Beneath the headlines and half-truths, what is the Chinese internet really like? Equator's Samanth Subramanian speaks to Yi-Ling Liu about how life online in China actually operates – from the subtle, ever-shifting cycles of state oversight to the surprising spaces where creativity and subcultures thrive.

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Equator's Mohsin Hamid talks to the award-winning writer Amitav Ghosh about how Western NGOs and climate experts have focused their apocalyptic thinking on Bangladesh – often to the detriment of the Bangladeshis themselves.

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How are the fascisms of today different from those of the past, and how can we collectively fight them? Equator's Pankaj Mishra talks to the award-winning writer Naomi Klein about how history repeats itself not precisely but in a morphed manner. The totalitarianism we see around us is different from that of the mid-20th century, not least in their use of new technologies.

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Equator's Samanth Subramanian and the journalist Osman Samiuddin dive into one of world sport's most charged rivalries - India versus Pakistan in cricket - and explore the "geopolitical hot mess" that is cricket in South Asia today.

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In March, the Lebanese writer Lina Mounzer's family home in Beirut was bombed as part of the US-Israeli war on Iran. In an earlier time, she might have written about the destruction for a US publication. But as she tells Pankaj Mishra, she has stopped trying to explain the Middle East to Americans.

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Nesrine Malik talks to the historian Nikhil Pal Singh about US imperialist tendencies overseas, and how they’re inextricably bound up with its violence at home. Singh argues that the current Trump administration is reworking both foreign and domestic policy to create a single domain of impunity.

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Pankaj Mishra, Nesrine Malik and Mohsin Hamid introduce the birth and mission of Equator, the first season of the Equator podcast, and upcoming interviews with Amitav Ghosh, Naomi Klein and other guests.

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