Our essential reads for the week
A child’s eye view on military madness and national rivalry
What does harm reduction look like when nobody has the language for it?
A chance online friendship has now resulted in an annual pilgrimage and a rich archive that captures Pakistani musical memory and tradition
How the geopolitical order transformed the spy novel into a genre shaped by national anxieties, and the shifting boundaries of loyalty, secrecy, and belonging
The PTI’s response to governor rule in KP has been strangely muted. What explains this supposed acquiescence?
The consequence of statistical prioritization in sports has meant the death of what really made sports fun: vibes
Rupture Anthem, Hera Naguib’s debut collection of poems, is at once a resolute, beautiful roll-call of the things that b...
With its almost fantastical sleuths, wily criminals and neverending plot twists, the pulpy Urdu and Hindi detective nove...
This year’s Women’s Prize winner fills an important gap in contemporary histories of Afghanistan, but leaves the reader...
The daily horrors that animate the interior lives of women find themselves externalised as the uncanny
The political imaginaries of Iran’s most lauded literary voices in the West
Dalrymple reframes ‘Partition’ as the proper noun in the South Asian imaginary into a verb
At the center of Mina Malik’s 𝘙𝘰𝘨𝘶𝘦 𝘗𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘦𝘵 is a woman who, cleansed by grief and anger, can finally see clearly
Leftist intellectuals and the creator of Ainak Wala Jin have more in common than we may assume
By Saba Imtiaz
By Umair Javed
By Maryam Jillani
By Haroon Sethi
By Manahil Tahira
By Nudrat Kamal
Stories, Cultures, and Landscapes
Reflecting on the Zeitgeist
What does harm reduction look like when nobody has the language for it?
Oct 27, 2026
Pakistan’s foremost digest writer’s formula for success: a spoonful of morality makes the patriarchy go down
Oct 16, 2026
What does harm reduction look like when nobody has the language for it?
Oct 27, 2026
Pakistan’s foremost digest writer’s formula for success: a spoonful of morality makes the patriarchy go down
Oct 16, 2026
A child’s eye view on military madness and national rivalry
A meditation on the visceral experience of inhabiting a body in pain
The city as the main character in one writer’s quest for discovering his own voice
One woman’s neurotic descent for the aesthetic
SPORTS
The consequence of statistical prioritization in sports has meant the death of what really made sports fun: vibes
SPORTS
Shoaib Akhtar, an era-defining bowler whose run-ups became the stuff of cricketing legend for how they commanded the emo...
When an algorithm selects a target, who carries the responsibility for the death that follows? Constitutional lawyer Maryam Ali Abbasi surveys the current state of AI-powered systems in global warfare and the development of legal frameworks.
At the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, the European Union and its leading member states were no longer willing to quietly acquiesce to Washington’s demands under President Donald Trump.
Trump’s interest in Greenland is not new. During his first term, his suggestion that the United States should ‘buy’ Greenland was widely mocked, dismissed as a diplomatic oddity. Ahmad Jamal Wattoo looks at the strategic logic beneath the spectacle.
