1. Himal Southasian — a region writing itself
Himal Southasian has been published out of Kathmandu since 1987, which is older than most of the think-tanks currently explaining South Asia to Washington. It writes the subcontinent as a single cultural and ecological space — India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, the Maldives, Afghanistan, the diasporas — and refuses the lazy nation-state framing in which each country appears only when it bleeds. The reporting is slow, the essays long, the register unimpressed. If you have ever wanted to read a Himalayan river basin, a Rohingya camp, a Tamil cinema, and a Karachi book fair as parts of the same continent-shaped argument, this is the one magazine that still does it.
2. The Caravan — long-form from Delhi, written for adults
The Caravan is India’s serious long-form monthly — the one that still prints twenty-thousand-word reconstructions of a corporate takeover, a judicial capture, a caste massacre, a security apparatus. It is unfashionable in the way serious magazines are supposed to be unfashionable: close reporting, named sources, cold legal prose, and a willingness to spend three months on a story that will not trend. If you want to understand how the largest democracy on earth actually works under its own skin — its courts, its ministries, its monopolies, its police — this is the sentence-level evidence. Pick one investigation per weekend. Read it slowly. The frame it leaves behind outlasts a hundred wire takes.
3. Africa Is a Country — a continent not reduced to its crises
Africa Is a Country began as a joke at the expense of a certain kind of foreign correspondent and became one of the most consistently intelligent commons on the English-language internet. It gathers writers from Lagos, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Dakar, Addis, Khartoum, and the diasporas to argue about politics, culture, economy, and empire on their own terms. The register is academic but not stiff, the politics clearly to the left, the humour real. Read it as a corrective to the two usual Atlantic habits with Africa: coverage only when something explodes, or coverage only when something is extracted. There is a third option. This is where it lives.
Amsterdam: five reasons to leave the house this weekend
The magazines above are for the chair. What follows is for the shoes. Five rooms, scattered across the city from the IJ down to the Museumplein, each with at least one real item on Friday evening, Saturday, or Sunday.
Bimhuis, Piet Heinkade 3. Sanam, a six-piece from Beirut, plays three nights in a row — Friday 16, Saturday 17, Sunday 18 October, all 20:30. Krautrock, electronics, avant-jazz, Arabic poetry, a drone that doesn’t ask permission. It rhymes, perhaps too neatly, with the Africa Is a Country note above and the Himal note at the top: not every regional voice has to pass through London or Berlin first. Walk out along the IJ afterwards.
Splendor, Nieuwe Uilenburgerstraat 116. On Saturday 17 October at 20:00, pianist and composer River Adomeit presents Ontworteld #2: Nina Simone with soprano Claron McFadden — a serious tribute to the High Priestess of Soul, in a room small enough that the floorboards do half the work. On Sunday 18 October at 16:00, David Dramm’s Jazzy Jewels & Classical Pearls cd-release concert, Scarlatti and Ellington in the same breath.
Van Gogh Museum, Museumplein 6. Whistler. Dandy and Disrupter opens Saturday 17 October, the first full retrospective of a painter Van Gogh himself called one of the most highly regarded artists of his time — printmaker, agitator, 19th-century dandy with real teeth. Go early; it will not be quiet for long.
Posthoornkerk, Haarlemmerstraat 124-126. AmsterArt in the Church, Friday opening then Saturday 17 and Sunday 18 October, €5. Dutch and international artists exhibiting and selling work under Cuypers’ dark neo-Gothic vaults, with a weekend of workshops folded in — the Indian Roots & Reinvention session on acrylic and pastel chalk is worth an hour. Part of the ticket goes to restoring the Vondelkerk.
De Balie, Kleine-Gartmanplantsoen 10, on the Spui. On Friday 16 October at 20:00, Reporting on Russia with Pjotr Sauer and Shaun Walker — two of the better foreign correspondents on how to report a country where truth itself has become a political battleground. On Sunday 18 October at 15:00, as part of Black Achievement Month, four short films from West Africa, framed as escaping the neo-colonial frame — which rhymes, again deliberately, with the Africa Is a Country note above. An hour later, Sunday 18 October at 16:00, Operatie Interview puts the Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science, Rianne Letschert, in front of three anonymous interviewers. Two doors down, SPUI25 is dark this weekend — the university room does not programme on Saturday or Sunday — but opens the week on Monday 19 October with a 17:00 English panel on the societal challenges of post-quantum cryptography and a 20:00 Dutch programme on Robert Musil’s 1937 essay on stupidity, newly translated.
Three magazines from three capitals that are not London or New York. Five rooms across one city that still, on a good weekend, remembers what rooms are for. Read slowly, walk once, and let the week finish with its edges still visible.