DSJ: Does Equator take a stance on terms like “Global South,” “the West,” etc.? Is there utility in using these terms?

GJ: Our editorial declaration explicitly rejects the idea of a monolithic “Global South.” That term, while politically useful in certain contexts, flattens vast differences and creates a false unity. Nigeria and Indonesia and Bolivia have radically different histories, political systems, and relationships to colonial power. Treating them as a unified bloc replicates the totalizing logic we’re trying to escape. Similarly, “the West” is a constantly shifting category. These terms are more ideological than geographical because they describe relationships to power, not fixed locations. That said, we use these terms strategically, with awareness of their limitations. When we talk about “post-American” or “non-Western” perspectives, we’re pointing to the end of a particular hegemonic formation where a handful of Atlantic powers determined the terms of reference for everyone else.

What we’re really interested in is what my colleague Pankaj Mishra described in a recent conversation he had with the musician Ali Sethi: “a certain experience of modernity that united societies and cultures as far apart as Mexico and India.” These overlapping experiences, these shared conditions of being subjected to imperial power, of negotiating between tradition and transformation—these create affinities that aren’t captured by simple geographical binaries.

The name “Equator” itself is meant to gesture beyond these categories because it’s a line that divides nothing while connecting everything. We’re less interested in reinforcing North/South or West/East binaries than in revealing entangled histories and the multiple, shifting ways people actually live and think across the planet. This is why our unofficial motto is “The end of the West is not the end of the world.”

DSJ: What are the broad intellectual influences behind Equator?

GJ: Those involved in Equator come from different traditions, but certain figures and texts recur.

In a recent newsletter, we each named formative influences. For Pankaj, it was Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet who wrote about India with “cosmopolitan authority” and showed him that there were ways of seeing modernity beyond the Western frame. For me, it was writers like Adonis (Sufism and Surrealism), Mathias Énard (Compass), David Scott (Refashioning Futures)—books that refuse singular visions of modernity and reveal unexpected affinities between cultures that official narratives keep separate.

I’ve also been returning to Carl E. Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Schorske’s account of turn-of-the-century Vienna, when new political forces were emerging, when artists and thinkers were groping toward forms adequate to a reality that exceeded existing categories, feels uncannily relevant to our own moment. That period speaks to us because it, too, faced what we might call the dissolution of the liberal view of man. Robert Musil captured this when he wrote that “waking life trembled over an incommensurable ocean of unconscious drives.” The confident 19th-century liberal subject was revealed as far more fragile and contradictory than anyone had imagined. In its place emerged new political tendencies: the mass movements, the psychoanalytic subject, the modernist fragmentation of consciousness. We’re living through something analogous now, which is the end of the liberal universalism that dominated the postwar era, and the emergence of forms and subjectivities that don’t fit the categories we inherited. Understanding this requires what fin-de-siècle Vienna attempted, which was a wide range of ideas and practices capable of comprehending human feeling and political possibility in a post-liberal, post-American age. That’s what we’re trying to build with Equator: a whole cultural and intellectual apparatus for making sense of transformation.

We’re also deeply interested in oral history as a form and the way it can capture multiple voices and allow people to narrate their own experiences without the mediating authority of a traditional journalist parachuting in from outside. Svetlana Alexievich has been a major influence here. When she won the Nobel Prize in 2015, the Swedish Academy credited her with inventing a new literary genre: “a history of emotions—a history of the soul.” That’s precisely what we’re after: capturing how transformation feels and what it does to people’s inner lives.

Art and visual culture are also core to Equator. We’ve been extraordinarily fortunate to collaborate with Yto Barrada, the Moroccan-French artist whose work explores migration and memory. Yto designed our logo and has provided photography for the site. Her sensibility—rooted in specific places but globally resonant—embodies what we’re trying to do. We also look to photographers like Nan Goldin, whose work documenting queer life and activism created an entirely new visual language for bearing witness to marginalized communities.

Film is another crucial influence. We admire directors like Claire Denis and Mati Diop, whose films have a sensuality and complexity that refuses easy political readings. Their work is rooted in specific places but always reaches toward something universal. Among intellectuals working today, we’re deeply engaged with figures like Lea Ypi, whose memoir Free recounts growing up in communist Albania and then experiencing the chaos of post-communist “freedom.” And Adom Getachew, who wrote for our launch issue and whose book Worldmaking After Empire is about how postcolonial states tried to create a new international order in the mid-20th century. What we appreciate about their work is that they take non-Western experiences seriously as sites of theoretical innovation.

I also have to mention Dua Lipa and her newsletter Service95, which might seem like an odd reference, but I think what she’s done is fascinating. She’s used her enormous platform to create a genuinely global cultural conversation—commissioning writers from everywhere, covering art, politics, literature, music without the usual hierarchies that treat Western culture as serious and everything else as exotic. Service95 reaches young people who might never pick up a traditional literary magazine, and it introduces them to writers and ideas they wouldn’t otherwise encounter. That’s a model we’re thinking about: How do you reach beyond the usual suspects, how do you make serious culture feel accessible rather than intimidating?

DSJ: Is Equator offering an alternative global history of our times?

GJ: Yes, though perhaps not in the conventional sense of “correcting the record” or “filling in the gaps.” We’re doing that too by centering voices and stories that get marginalized, but the deeper project is showing that what counts as “our times” looks radically different depending on where you stand.

Take the end of the Cold War. From Washington, 1989 meant American victory, the vindication of liberal capitalism, the “end of History.” From Moscow, it meant humiliation and impoverishment. From Beijing, it meant a near-miss – the Tiananmen massacre showed how Chinese leaders drew very different lessons about the necessity of maintaining party control while opening markets.

Or consider 9/11. For Americans, it was the rupture that defined the 21st century’s opening decades. For much of the Muslim world, the rupture came earlier, with the first Gulf War, or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, or the Iranian Revolution. September 11 was a symptom, not a cause. What we’re trying to do is show how these different temporalities and geographies intersect, how the same event has different meanings depending on perspective. Not to say “everyone’s view is equally valid”—some views are more aligned with reality than others—but to reveal that “global history” has always been multiple histories forced into uneasy coexistence and entanglements.

DSJ: Cosmopolitanism gets a bad rap these days as it is typically associated with out of touch Davos elites. What is the kind of cosmopolitanism that Equator embraces?

GJ: You’re right to say that cosmopolitanism has been degraded and is associated with Davos elites, or has provided intellectual cover for cultural imperialism. The cosmopolitanism we’re after is more rooted. It starts from particular places, traditions, languages, but refuses to be imprisoned by them. It’s what Simone Weil described: You need local attachments and cultural traditions not in opposition to global connection but as the foundation of it. We don’t want “to become lost in a disembodied universalism,” as Aimé Césaire put it, but embrace “a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.”

In contemporary politics, I think Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign embodied many of these virtues and ideals. It has been described as practicing an “empathetic pluralism”—building coalitions across communities not by erasing differences but by honoring them, by showing how struggles for housing justice in Queens connect to anti-imperialist politics globally, by refusing the false choice between local organizing and international solidarity. That empathetic pluralism—rooted, connected, refusing lazy universalisms but also refusing parochialism—is what we would like to uphold at Equator.

The cosmopolitanism we’re building assumes that genuine connection requires specificity. We’re not interested in flattening differences into some bland “global citizenship.” We want readers in Lagos to encounter a Chinese writer’s view of Central Asia and think, “I recognize something here, even though the specifics are foreign.” We want that shock of recognition Marshall Berman described: “recognition of themselves and each other, that will bring their lives together.”

This also means rejecting the false choice between cosmopolitanism and solidarity. We’re after a cosmopolitanism grounded in solidarity—recognizing that our lives are entangled, that injustice anywhere diminishes us everywhere, and that we have obligations to people we’ll never meet. Gaza makes this concrete. The genocide is happening to a specific people by specific perpetrators. But it reveals something about the global order and about whose lives matter, which laws apply to whom. A cosmopolitanism that can’t recognize this, that treats Gaza as just another regrettable conflict, is worthless.

The world we’ve inherited is broken in fundamental ways. But other worlds are possible. Other ways of being human exist. Equator is about making those possibilities visible, creating community around them, and refusing to settle for the spiritual poverty that Western modernity offers as our only fate.

DSJ: The Epstein scandal has revealed the utter corruption of wide swaths of the US and British political and intellectual class. How has Equator covered the scandal, or what has it ultimately revealed to you?

GJ: We published a great essay by Melinda Cooper, an Australian political theorist, that offers the most sophisticated understanding of what the Epstein scandal reveals. Melinda’s argument is that Epstein is a specimen of a new political economy, one organised around what she calls the “household economy,” where the boundaries between business asset and personal possession, as well as debt and fealty, are collapsed. What she shows is that Epstein’s operation was essentially a system of permanent indebtedness. He made big promises around introducing people to each other and boosting careers, but the point was to keep everyone around him, both his victims and his beneficiaries, in a state of permanent obligation because that’s how he protected himself.

The piece also connects Epstein to a broader tendency on the Silicon Valley far right who share what Melinda calls the fantasy of the “primal father”: a patriarch who operates above the law because he considers himself the founder of something larger than mere society. For Equator, this is interesting because we see these figures as symptomatic of a grotesque vision of a social order which liberal fictions about contractual equality or institutional accountability have masked but which are now being slowly stripped away to reveal the sort of master-servant relations that have long been underneath. This is hardly shocking for much of the world because the gap between Western liberal self-presentation and actual conduct has always been visible to those on the receiving end of it. The Epstein scandal makes that gap impossible to conceal even for Western audiences.

DSJ: Equator has offered a running commentary on the US decision to launch a war against Iran. What are some of the major takeaways from it?

GJ: One major takeaway is that it’s more than infrastructure that’s being destroyed by the American-Israeli bombing. Naghmeh Sohrabi wrote something that I think will endure as one of the most important pieces we’ve published so far, which describes the extraordinary intellectual ferment that was happening inside Iran in the weeks between the January massacres and the start of the bombing. There were university students organizng reading groups on radical republicanism, livestreamed debates garnering half a million views, as well as some fearless journalism. A Tehran sociology student association posted one final message when the bombs began: “We hope for an end to these dark days and we hope that we can get together again.” It’s an incredible line. What Naghmeh showed is people working to imagine different political futures and envisage new horizons, which isn’t something that gets reported on much in the Western press when it covers Iran. And it’s this world of intellectuals, reading groups, online events and writing that’s also being obliterated alongside the military installations.