This magazine -- @equatormag.bsky.social -- is publishing some amazing work. Have a look. www.equator.org/articles/hav...

'Trump is zeker niet verzekerd van succes. Hij is impopulair, leidt een uitgeholde partij, staat bloot aan een grillige publieke opinie en is afhankelijk van coalities die net zo snel uiteenvallen als ze ontstaan.’ Nikhil Pal Singh @groene.nl @equatormag.bsky.social www.groene.nl/artikel/trum...

In 1960, 283 children died when a theater in northern Syria went up in flames. Kurdish poet Golan Haji recalls the disaster: “Even though it happened many years before I was born, consigned to police files marked ‘no perpetrator’, we all knew of the fire.” www.equator.org/articles/ash...

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)

I signed up for free for @equatormag.bsky.social when it launched but I have so consistently read & enjoyed the articles that show up in my inbox that I just started paying. Well-written and thoughtful and interesting pieces from around the world: www.equator.org

Wrote a little intro to this excerpt from @yilingliu95.bsky.social's new book, reflecting on Chinese hip-hop's strange decade and the tendency for "cultural freeze frames" in English writing on non-western contemporary culture.

An excerpt from Yi-Ling Liu ’s "The Wall Dancers”, about how the internet made — and then unmade — Chinese hip-hop: “Kafe once aspired to be like Kendrick Lamar, who was commercially popular but also spoke truth to power. That would no longer be possible.“

‘Van Caracas tot Minneapolis worden wettelijke bevoegdheden en institutionele macht ingezet voor één overkoepelend doel: mensen besturen als onderdanen, niet als burgers.’ Pal Singh @casperthomas.bsky.social @groene.nl @equatormag.bsky.social www.groene.nl/artikel/van-...

Brilliant piece

This piece from inside Iran @equatormag.bsky.social is fascinating and horrifying: www.equator.org/articles/the...

Good piece on Trump's admin It collapses "the foreign and the domestic in a single domain of impunity"; it "invokes emergency war powers at home, to arrest and remove unauthorised immigrants, and discretionary police powers abroad, to arrest foreign leaders (and seize foreign assets) under US law"

El novelista Salar Abdoh en @equatormag.bsky.social sobre las protestas masivas en Irán y la represión del régimen: www.equator.org/articles/the...

“I heard the bastards set fire to a fireman.” “Which bastards?” “I don’t know. I don’t know which bastards anymore.” If you read one thing about Iran this weekend let it be this www.equator.org/articles/the...

“We all knew that a bloodbath had taken place, though as yet we didn’t know its true magnitude and perhaps never will.” Salar Abdoh on what happened in Iran www.equator.org/articles/the...

"It was a reminder – perhaps a rather too facile reminder – that we were all in this together. But together in what exactly? I didn’t know." Salar Abdoh, an essential read in @equatormag.bsky.social www.equator.org/articles/the...

“In the next few days a pall fell over the country. The quiet was chilling. We all knew that a bloodbath had taken place, though we didn’t know its true magnitude and perhaps never will.” A report from inside Iran by the novelist Salar Abdoh: www.equator.org/articles/the...

This is an outstanding long read by one of the best writers around, never mind just on Pakistan cricket. I didn't expect Imran to be in jail for this long but it's kinda fitting he's rejected any deals so he'll stay in jail before that.

"Trump’s Homeland Empire is incapable of generating consensual order or lasting hegemony. This is what happens when actual, functioning empire enters its terminal, attritional phase: construction, growth & visions of progress are replaced by pyrotechnic convulsions." www.equator.org/articles/hom...

I interviewed Nikhil Pal Singh about his recent essay in @equatormag.bsky.social in which Nikhil talks about how the Trump administration has collapsed the distinction between foreign and domestic policy, creating a single zone where violence and impunity reign:

"There is no Pakistani — male, female, dead, alive, real, imagined — as famous as Imran Khan." @osmansamiuddin.bsky.social traces, for @equatormag.bsky.social, Khan's story from national cricket hero to prime minister and his current status as a forcefully vanished figure. bit.ly/4q5bbXg

From “A Society Exhausted by Repetition,” by an anonymous writer living in Tehran, published by @equatormag.bsky.social. Read here: www.equator.org/articles/teh...

Some poignant observations from Iran “But what endures is what happens after the streets empty: the recalibration of fear, the small private negotiations with conscience, the decision each morning about how visible one can afford to be.”

Stark läsrekommendatipn på denna redogörelse inifrån upprorets och repressionens Iran. Mörk grundton men skarpa och nödvändiga reflektioner. www.equator.org/articles/teh...

Take 13 minutes to watch this Nan Goldin documentary on Gaza www.equator.org/articles/nan...

Incredibly powerful, beautiful, and heartbreaking letter from a young man in Iran in the midst of his military service writing about the days following the protests, the "suspended agency" quieter than despair. www.equator.org/articles/teh...

Powerful letter from Tehran taking stock of the violence of the last weeks and the mood on the street: "When politics lacks depth, spectacle rushes in. When history is erased, myth rushes in. When education fails, fantasy becomes governance." www.equator.org/articles/teh...

"The capture and warehousing of humans is now at the centre of an institutional transformation of federal police power" - among many other insights here www.equator.org/articles/hom...

Imran Khan has gone from batting and bowling to serving as Prime Minister and being imprisoned. No Pakistani can match his fame. Yet for two years, as @osmansamiuddin.bsky.social reports, he has been erased from public life. www.equator.org/articles/the... www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzA9...

Nobody is better placed than @osmansamiuddin.bsky.social to write about Imran Khan: the cricket legend, polarizing politician, and now, Pakistan’s most famous prisoner . www.equator.org/articles/the...

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...

'The footage in this film is from friends who visited Palestine, the brave journalists on the ground...The film loops because what it is showing is constantly repeating. It remains unfinished because it is not over.' Nan Goldin www.equator.org/articles/nan...

“We have a tendency to keep asking whether a threshold of no return has finally been crossed. The answer is yes – but not because Trump is operating outside of historical precedents for US racism and imperialism, which are not hard to find.” www.equator.org/articles/hom...

Nothing to do with NYRB but a fascinating article (and we have some crickets fans on staff).

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...

Nikhil Pal Singh bids good-bye to all that: “Trump builds on long-term institutional arrangements while turning these against an equally fundamental premise of the postwar period, that Homo liberalis would thrive in the protected space of US imperium. That is over. ” www.equator.org/articles/hom...

"There is something self-aggrandising about most American cultural depictions of authoritarianism. The stories narrate life behind enemy lines – whether in the 1930s or in outer space – in a way that implicitly tells the viewer that the US is different. It really couldn’t happen here."

From the @equatormag.bsky.social mission statement and damn, was that ever proven 100% correct in short order.

Cool Aziz Rana project incoming 🛬🛬🛬🛬

Recommending these very insightful observations of the past year by Aziz Rana. www.equator.org/articles/day...

Follow that up with Aziz Rana's diary from the first year of Trump II, published by @equatormag.bsky.social.

We recently published two pieces about Trump’s Second Coming. Nikhil Pal Singh charted the contours of an emerging US “homeland empire”; and Aziz Rana looked back, in a personal register, on a year of resistance and complicity: www.equator.org/articles/hom... www.equator.org/articles/day...

Mostly reading today since dropping the kids off to do community service. Here’s a thing that I’m thinking about: www.equator.org/articles/hom...

"The Stephen Millers of the country are fighting a cultural war that they have already lost. But what continues to hang in the balance is the amount of destruction that they can inflict on the world nonetheless, and what type of country will be present on the other side."

New @equatormag.bsky.social: Aziz Rana’s political diary of 2025, a year of state violence and moral complicity in the United States: ”We are all participants in a political conversation whose rules make naming a depravity into a violation of etiquette.” www.equator.org/articles/day...

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...

“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.”

"familiar analytical frameworks which rely on the distinction between foreign and domestic realms, normality and legality, policing and war, cannot provide the ‘world picture’ we need to grasp what’s happening here." -- Nikhil Pal Singh www.equator.org/articles/hom...

Nikhil Pal Singh on Trump’s new Homeland Empire: “From Caracas to Minneapolis, legal authority and institutional power are being redirected toward an overriding end: governing populations as subjects rather than citizens.” equator.org/articles/hom...