The Demand for Silence 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

Inside the BBC’s Gaza Fiasco Reportage

Daniel Trilling

How the world’s most trusted media organisation fell apart

Surrealism Against Fascism Essay

Naomi Klein

A century ago, artists who survived the trenches captured humanity’s capacity for destruction. What can they teach us about confronting the far-right in a new age of genocide?

Statemania Essay

Rahmane Idrissa

When the American Dream came to Africa

Caste and Chappals Translation

Chandu Maheriya

What leather footwear reveals about discrimination against Dalits

Pity and Fear Essay

Hisham Matar

What images of cruelty reveal about the limits of power

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.

The Xi Jinping School of Journalism Memoir

Soyonbo Borjgin

The education and reeducation of a Mongolian reporter

Farewell to Podemos Memoir

Lilith Verstrynge

My decision to quit politics at 31

We Have Talked Enough About Ourselves Essay

Benjamin Moser

How the marriage of American exceptionalism and liberal Zionism led to genocide

Clippings 1/3 

“As our global order decays, jettisoning its professed universal values for something more nakedly violent, nationalist and anti-democratic, the BBC has the unenviable task of narrating the collapse, while also being subject to it.”Daniel Trilling

“Where the Surrealists made irreverent and untameable art, the fascists sought a world of perfect symmetry and parallel lines. While the Surrealists embraced the frailties and mysteries of the human body, the fascists waged war on ‘deviance’.”Naomi Klein

“The entire logic of The Death of Actaeon, which marks the pinnacle of Titian’s late style, the accumulation of a lifelong practice and study, runs counter to Aristotle’s sense of what a tragedy must do.”Hisham Matar

Two Years of Genocide Dispatch

Sondos Sabra

In Gaza City, people are slowly returning, pitching their tents over the ashes of homes

Boyhood Memoir

Yuri Slezkine

What I learnt from the Soviet Adventure Library

Murder House Reportage

Na Zhong

The Silicon Valley killing that exposed the new fault lines in Chinese society

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When Your Father Dies of AIDS Fiction

Oksana Vasyakina

An excerpt from the novel Steppe

Two Poems Poetry

Michael Hofmann

29.10.2025

The Coast Photo Essay

Sohrab Hura

All photographs from Sohrab Hura’s series The Coast (2013–2019).

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