Broken Record
By Saba Imtiaz
In Interesting Times
By Umair Javed
Not a Recipe Column
By Maryam Jillani
Spotlight
Our essential reads for the week
Under colonial influence, the visual grammar of our past—soft silhouettes, draped fabrics, floral motifs, jewelry worn by men with ease—was stripped away. What remains is a masculine rigidity suspicious of any sartorial playfulness
Pakistan's myopic focus on raising tax-to-GDP ratios rests on flawed assumptions and distracts from real fiscal reforms.
At his mid-career retrospective at COMO museum, the artist’s work speaks to his personal and ancestral pain and imagines a way out of it
While most citizens of Karachi do not have access to cultural spaces, the well-heeled enjoy the vast expanses of country clubs, spaces reminiscent of the colonial era that function as a soft mechanism of exclusions, making it clear who is deemed to deserve leisure and comfort in the city.
Characterized by deregulation in markets, and trade and financial liberalization, the set of prescriptions commonly dubbed as ‘neoliberalism’ were macroeconomic orthodoxy for nearly four decades. Now it seems to be dying, transforming our world in the process.
Despite small pockets and different formats of revival, spaces for communities to gather and spend unstructured time together have been shrinking in Pakistani cities
Columns
PAKISTAN EXPLORED
Stories, Cultures, and Landscapes
Comment
Reflecting on the Zeitgeist
Country Clubs in Karachi: A Story of Polite Social Divide
While most citizens of Karachi do not have access to cultural spaces, the well-heeled enjoy the vast expanses of country clubs, spaces reminiscent of the colonial era that function as a soft mechanism of exclusions, making it clear who is deemed to deserve leisure and comfort in the city.
May 31, 2025
Legislative Onslaught: Laying Down our Fundamental Rights One Law at a Time
From the ban on X (formerly known as Twitter) to the arrests of activists over speech, PECA has allowed the state to exercise the most arbitrary set of controls over Pakistani citizens’ use of the vast playground of the internet
Apr 29, 2025
Country Clubs in Karachi: A Story of Polite Social Divide
While most citizens of Karachi do not have access to cultural spaces, the well-heeled enjoy the vast expanses of country clubs, spaces reminiscent of the colonial era that function as a soft mechanism of exclusions, making it clear who is deemed to deserve leisure and comfort in the city.
May 31, 2025
Legislative Onslaught: Laying Down our Fundamental Rights One Law at a Time
From the ban on X (formerly known as Twitter) to the arrests of activists over speech, PECA has allowed the state to exercise the most arbitrary set of controls over Pakistani citizens’ use of the vast playground of the internet
Apr 29, 2025
Books
In Conversation with Shazaf Fatima Haider
The UK-based Pakistani author’s most recent novel A Woman on a Suitcase revisits marriage and the end of it
A Flat Place by Noreen Masud
In our increasingly media-saturated landscape, in thrall of an attention economy that strategizes attracting eyeballs and maximizing clicks per second, A Flat Place reveres and reaffirms the power of quiet observation.
Banu Mushtaq’s Muslim Women
𝘏𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘓𝘢𝘮𝘱, the first ever book translated from Kannada shortlisted by the International Booker Prize, is a collection of short stories not bothered with defining and diagnosing the problems of the nation at large, but with the minutiae, with domestic squabbles, with very peculiar anxieties
Dreaming Of A Different World
Nobel Prize Winner Han Kang’s oeuvre may be be celebrated due to her status as a novelist “for the times”, but what separates her work from the rest is her filial devotion to other humans, especially women