Our essential reads for the week
Some tasks are written for the sons of the house, such as getting dahi from the corner store, or killing the odd rat found scurrying around the house. What happens when the son in question tries to outsource the hit job?
How Pakistan's digital attention economy turned public performances of faith into celebrity comeback scripts
This year’s Women’s Prize winner fills an important gap in contemporary histories of Afghanistan, but leaves the reader hankering for a world capacious enough to hold Afghan voices telling their own stories
The delivery app has fundamentally altered how people eat
Our editors, contributors and staff share the books they’re looking forward to reading this summer.
The World Cup has turned into a bonanza of capitalist excess. What keeps us watching still?
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
When enshittification comes for your favourite bookstore
Witches continue to inspire literary imaginations, whether in the form of supernatural entities (with or without cauldro...
By Saba Imtiaz
By Umair Javed
By Maryam Jillani
By Haroon Sethi
By Manahil Tahira
Stories, Cultures, and Landscapes
Reflecting on the Zeitgeist
How Pakistan's digital attention economy turned public performances of faith into celebrity comeback scripts
Jul 28, 2026
A seventy-year old photo of Ava Gardner, darling of the Golden Age of Hollywood, standing on a railway platform with a crowd of South Asian men and women behind her, often does the rounds on social media accounts that look back at the ‘good old days’. The story behind the photo, though, is one of exploitation and racist filmmaking. Aqeel Ahmad takes a look at Bhowani Junction, the 1956 film that brought Hollywood stars to Lahore.
Jun 12, 2026
How Pakistan's digital attention economy turned public performances of faith into celebrity comeback scripts
Jul 28, 2026
A seventy-year old photo of Ava Gardner, darling of the Golden Age of Hollywood, standing on a railway platform with a crowd of South Asian men and women behind her, often does the rounds on social media accounts that look back at the ‘good old days’. The story behind the photo, though, is one of exploitation and racist filmmaking. Aqeel Ahmad takes a look at Bhowani Junction, the 1956 film that brought Hollywood stars to Lahore.
Jun 12, 2026
Some tasks are written for the sons of the house, such as getting dahi from the corner store, or killing the odd rat found scurrying around the house. What happens when the son in question tries to outsource the hit job?
What happens when it’s your parents’ dream home being realised (and their life savings spent) and you’re the default project manager?
Millennial women, especially those wanting to be mothers, were once promised they could have it all: a solid career, a perfect family and enough time to spare to work on their own selves. So why is it that millennial women, especially mothers, are constantly exhausted and burnt out?
Following the passing of her maternal grandmother, Dur e Aziz Amna reflects on grief, love and rituals of mourning in this heartfelt elegy.
SPORTS
Shoaib Akhtar, an era-defining bowler whose run-ups became the stuff of cricketing legend for how they commanded the emo...
SPORTS
Luka Modrić redefined the art of football in a way few players have.
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.
Debt-for-climate swaps are no longer boutique transactions, but are being pitched as a central tool to help countries break free from the vicious cycle of debt distress and climate vulnerability. Can the G77+China succeed in making them more than symbolic, clever deals on the margins?
