Latest
Conversation
Rodrigo Nunes
The limits of Lulismo, the sons of Bolsonaro and the politics of disintegration
Memoir
J. M. Coetzee, F. M. Siccardi
Growing up in the shadow of genocide
Reportage
Marcela Turati, Thelma Gómez Durán, Eliezer Budasoff
What happens to the disappeared in Mexico’s narco-slavery camps
Essay
Magdi El-Gizouli
How Sudan’s violent integration into global capitalism led to civil war
Dispatch | Photo Essay
Aruna Chandrasekhar
A vision of our overheated future on the streets of Mumbai
The World After Gaza
Essay
Isabella Hammad
On Gaza, ruins and mourning
Memoir
Nasser Abu Srour
Surviving torture and brutality inside Israel’s prisons
Essay
Abdaljawad Omar
Forty years after Edward Said demanded ‘permission to narrate’, the truth from Palestine has never been more widely known. And yet the annihilation continues.
The Post-American World
Essay
Carlos Manuel Álvarez
A Cuban writer contemplates his new life in America, as Washington puts the island under siege once again
Essay
Nikhil Pal Singh
From Venezuela to Minnesota, Trump is creating a borderless American power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic into a single domain of impunity
Essay
Rahmane Idrissa
When the American Dream came to Africa
War on Iran
Symposium
Responses to the American-Israeli war on Iran
Reportage
Salar Abdoh
The Islamic Republic of Iran, fearing for its own survival, presides over a bloodbath
Argument
Sahar Delijani
Generations of organisers and dissidents have kept the Iranian struggle alive
Argument
Argument
Richard Flanagan
How Israel’s advocates are working to silence dissent in Australia – and everywhere else
Argument
Mona Ali
Hormuz and the end of American hegemony
Argument
Melinda Cooper
The billionaire patriarchs of the ascendant far-right want to rule an economy of masters and servants
Clippings 1/3
Elective Affinities
Essay
Maria Stepanova
How Russia’s new generation of political exiles is redefining what it means to lose a homeland
Essay
Carey Baraka
Separating truth from fiction in the most successful African movie of all time
Memoir
Yuri Slezkine
What I learnt from the Soviet Adventure Library
Translation
Translation
Sevgi Soysal
The prison memoirs of a revolutionary Turkish novelist
Translation
Thomas Mann
In a previously unpublished essay from 1949, the German novelist reflects on America’s ‘terrifying moral decline’
Translation
Zheng Xiaoqiong
A poet has collected the stories of the workers whose migration to Guangdong powered China’s manufacturing revolution
Provincializing Europe
Essay
Eva Menasse
Nothing can stop Germany’s moral panic over antisemitism
Conversation
Ivan Krastev
Viktor Orbán‘s vision for Europe
Essay
Yevgenia Belorusets
Everyone wants Ukraine to be a nation of heroes – but no one wants to talk about the violence required to sustain armed resistance to Russia’s invasion
Memoirs of Disillusion
Memoir
Mahmoud Khalil
Imprisoned for no crime, I discovered my arrest was a message: speak out for Gaza, and we will come for you
Memoir
Soyonbo Borjgin
The education and reeducation of a Mongolian reporter
Memoir
Lilith Verstrynge
My decision to quit politics at 31
Editorials
Editorial
The Editors
America’s defeat in the Persian Gulf reveals the world to come
Editorial
The Editors
The adoration of force has become the West’s ruling passion
Editorial
The Editors
The fundamental problem of the present is complicity
Conversations
Conversation
Akbar Shahid Ahmed
A new book thoroughly documents America’s complicity in genocide
Conversation
Rozina Ali
How the persistence of American Islamophobia makes it painfully clear that we are still living with the War on Terror
Conversation
Antonio Spadaro
A Vatican adviser explains how the Pope became the most formidable critic of the algorithmic age
From the editors
The theme that unites our first stories is the passing of a grand illusion: the illusion that the whole world was on a trajectory, however delayed or disrupted, toward Western modernity. That history had a direction – and America stood at its terminus, beckoning others forward.
This illusion was never entirely believed, even by those who professed it most loudly. But it shaped the desires and aspirations of people everywhere; it constrained what could be imagined, demanded and built.
Today, the American model persists, but in a diminished form – as merely one option among others, and no longer inevitable. And this shift, from destiny to choice, from universal to particular, marks the true end of the illusion. What remains is not collapse but something far stranger.
The launch of Equator explores many facets of this transformation – how it feels, what it means, where it leads. Together, they map a world learning to imagine itself beyond the coordinates that once seemed permanent. This is where we begin.