@equatormag.bsky.social
A magazine of politics, culture and art equator.org
Brilliant piece
02.02.2026 23:47 — 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
This piece from inside Iran @equatormag.bsky.social is fascinating and horrifying: www.equator.org/articles/the...
03.02.2026 11:23 — 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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...
31.01.2026 17:53 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
"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...
31.01.2026 17:50 — 👍 6 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 1This 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 has dispensed with the old legitimation strategies that were characterised by a dual commitment to rule-bound international order (with exceptions) and equal protection inside US national boundaries. Instead, he conflates immigrants, drugs and free trade as sources of weakness coming from outside, “poisoning the blood of our country”. At the same time, he inverts settled conceptions of external and internal: if we have Venezuela’s people (which we shouldn’t have), they have our oil (which they shouldn’t have). In turn, his administration 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. Trump’s real innovation has been to marry the archaic geopolitics of a settler empire to the modern legal frameworks devised by his liberal predecessors. What distinguishes his latest regime is its effort to reimagine and remake the borders of American state power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic in a single domain of impunity: call it ‘Homeland Empire’.
29.01.2026 07:33 — 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0
"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...
28.01.2026 09:47 — 👍 10 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0
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
What unsettles many inside Iran is not only the regime or the repression, but the spectacle unfolding beyond the borders. The behaviour of the opposition abroad, and of the Iranian diaspora more broadly, has taken on an almost manic quality. There’s a sense of disconnection so severe that it borders on hallucination: maximalist rhetoric untethered from lived reality, feverish certainty detached from consequence. From inside the country, this external discourse often feels less like solidarity and more like noise. Or worse, like projection. A politics of fantasy, conducted at a safe distance, treating those still here as symbols rather than living breathing bodies. For many of us, this is perhaps the most alienating realisation of all: that the loudest voices claiming to speak for Iran often seem unable – or unwilling – to listen to it.
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.”
24.01.2026 18:27 — 👍 3 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
Stark läsrekommendatipn på denna redogörelse inifrån upprorets och repressionens Iran. Mörk grundton men skarpa och nödvändiga reflektioner. www.equator.org/articles/teh...
25.01.2026 11:25 — 👍 14 🔁 7 💬 0 📌 0
Take 13 minutes to watch this Nan Goldin documentary on Gaza www.equator.org/articles/nan...
25.01.2026 14:00 — 👍 4 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
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...
27.01.2026 07:23 — 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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).
22.01.2026 14:43 — 👍 7 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0
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."
21.01.2026 10:24 — 👍 9 🔁 5 💬 0 📌 0
