Conversation
Antonio Spadaro
A Vatican adviser explains how the Pope became the most formidable critic of the algorithmic age
Memoir
Nasser Abu Srour
Surviving torture and brutality inside Israel’s prisons
Dispatch
Mohammed R. Mhawish
In Palestine, the results matter less than the fact that the game persists
Argument
Mona Ali
Hormuz and the end of American hegemony
Translation
Thomas Mann
In a previously unpublished essay from 1949, the German novelist reflects on America’s ‘terrifying moral decline’
Translation
Mariella Mehr
On Switzerland’s hidden persecution of the Yenish people
Argument
Sahar Delijani
Generations of organisers and dissidents have kept the Iranian struggle alive
Essay
Eva Menasse
Nothing can stop Germany’s moral panic over antisemitism
Get your copy of our first print issue
The inaugural print issue of our magazine – filled with original art, new essays, fiction and poetry, and some of the standout pieces from our first seven months – will soon be sent out to our Insider and Patron members. Sign up to receive yours.
The cover features a tender image by Sohrab Hura, while the back cover is drawn from a shoot for the magazine by Yto Barrada. Inside:
• Short stories by Zain Khalid and Elnathan John – set, respectively, during a Hajj stampede and in a Jehovah’s Witnesses church in Nigeria
• A madcap essay by Carey Baraka about the vexed classic, The Gods Must Be Crazy: part-reconsideration, part-travelogue and part-film criticism
• New poems by Yasmine Seale
• A sweeping and idiosyncratic essay by Isabella Hammad on ruins, poetry and the work of mourning in a time of genocide
• Rahmane Idrissa on Statemania, Benjamin Moser on American Zionism, and much more
Make sure you get your copy while stocks last! Sign up as an Insider or a Patron so that we can send your issue straight to your doorstep.
War on Iran
Memoir
Amir Ahmadi Arian
Feasting and warring in Tehran
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
The Post-American World
Essay
Rahmane Idrissa
When the American Dream came to Africa
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
Reportage
Reportage
Rania Abouzeid
In a country redefining its national symbols, holidays, historic heroes and school curriculum, what it even means to be Syrian is an open question
Reportage
Osman Samiuddin
The cricketing legend is Pakistan’s most famous man. Can the state make him vanish?
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
Clippings 1/3
Translation
Translation
Afrizal Malna
What have Indonesia’s revolutions done for the poor?
Translation
Zheng Xiaoqiong
For many years, a poet has collected the stories of the workers whose migration to Guangdong powered China’s manufacturing revolution
Translation
Golan Haji
Growing up in the shadow of a burned cinema, a Kurdish poet in Syria learns to read the landscape for traces of a violent history
Memoirs of Disillusion
Memoir
Soyonbo Borjgin
The education and reeducation of a Mongolian reporter
Memoir
Siddhartha Deb
A memoir of disenchantment
Memoir
Lilith Verstrynge
My decision to quit politics at 31
Conversations
Conversation
Rahmane Idrissa
Military revolutions and jihadist insurgencies in the Sahel
Conversation
Ivan Krastev
Viktor Orbán‘s vision for Europe
Conversation
Barnaby Raine
What the mainstream gets wrong about antisemitism
Argument
Argument
Melinda Cooper
The billionaire patriarchs of the ascendant far-right want to rule an economy of masters and servants
Argument
Amitav Ghosh
How visions of catastrophe shape the ‘climate solutions’ imposed by aid agencies
Argument
Lina Mounzer
Why I stopped explaining the Middle East to Americans
Dispatches
Dispatch
Sara Mokhavat
It was hard to imagine that I might soon be in another country, away from this war
Dispatch
Guillermo L.
Cuba is wasting away and making us waste away
Dispatch
Zahra Nader
When Pakistan bombed a rehabilitation facility, the victims were addicts detained by the Taliban
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.