Reportage
Rania Abouzeid
In a country redefining its national symbols, holidays, historic heroes and school curriculum, what it even means to be Syrian is an open question
Symposium
Responses to the American-Israeli war on Iran by Hamid Alizad, Ala’a Shehabi and Justin Salhani
Translation
Óscar Martínez
How the Salvadoran president sent his childhood friend to die in prison
Editorial
The Editors
The adoration of force has become the West’s ruling passion
Argument
Melinda Cooper
The billionaire patriarchs of the ascendant far-right want to rule an economy of masters and servants
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.
War on Iran
Symposium
Responses to the American-Israeli war on Iran
Argument
Andrew Arsan
Netanyahu’s war to remake the Middle East
Reportage
Salar Abdoh
The Islamic Republic of Iran, fearing for its own survival, presides over a bloodbath
The Post-American World
Essay
Rahmane Idrissa
When the American Dream came to Africa
Essay
Carlos Manuel Álvarez
A Cuban writer contemplates his new life in America, as Washington puts the island under siege once again
Essay
Nikhil Pal Singh
From Venezuela to Minnesota, Trump is creating a borderless American power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic into a single domain of impunity
Reportage
Reportage
Osman Samiuddin
The cricketing legend is Pakistan’s most famous man. Can the state make him vanish?
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
Reportage
Daniel Trilling
How the world’s most trusted media organisation fell apart
Clippings 1/3
Translation
Translation
José Henrique Bortoluci
Devastation and resistance in Brazil’s most dangerous region
Translation
Zheng Xiaoqiong
For many years, Zheng Xiaoqiong has collected the stories of the workers whose migration to Guangdong powered China’s manufacturing revolution
Translation
Natalia Ginzburg
In these two essays, newly translated for Equator, the Italian writer articulates a powerful moral vision of what it means to belong, and to whom we owe our compassion
Memoirs of Disillusion
Memoir
Siddhartha Deb
A memoir of disenchantment
Memoir
Soyonbo Borjgin
The education and reeducation of a Mongolian reporter
Memoir
Lilith Verstrynge
My decision to quit politics at 31
Art and Politics
Essay
David Velasco
The former editor of Artforum, fired in the wake of 7 October, reckons with two years of division, fear and silence
Essay
Hisham Matar
What images of cruelty reveal about the limits of power
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?
Argument
Argument
Ante Andabak
In the pages of a defunct satirical magazine, I learned to loathe the nationalism that raised me
Argument
Amitav Ghosh
How visions of catastrophe shape the ‘climate solutions’ imposed by aid agencies
Argument
Lina Mounzer
Why I stopped explaining the Middle East to Americans
Dispatches
Dispatch
Zahra Nader
When Pakistan bombed a rehabilitation facility, the victims were addicts detained by the Taliban
Dispatch
Ikhtisad Ahmed
Democracy has returned, but Bangladesh is more conservative than ever
Dispatch
Sondos Sabra
In Gaza City, people are slowly returning, pitching their tents over the ashes of homes
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