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From Calcutta to Columbia • EQUATOR A memoir of disenchantment

One theme of Equator is the post-American world – the end of the era when people everywhere saw the US as a model for their own futures. This memoir by @siddharthadeb.bsky.social, about leaving India for American academia, is a study of global disenchantment:
www.equator.org/articles/fro...

Epic Fury • EQUATOR The adoration of force has become the West’s ruling passion

“At the root of so many of our moral and political crises today is what Simone Weil, describing life under European fascism, called ‘the adoration of power in its most brutal form’.”

Our editors on the Iran war:
www.equator.org/articles/epi...

How I Wrote This: Anand Gopal Rethinking foreign correspondence for the many, not the few.

We're doing a series of Equator online events with writers about their books: the first one is tomorrow, featuring Anand Gopal talking about his extraordinary process for reporting "Days of Love and Rage", about a group of Syrian rebels. Sign up for free here: www.eventbrite.com/e/how-i-wrot...

Death and Destruction From the Sky • EQUATOR Responses to the American-Israeli war on Iran

Why does the old regime persist?

For this @equatormag.bsky.social symposium, I offer some stylised explanations of what the ECFR calls ‘strategic lunacy’: the tenacity of European servility despite the waning of both US power and the benefits of submitting to it.

www.equator.org/articles/dea...

Naghmeh Sohrabi and Arang Keshavarzian talk to Equator's
@shainin.bsky.social about the US-Israel war on Iran, the reactions within and outside the country, and the future of the Islamic republic.

Register for free:

www.eventbrite.com/e/the-war-on...

1013 - Your Podcast feat. Jonathan Shainin (2/23/26) Podcast Episode · Chapo Trap House · 24 February · 1h 41m

if you'd like to have me on *your* podcast to talk about Equator and how Keir Starmer sucks, let me know
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/1...

I know they do things differently in the lobby but this sort of sourcing drives me absolutely nuts. If Mandelson won’t give you comment on the record just write that he declined to comment. You don’t need to launder his excuses through a lens of deniability

Mark O'Connell: A new magazine underlines that the ‘end of the West’ isn’t the end of the world It’s possible to see that some good might come of the chaos. We might even, in time, become less relentlessly focused on our own particular region of the world

“It is energising to witness the founding of an explicitly left-wing publication – of all things, a magazine! – with such a sense of political purpose and intellectual vigour.“

A very nice piece by Mark O'Connell about the launch of Equator:

www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2026...

Epstein Family Values Melinda Cooper and Quinn Slobodian discuss the depredations of Jeffrey Epstein, America's billionaire patriarchs, and the far right

In Equator's first free Zoom event Melinda Cooper and Quinn Slobodian discuss the revelations of the Epstein files, and what they tell us about the obsessions of America's elites.

Time: Thursday, 26 February, 7 PM ET / Friday, 27 February, 11 AM AEST

Register: www.eventbrite.com/e/epstein-fa...

Have Money Daddy • EQUATOR Kafe Hu was a pioneer in the underground scene that made Chengdu into China's hip-hop capital. But what happens when the counterculture blows up?

I love China and hip hop so I was an easy sell but I can't recommend this @equatormag.bsky.social piece enough. It is so hard to get good essays in English about life in China; this one is about so much more than music (though it's got that too)

The Hidden Imran • EQUATOR The cricketing legend is Pakistan’s most famous man. Can the state make him vanish?

After jailing Imran Khan two years ago, Pakistan’s military establishment has tried to erase him from public life. @osmansamiuddin.bsky.social travelled to Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore to report on this bizarre effort to disappear the country’s most famous man.
www.equator.org/articles/the...

NEW: Allies of Keir Starmer say Andy Burnham will not be allowed to stand - and one well-placed source suggests an all-BAME shortlist could be used:

Amazing how they just say this stuff out loud now. I assume they understand people can see them saying it.

The Hidden Imran • EQUATOR The cricketing legend is Pakistan’s most famous man. Can the state make him vanish?

This week's big new Equator story

The Hidden Imran
by Osman Samiuddin

The cricketing legend is Pakistan’s most famous man. Can the state make him vanish?

www.equator.org/articles/the...

Find out more at equator.org

The true essence of Starmerism: smug grandstanding about how he's not grandstanding. (Recall his pre-prepared response to a protestor at his conference speech in 2021: "Shouting slogans or changing lives, conference?")

‘An Explosion Long in the Making’ • EQUATOR A conversation about ‘the most intense protests’ since 1979, the prospect of American intervention, the surreal resurgence of Reza Pahlavi – and the future of Iranian society

“People are emboldened in part by the weakness of the regime, but also because society has been brimming with energy from both previous national protests & daily claim-making by nurses, teachers, truck drivers, farmers, pensioners, oil workers & many others. These protests don’t exist in a vacuum.”

Even five years ago, I would have scoffed at this suggestion. Reza Pahlavi hardly represented a serious political movement. I still don’t see a well-articulated, let alone coherent, political project, but we have to acknowledge that something has shifted and a return to Pahlavism has become meaningful to many Iranians. I can’t give you percentages, but we see it in urban areas and across many classes. That said, this is a reflection of the lack of viable alternatives to the Islamic Republic. At every turn in the past decades the Islamic Republic has cut off avenues for participation, representation, and for imagining a new political future. At the same time, it has violated the moral economy that was one of the core tenets of the revolution – that wealth and development was for all.

From this weekend's @equatormag.bsky.social newsletter, an interview with Arang Keshavarzian on the scale and significance of the protests in Iran: www.equator.org/articles/ira...

Homeland Empire • EQUATOR From Venezuela to Minnesota, Trump is trying to create a borderless American power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic into a single domain of impunity

A question we can't stop asking is whether Trump is radically novel in American history or just a revival of the most reactionary past. This essay by Nikhil Pal Singh provides a new understanding the nature of Trump's hybrid regime: call it Homeland Empire

www.equator.org/articles/hom...

New genre of Binmenism (cf @danhancox.bsky.social ) slop has dropped: nostalgia for watching tv in the nineties

BREAKING Chinese spies only people brave enough to move to world's most dangerous city

i think i would die if i had to leave this country uk rap v the ravey right on rainy fascism island

New Substack from me - on "the battle for the soul of this country", fascism and UK rap's Flag Play danhancox.substack.com/p/i-think-i-...

The Demand for Silence • EQUATOR 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

“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.”

A powerful new essay for EQUATOR by the Ukrainian writer and photographer Yevgenia Belorusets equator.org/articles/the...

New @equatormag.bsky.social: @naomiaklein.bsky.social on how the Surrealists transformed the wreckage of history into revolutionary art – and what their example can teach us about the fight against fascism today www.equator.org/articles/sur...

this piece, recommended to me years ago by @shainin.bsky.social , has always stayed with me www.ftrain.com/wwic

Inside the BBC’s Gaza Fiasco • EQUATOR How the world’s most trusted media organisation fell apart

Important and remarkably timely piece by @trillingual.bsky.social in @equatormag.bsky.social www.equator.org/articles/ins...

For the @equatormag.bsky.social newsletter, I talked about how I reported my piece on the BBC and Gaza, and what's at stake in the current crisis. You can read/sign up below - Equator is a brilliant and necessary new magazine, so give it your support!

www.equator.org/articles/ins...

Equator is founded on our conviction that these storied titles of the Anglophone West cannot be internally reformed, nor redeemed by their periodic U-turns and belated mea culpas. The time has come to create something new.

We have just published Equator's editorial declaration — our commitment to build something new. Read more and be a part of what comes next: equator.org

The end of the West is not the end of the world.

EQUATOR: a new magazine of politics, culture, art.

** If you haven't signed up to our mailing list, do so at equator.org **

trump’s numbers are tanking and there is a palpable desire in the electorate for a real alternative and yet the only money in democratic politics is for doing starmerism