It’s been the opposite of what you might call a banner year for legacy media. Public faith in our papers of record continues to erode. The monoculture’s in shambles, and you can’t swing an inbox open without hitting a dozen Substacks. This isn’t an obvious time to kick off a new arts and culture magazine. Yet the fine folks at Equator have done just that.
Billed as a new magazine of politics, culture, and art, Equator has already drawn some thrilling international voices to the masthead. Early contributions merge political theory and literary criticism. In a recent essay, public intellectual Naomi Klein considered surrealism as an anti-fascist practice. And Hisham Matar looked at a history of cruel images, from Titian paintings to photo evidence out of Abu Ghraib and Gaza City.
I spoke with founding editor Gavin Jacobson by email for a little context about this promising new international hub. The following has been condensed for clarity.
I’m struck by the description on your homepage re: the editorial board coming together in a moment of moral despair, and would love to learn a little more about what that process looked like. What did the shape of your earliest meetings look like, and at what point did making a magazine begin to feel like the right shape for an intervention?
The core of the current team came together in late 2023, initially through informal conversations among friends and colleagues who shared certain frustrations about the legacy publications we were all working in or writing for, but also a shared sense that this historic moment called for new ways of thinking about and reporting the world. Our earliest meetings were exploratory as we were simply trying to articulate what we were all feeling as well as what we thought would make for a distinctive voice and intellectual experience.
Fairly quickly, we realized that critique alone wasn’t enough—we needed to have a more open and productive message about how this moment, despite prophecies of darkness and calamity, of a new “midnight in the century,” as Victor Serge once put it, represented something of a dawn rather than a twilight. We felt like the epoch ahead is ripe with the promise of fresh illuminations, of new horizons of human action and imagination. This is why we say that “the end of the West is not the end of the world.”
How did you first organize as an international editorial body, and what steps will the publication take to keep the masthead and readership global?
The international composition of our team came about quite organically. We spoke to friends and colleagues who felt like we did and were willing to build something new. All of our meetings and conversations happen across time zones, which means we’re always obliged to think globally. Keeping the masthead and readership global is central to everything we do.
Editorially, this means actively commissioning work from writers and thinkers outside the usual Anglo-American networks, translating important work that hasn’t reached English-language audiences, and being intentional about which stories and perspectives we prioritize. It means our editors are constantly in conversation with intellectual communities in multiple regions, bringing those conversations into Equator.
Do you see your magazine in conversation with any other publications or cultural projects, contemporary or past? Did you look to any particular templates when designing Equator?
We’re conscious of lineage. Publications like Granta in its early years, n+1 when it launched, The Baffler, and international journals like New Left Review showed that it’s possible to create intellectually serious publications outside traditional institutional structures. But we’re also conscious of what doesn’t work anymore.
The old model of the “little magazine” that speaks primarily to other writers and academics feels insufficient right now. We need to reach a broader readership—people who care deeply about ideas and culture but who aren’t necessarily in the academy or the literary world. So we’re trying to learn from publications and institutions (such as the CCCB in Barcelona or the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research) that have built engaged, intelligent audiences across different platforms and formats.
We need to meet people where their attention is at, which isn’t always the long form essay, which is why we’ll be investing a lot of time and creative energy into thinking about video and offline events, such as reading clubs and in-person conversations.
And finally, what challenges is Equator facing down in the short to long term, in terms of funding or finding its audience?
We’re facing all the challenges any new independent publication faces. Right now we’re supported by a combination of founding grants from philanthropic sources and our membership program, which launched alongside the magazine. Ideally, we’d like to build toward a self-sustaining model, one supported by its members. The membership model is crucial for us—not just financially, but because it builds a community of invested readers who see themselves as stakeholders in this project. But we’re realistic that membership revenue can take time to build.
We know there’s tremendous hunger for what we’re doing because we hear it constantly from readers, writers, and thinkers who feel ill-served by existing publications. But reaching those readers in a fragmented media landscape, and convincing them to invest in yet another publication when they’re already overwhelmed, requires building trust and demonstrating consistent quality. That takes time.
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For incisive and globally-minded poetry, argument, fiction, and essays from writers like Benjamin Moser, Aria Aber, and Soyonbo Borjgin—check out Equator.
