A Magazine Born of Anger, Heartbreak, and Hope

On the drizzly night of October 31, Equator, a new global magazine, held its launch event on the south bank of the Thames. Outside, vampires, devils, and werewolves walked by—the early Halloween crew, totems of America’s cultural hegemony. Inside, the guests, shedding scarves and tote bags, were handed a foldout poster in striking yellow, printed with Equator’s manifesto, which begins: “The end of the West is not the end of the world.”

In many ways, the arrival of a new magazine is like the launch of a new medicine: it inherently involves a diagnosis of the disease blighting the existing slate of media offerings and proposes a cure. Equator’s diagnosis is that the “storied titles of the Anglophone West” have “met an increasingly globalised and interconnected world with boilerplate journalism, facile binaries and an invincible ignorance of other societies and cultures.” Its editorial manifesto argues that the highbrow titles of the Western establishment, for which its founders spent much of their careers writing, have betrayed their own lofty universalist values and are guilty of warping reality. The Equator team is referring, most recently, to coverage of the Israeli war on Gaza; but, longer-term, they contend that the end of the Cold War ushered in an American-centric perspective that infected the West’s publishing culture. Equator promises to be a post-American global magazine of politics, culture, and art that avoids a Western-centric gaze.