it argued that the American understanding of South Africa is too crude. Rather than seeing South Africa as another deeply polarised society, it argued that the United States would do better to seek common ground with South Africa's growing multiracial and conservative middle class.

In all, we think it is a good and positive start, therefore. And we want our readers to know how we think about them.

But it was also with great sorrow that the newspaper took leave last week of RW Johnson, its most senior columnist. His obituary follows here. We subsequently learned that the day before his death, and despite a prolonged and difficult illness, Bill had been at his computer and attempted to complete his column – the ultimate mark of respect for the readers who had followed him across so many decades. It’s a standard this newspaper will live up to.