"Governments have never used cricket as nakedly as they do now" @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social and @osmansamiuddin.bsky.social dive into the geopolitical hot mess that is cricket in South Asia today. Find us on any major podcast app of your choice. Visit us to know more. www.equator.org/podcasts

Enjoyed “A dominant character”, @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social’s biography of JBS Haldane which is also - perhaps mostly - a love letter to the scientific mindset. “To be open to the unknown strangeness of the world”

Engrossing read on the mind boggling Mads Brügger doc The Black Swan currently on iPlayer @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

Happy UK pub day to @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social's THE WEB BENEATH THE WAVES: The Fragile Cables that Connect our World (of course still on sale now in the US!) “A brief, lyrical survey of the internet’s underwater infrastructure.” —@economist.com ↪️Get your copy: uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

On the occasion of the 15th-year reissue of my first book, I rambled a little on my Substack about its fortuitous backstory: samanth.substack.com/p/multi-stor...

“The safety of the cables in the ocean is a national security issue, a precondition for the economy, and a matter of literal life and death” 🎧ICYMI: The Guardian Long Read podcast features an excerpt from @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social’s THE WEB BENEATH THE WAVES podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/e...

Good wishes to @shainin.bsky.social, @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social, @nesrinemalik.bsky.social, Negar Azimi and all involved in @equatormag.bsky.social, which launches with its first batch of articles today: www.equator.org

Pankaj Mishra and Nesrine Malik, the founding editors of new magazine Equator discuss its ambition to depict a new world that Western narratives have neglected. When - 31 Oct Where - London Cost - From £20 disabilityarts.online/events/panka...

Just how delicate is the Internet? After the AWS outage, @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social joins @lizzieohreally.bsky.social on the What Next: TBD podcast to explain how fragile the Internet's infrastructure really is, and how much that should worry us. 🎧 slate.com/podcasts/wha...

What happens when a whole country finds itself internet-less? Superb long-read by @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social, who visited Tonga after a volcanic eruption cut the cable that linked the archipelago to the rest of the world. www.theguardian.com/news/2025/se...

1/5 🌋 In 2022, a volcanic eruption tore apart Tonga’s only internet cables. Overnight, a nation was plunged into silence. What happens when the fragile threads that bind us snap? 🔗 www.theguardian.com/news/2025/se... @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social @theguardian.com

3. "Extremely Offline: What Happened When a Pacific Island Was Cut Off From The Internet" @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social "What a remarkable engineering feat. How unsettling that this is what holds us together." www.theguardian.com/news/2025/se...

From his excellent new book on undersea cables globalreports.columbia.edu/books/the-we...

“With the fracture of a single cable, Tonga was plunged into the kind of isolation it hadn’t seen in more than a century.” Today‘s long read by @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/news/2025/se...

Had a few conversations recently that make me think, for the first time in ages, there are some exciting things happening in media. This is one of the highlights: Equator, a new magazine set up by Nesrine Malik, Pankaj Mishra, Jonathan Shainin and others. Sign up for info here: www.equator.org

Our new magazine, Equator, is officially out in the world — and here @equatormag.bsky.social Sign up for preview emails, donate, and get tickets to our launch event in London: equator.org

Our new magazine @equatormag.bsky.social is officially out in the world. Sign up for preview emails, donate, and get tickets to our launch event: www.equator.org.

@alexis32.bsky.social Hi Alexis -- I'm a journalist based in London, looking to write to you about your YouTube channel. Would you be able to email me (samanth [at] gmail) or DM me here with your email ID? I'd love to explain more in full over email. Thank you so much!

Out in the US and UK in less than six months! Pre-order here, pretty please — it makes a world of a difference to sales. And please RT / spread the word! www.amazon.co.uk/Web-Beneath-...

Out in the US and UK in less than six months! Pre-order here, pretty please — it makes a world of a difference to sales. And please RT / spread the word! www.amazon.co.uk/Web-Beneath-...

Tricksters duping tricksters. Cons within cons. A gonzo documentary filmmaker runs into an unknowable subject in my piece, reported from Denmark, in @theguardian.com today: www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

A jaw-dropping story of corruption, duplicity and murky journalistic ethics. Today's Guardian long read by @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

@danielapinheiro.bsky.social Hi Daniela! I'm a journalist in London, and hoping to reach out to you about a project. Is there a convenient email to reach you? I am at samanth [at] gmail [dot] com.

Always a blessed relief to hold the manuscript of a NEW BOOK in your hand. This one, on the fragile undersea cables that carry our data, took 2 years of research…

Always a blessed relief to hold the manuscript of a NEW BOOK in your hand. This one, on the fragile undersea cables that carry our data, took 2 years of research…

This idiot Trump blamed a tiny, endangered fish 🐟 for the #LAfires 🔥 As a #freshwater #biodiversity guy, I took this personally www.tbsnews.net/features/pan... 🧪🌎

A new teaser of a recent piece. Highlights: vomiting into a glass, terrorism at Wimbledon, the Poisson model to calculate how many soldiers were killed by horse kicks, Malawi’s football league, the conundrum of whom a sports data point — a goal, say — belongs to samanth.substack.com/p/multi-stor...

‘The point is that patriarchy puts women in a sceptical scenario, making the distinction between the men you can and can’t trust difficult to draw.’ Sophie Smith on the Pelicot trial:

My very last piece of 2024: reported from Eindhoven, where I watched football-playing robots and learned about how they could make our much-vaunted, automated, AI-centric future a little greener. www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solu...

Errr…

A 2024 wrap: elephants, Indian voters, AI writers, beautiful batting, cyber-forensics, ceiling fans, a cement company’s shady deal with ISIS, Alfonso Cuaron, sports gambling, kaplan-maplan, undersea cables. samanth.substack.com/p/multi-stor...

“Question 7,” Richard Flanagan

the online sentiment toward insurance execs is pretty much what Dylan expressed toward arms makers and dealers in his “Masters of War”

I didn't know what a renga was before this beautiful, meditative dialogue between two poets arrived in my inbox. And now I can't wait to discover more, though these poems are set in Paris in grief time, so yes, there's the weight of that too.

I read this beautiful @hunterdukes.bsky.social piece once a couple of weeks ago and went back to it today because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What’s in a name? Well: everything. www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/69/du...

I will never forget how, when he came to Cairo at my invitation, he chose not to give his prepared talk since he felt it insufficiently honored the plight of Egyptians caught in the counter-revolution. His extempore words are seared in my heart. Great to see this profile in a western magazine.

A chemical analysis of RFK Jr.'s bottled water line, which he shuttered in 2013, found that it contained more fluoride -- the mineral he now wants to eliminate -- than is typically found in tap water. From this week's @newyorker.com: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Digging around in the PG Wodehouse archive at Dulwich College, I found this cricket scoresheet: one short of a perfect ten!

The story behind the story: open.substack.com/pub/samanth/...

Great story, especially if you love languages

Is it a good time to press my Substack onto the fine people of BlueSky? I hope so. Please sign up. It’s all free! samanth.substack.com

Midday visual break: A bunch of amusing octopuses sumo wrestling (bottom centre), breakdancing (?), playing intruments. Edo period woodblock print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), who was one of the three principal 'Ukiyo-e' artists that includes Hiroshige. (British Museum Collections)

In this week's New Yorker: My profile of Ganesh Devy, who assembled the first Indian survey of languages in a century, and who now lives in Dharwad as a protest against forces who will kill writers and impose religions and languages [1] www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

In this week's New Yorker: My profile of Ganesh Devy, who assembled the first Indian survey of languages in a century, and who now lives in Dharwad as a protest against forces who will kill writers and impose religions and languages [1] www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

For @WIRED, I had an hour to talk to Alfonso Cuaron about movies, his pandemic, and his show "Disclaimer," on @AppleTV. We went for 90 mins, all so I could bring you the scoop of scoops: what Alejandro Inarritu stole from Cuaron. All the tea below 👇 wired.com/story/big-inte…

The FT has a robust new entry in the age-old travelogue genre best described as “Once you get past the rubbish and the chaos, what a charming place this poor country is.”

A few weeks ago, I published a @gdnlongread about Lafarge's alliance with (and payments to) ISIS, all so it could keep selling cement in wartorn Syria. Here's a peep backstage. samanth.substack.com/p/multi-storie…

Terrific opportunity for historians and to work @Archives_NCBS and -- here are the magic words -- with funding!

"Benefit from standard legroom

For the @gdnlongread, I wrote about the French cement giant Lafarge, which decided, back in 2013-14, that it was a good idea to pay ISIS millions of dollars so that it could keep making and selling cement in Syria. You read that right. A short 🧵: theguardian.com/world/2024/sep…