Geometric Model by A. Harry Wheeler, Congruent, Symmetric Spherical Traingles (1943) | Smithsonian American History Museum / CC0
Suzy Hansen is an author and journalist whose work examines the blind spots of American liberalism and the failures of Western journalism. She is one of the founding editors of Equator, a new online publication created in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, to address censorship in liberal media coverage. Equator launched its first issue this fall. Hansen, who took leave in early this year to finish her second book (forthcoming in April 2026), sat down with Mariana Giacobbe Goldberg to discuss what it means to serve a global audience.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Marianna Giacobbe Goldberg: What is Equator and how did the project come together?
Suzy Hansen: The idea started with Pankaj Mishra, Nesrine Malik, and Mohsin Hamid. I think especially in the wake of Gaza and the failure of the media to accurately report that event, there was an exhaustion from this failure that has been ongoing for many decades. The way the West frames various conflicts they’re involved in doesn’t accurately reflect the way that the rest of the world sees them. The idea was for a publication that would see the world the way people outside of London and New York see it—to have a publication that sought to describe the world, the way that people in Lahore, Nairobi, and India perceive it. It’s a difficult thing to do, but part of the task is to gather voices from around the world and to find these common ideas, themes, and feelings, and make sense out of them.
Giacobbe Goldberg: It says on your homepage that the project doesn’t aim to narrate global events for Western audiences. But isn’t it important to bring different perspectives for the Western audiences too? This question relates to the concept of American innocence, coined by James Baldwin, that you bring about in your book Notes of a Foreign Country (2017).
Hansen: I think a lot of people in the Western world whose families came from other parts of the world are going to find a lot of interesting pieces and ideas in a magazine like this. For so long, writers who are trying to get published and get paid have had to write in a certain way. They’ve had to cater to an American audience, which understands a country like Turkey or Mexico according to specific frameworks.
Perhaps the byproduct of this is that a Western reader reads things differently, coming to see the world as if the United States is centered in every single event. A publication like Equator could provoke a shattering of this innocence. In that way, it’s a very exciting and hopeful endeavor.
Giacobbe Goldberg: Could you explain the concept of American innocence through your personal experience in your travels as a Middle East correspondent?
Hansen: I think American innocence is this reflex to ignore the tragedy of American actions abroad and to constantly redeem yourself. it is belief in this fundamental and endlessly renewable goodness that only Americans have, which (quite incredibly) wipes away or denies almost the entire history of the American empire. It is such a fundamental part of our psychology. I am almost not sure it is possible to change this because it has so much to do with our deep belief of who we are as Americans. It results in indifference and even cruelty—as we now see in its worst incarnation in Donald Trump. I would say that he is a continuum, not an aberration, and that you can trace a lot of his sentiments, actions, in his own reflexes.
You can trace it way back to the beginning of our history [in the United States]. In my book, I actually wrote about liberal institutions much more than conservative institutions. That’s really where you see the innocence because there is such a deep belief in American good intentions that it’s almost as if liberals are the last ones to see what they have done and to apprehend the terribleness of it. Gaza is the end result of a long period of American liberalism and innocence.
Giacobbe Goldberg: What do you think has changed since Vietnam? Seeing all those images of destruction and suffering published by the media at the time basically ended the war. Why does that not happen today with the images we receive through social media from Gaza?
Hansen: The reality is that the war in Vietnam did not stop, because it continued in Laos and Cambodia—it just became secret. People didn’t know how many bombs were being unleashed in these places or how many people were dying. I think the difference with Vietnam was that we did have a massive national movement against the war, the likes of which the United States has never seen again. Historians tend to attribute that purely to the fact that Americans were fighting and that the lies were so shocking. But if you look at the thinking behind Vietnam, it says a lot about American innocence, which is that we Americans did deeply believe that the deaths were worth it in order to bring this idea of democracy to country, which is lunacy.
I have the same question you have about the images about Gaza, but one thing I’ve often thought about is that American political and diplomatic language has a very numbing effect. It automatically downplays the horror of the images that you’re seeing. It’s very manipulative. It’s very well practiced. You could probably trace how sinister it has become back to the beginning of the War on Terror.
Before Afghanistan, the images weren’t coming as constantly as they are from Gaza. I think [the United States] got away with wiping away questions about those wars. I do think the images coming from Gaza on social media have had a worldwide impact that has been different. It’s just that it has gotten to the point where the United States and Israel do not care what the rest of the world thinks.
Giacobbe Goldberg: It’s telling that the culmination of this conflict is also at the culmination of American hegemony and the subsequent decline of all typically American liberalist institutions—like the UN, which precisely is where the partition of Palestine was decided in the 1940s. Are we seeing the natural disintegration of this fabric?
Hansen: Yes, one thing I have been questioning a lot this year is whether the so-called liberal international order ever existed …
Giacobbe Goldberg: If there’s no order, if there never was one, how can we find a common tongue to speak and understand each other?
Hansen: Part of the problem now is that people are in a panic about the state of the world, whether brought on by climate change, technology, or even migration. How do you patiently build something at the same time? But having a steady vision is what’s really needed.
A magazine like Equator doesn’t want to tell people how to do politics, it’s more interested in what emerge when people can finally say things they can’t say elsewhere. An insidious form of censorship in media has long been a problem.
Giacobbe Goldberg: Do you think you’ll share a reader with publications such as the New Yorker or the New York Times?
Hansen: Sure. Why not? But I think a lot of people abroad have stopped reading those magazines and publications.. What I’ve been hearing lately is that people just don’t trust the foreign coverage of these publications anymore. But personally: I am a journalist, I have written for those publications, and I have watched so many publications die. I want to see as much media as possible. What really scares me is when it all disappears or is destroyed by autocrats.
Giacobbe Goldberg: What is your red flag when you’re reading foreign coverage in Western outlets?
Hansen: You can tell when writers are using language that manipulates while pretending to be objective. You can really see this with Israel/Palestine and Gaza; it’s those articles that recite the facts with this objective tone of authority—its very insidious. Because the narrative they are offering is based on propaganda to some extent. I just know it as soon as I start reading it. I think, “Oh my God, those are the really destructive writers,” because the average person reading will have no idea what’s being done to them.
Lately, I turn off whenever I see any article that tells “the other side” referring to a government or army that is known to be authoritarian or perpetrating war crimes. If outlets present it as Palestinians say this, and Netanyahu says that—well, one has to acknowledge then, that Netanyahu is almost always lying. I know there’s a reason why you do that in journalism, but when I wrote magazine pieces about Erdoğan [Turkey’s president], in the years after he became fully authoritarian, I didn’t call his office to get his side of the story about what is obviously mass repression. What’s the point in confusing the reader by saying what their side is? They’re lying.
Giacobbe Goldberg: What would success look like for Equator?
Hansen: One thing that comes to mind is creating a global audience. I think reaching people around the world, reaching new audiences, finding people who have been looking for a community. I think the goal is to allow people to discover each other and put them in dialogue. It should be a relief to be able to exchange ideas in a place that understands and even celebrates their worldview.
