How are the fascisms of today different from those of the past, and how can we collectively fight them? Equator's Pankaj Mishra talks to the award-winning writer Naomi Klein about how history repeats itself not precisely but in a morphed manner. The best image to visualise these cycles is not a circle but a spiral, pulling us downwards.

The totalitarianism we see around us, Naomi argues, is different from that of the mid-20th century. For one, the technologies are different, and big American tech companies are deeply complicit in their government's abuses of power. The abusers themselves are of a different order. "Never before have we seen an elite that is not only kleptocratic...but also spiritually vacuous and culturally empty," Pankaj says. The world is worse too, Klein says, because of its headlong rush towards momentous collapse. "Our predecessors did not win their revolutionary battles against capitalism, and capitalism has become much, much worse," says Naomi.

Pankaj and Naomi also discuss her Equator essay Surrealism against Fascism, about how a radical artistic movement that emerged a century ago defied the rising fascism of the time. Naomi unpacks what surrealism stood for, how it challenged oppressive systems, and why its spirit could still prove immensely useful.

Equator's Samanth Subramanian and the journalist Osman Samiuddin dive into one of world sport's most charged rivalries - India versus Pakistan in cricket - and explore the "geopolitical hot mess" that is cricket in South Asia today.

Osman, a senior editor at ESPNCricinfo and the author of The Unquiet Ones, a history of cricket in Pakistan, recently wrote The Hidden Imran for Equator, about the Pakistani government's attempt to erase the country's most famous man from public view. But even beyond the imprisonment and effacement of Imran Khan, cricket in the subcontinent has long been shaped by political tension, conflict and fragile diplomacy.

Osman and Samanth discuss how cricket matches have doubled as proxy battlegrounds, how players carry the weight of national identity, and how the line between sport and statecraft has all but disappeared. The India-Pakistan rivalry, in particular, escalated around the recent World Cup, to the point that it appears as if cricket and politics in these nations can never be separated. Finally, Osman narrates the story of one of cricket's most iconic figures: Imran Khan, revered as Pakistan's World Cup-winning captain and then as politician and prime minister. Osman explains how Imran was jailed on corruption charges, many of them spurious, and how, as the government has tried to mask Imran and his legacy, the internet has played a crucial role in keeping his story alive.

Read The Hidden Imran on Equator.

In March, the Lebanese writer Lina Mounzer's family home in Beirut was bombed as part of the US-Israeli war on Iran and its neighbours. In an earlier time, Lina might have written about the destruction of her home and of Beirut for a New York magazine or newspaper. But as she tells Equator's Pankaj Mishra, she has stopped trying to explain the Middle East to Americans.

In this episode, Pankaj asks Lina about The Disaster Correspondent, her memoir-essay about writing for mainstream magazines and newspapers in the US. She recalls the problems of being pigeonholed as a writer and having her work minimised when she was classified by certain print outlets as a disaster correspondent. Pankaj and Lina discuss the complex balance of wanting to raise awareness of the extreme and destabilising events in her home country with the exhausting and predictable way her pieces would be stripped of nuance, severely limiting her identity as a writer.

Read The Disaster Correspondent on Equator. Also read Lina's short essay "My Home is Burning", about the bombing of her family home.