The Equator Podcast

This week, Equator's Nesrine Malik talks to the writer Carey Baraka about a piece that isn't out yet – but will be soon, in the first print issue of Equator next month. To receive it, make sure you're subscribed to our Insider or Patron tier of membership. For both Nesrine and Carey, the film The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980) is a significant childhood memory, even if they now view it very differently...

Equator's Nesrine Malik talks to the writer Benjamin Moser, whose personal story and political analysis reveal the entanglement between American Judaism and the project of American power. Drawing on his upbringing in a Jewish-American community, Benjamin reflects on the values he was raised with and how they intersected with a broader narrative of American exceptionalism. He narrates how the align...

The American university today, the writer Siddhartha Deb tells Equator 's Pankaj Mishra, is "a money-making, MBA- and lawyer-run hedge fund and real estate operation with a minor sideline in education." It's hard, he says, to tell the difference between "Columbia University and the New School on the one hand and X and Elon Musk on the other." Siddhartha, an Indian writer and novelist, came to acad...

Beneath the headlines and half-truths, what is the Chinese internet really like? Equator 's Samanth Subramanian speaks to Yi-Ling Liu, author of The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet , who reveals how life online in China actually operates – from the subtle, ever-shifting cycles of state oversight to the surprising spaces where creativity and subcultures th...

This week, Equato r'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. Two-thirds of Bangladesh is less than 15 feet above sea level, making it highly exposed to the rise of oceans, coastal flooding, tropical cyclones and the salinati...

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 best image to visualise these cycles is not a circle but a spiral, pulling us downwards. The totalitarianism we see around us, Naomi argues, is diffe...

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. Osman, a senior editor at ESPNCricinfo and the author of The Unquiet Ones , a history of cricket in Pakistan, recently wrote The Hidden Imran for Equator , about the...

In March, the Lebanese writer Lina Mounzer's family home in Beirut was bombed as part of the US-Israeli war on Iran and its neighbours. In an earlier time, Lina might have written about the destruction of her home and of Beirut for a New York magazine or newspaper. But as she tells  Equator 's Pankaj Mishra, she has stopped trying to explain the Middle East to Americans. In this episode, Pankaj as...

Equator ’s Nesrine Malik invites the historian Nikhil Pal Singh to unpack Homeland Empire , his essay for the magazine about how the US’ imperialist tendencies overseas are inextricably bound up with its violence at home. Nikhil argues that the current Trump administration is reworking both foreign and domestic policy to create a single domain of impunity that exceeds American borders.  Nesrine an...

Welcome to the Equator podcast, hosted by the writers Mohsin Hamid, Nesrine Malik and Pankaj Mishra. Equator is a digital and print magazine launched by a global group of writers after a consensus that our media landscape today has been tarnished by censorship, complicity and an inability to stand up for the values of justice, solidarity and compassion. No longer should the future of the world be...