1. The Dial — a monthly letter from everywhere else
The Dial is the small, stubborn magazine the Anglophone web still does not quite know what to do with. Each monthly issue gathers reporting, essays, and translated fiction from a particular country or theme — Argentina, Georgia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Taiwan — and makes the simple, radical gesture of letting writers from those places frame their own world. The point is not exoticism. The point is the sentence that only a Lagos novelist or a Tbilisi essayist can write about the thing they live inside. Keep it bookmarked. Open one piece per weekend. Over a year, your interior map of the planet quietly repairs itself.
2. Palladium — governance in the long form
Palladium is useful not because it is always right — it is not — but because it writes about state capacity, bureaucracy, elite formation, and civilisational drift in paragraphs rather than tweets. The register is unfashionable: slow, structural, willing to think about Indonesia, Serbia, Singapore, and the Vatican in the same breath. Read it as a corrective to the Atlantic op-ed habit, where the furniture of international politics is always the same three rooms. You will not agree with every essay. You will come out of a long piece with a frame you did not have.
3. Rest of World — technology seen from where it is actually used
Rest of World is the single most important corrective to Silicon Valley press I know. It reports the global south on its own technological terms — Lagos ride-hailing drivers, Jakarta content moderators, Delhi UPI merchants, São Paulo influencers, Shenzhen hardware ecosystems — and refuses the lazy framing in which a product exists first in San Francisco and only afterwards in “emerging markets”. Most of the humans who touch these systems live outside the English-language commentariat. This is where that fact becomes legible.
Amsterdam: two standing habits for the autumn
Nothing exotic this week. Two rooms I return to when the light turns short.
Oude Kerk, Oudekerksplein. The oldest building in the city, patient and strange, hosting a single contemporary art commission at a time. The way the installation negotiates the gravestones under your feet, the Gothic ribs above, and the plain northern light through unstained glass is a small continuing lesson in what sacred space does to contemporary work — and what contemporary work can occasionally give back to a room older than any argument we are currently having. Check the current commission on their site, go on a weekday afternoon if you can, and leave an hour.
Bimhuis, Piet Heinkade 3. The agenda runs clean on their site — look for the current weekend’s programme and pick one. The room is still, honestly, one of the better small jazz halls in Europe: a cantilevered black box over the IJ, excellent acoustics, no bad seat, and the walk back along the water in October is its own quiet reward.
Three magazines. Two rooms. One short weekend. Read slowly. Walk once. Let the week finish as it should, without being hurried into the next one.