Our essential reads for the week
While the rest of the world - both developing and developed - contends with a sharp decrease in reproductive rates and an economics of a shrinking world, Pakistan’s population boom continues to be framed as a policy problem to be solved
The internationally acclaimed translator shares how she came to be the translator the world knows today
Revisiting Pakistani cinema's greatest leading man
With its almost fantastical sleuths, wily criminals and neverending plot twists, the pulpy Urdu and Hindi detective novel is a now-established genre with a fascinating origin story and some surprising early admirers in the Urdu literary canon
Engineering academic and smart manufacturing specialist Dr Uzair Khaleeq uz Zaman opines that Pakistan’s industrial modernisation should begin with factory-level data, diagnostics, process visibility and digital retrofitting before large-scale investments in robotics and advanced automation.
LAAM Fashion Week 2026 was an event that brought back the nostalgia of fashion week heyday, but with a commercial infrastructure built into it that aimed to reach a global audience in real time. But can LAAM Fashion Week escape the gravitational pull of the same elite curatorial instinct that ultimately hollowed out its predecessors?
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
When enshittification comes for your favourite bookstore
By Saba Imtiaz
By Umair Javed
By Maryam Jillani
By Haroon Sethi
By Manahil Tahira
Stories, Cultures, and Landscapes
Reflecting on the Zeitgeist
The lack of options in Pakistani cinemas is bleak, and inhibits our ability to tell our own stories
Aug 20, 2026
Watching the horror film in a Pakistani cinema, amid moans & hoots, is a deeply unnerving experience
Aug 19, 2026
The lack of options in Pakistani cinemas is bleak, and inhibits our ability to tell our own stories
Aug 20, 2026
Watching the horror film in a Pakistani cinema, amid moans & hoots, is a deeply unnerving experience
Aug 19, 2026
What is Pakistan once the lights are off?
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?
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.
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.
