I’m writing to share a big announcement that I’ve been sitting on for a while now and am finally able to share with you all: I’M WRITING A BOOK!!!

The title is The Sun Never Sets: Making Sense of Modern Empire, and it’s intended to be a sort of ‘crash course,’ geared toward a general left audience, in what it means to understand imperialism in systemic terms and why the contemporary left—particularly those of us located in the imperial core—need to center anti-imperialism and international solidarity as a core pillar of our politics. The idea is to draw on a rich tradition of anti-imperialist Marxist thought to push back against two of the most common misconceptions about imperialism that one often encounters in political discourse today—first, that empire is primarily a bygone historical injustice whose ‘legacies’ we need to ‘reckon with’ in the present; and second, that imperialism is a practice that individual states engage in rather than a world system of political economy and capitalist exploitation on a global scale.

The book, which I’ve been commissioned to write by the wonderful folks at Haymarket Books, follows along many of the themes that I’ve been exploring in both my writing, my podcast, and my organizing work for a while now. In particular, it builds upon the arguments that I started to lay out in the talk that I gave on “Reviving the Bandung Spirit” at the Socialism 2025 conference last July in Chicago. I previously published the text of that talk as an essay here; be sure to check it out if you’d like to get a preview of the sort of questions I’ll be wrestling with in this book!

Anyone who knows me knows that writing a book—and specifically, writing a book about imperialism—has been a dream of mine for as long as I’ve been pursuing writing in anything remotely resembling a serious or semi-professional way. I truly don’t have the words to express how grateful I am for this opportunity, and how excited I am to take on what I know will be an enormous but extremely rewarding project. It goes without saying that I am so grateful to all of you, my readers, for all of the support and encouragement that you’ve shown me over the years—I truly would not be here without you all.

Some light housekeeping—I hope you’ll continue to stick with me and bear with me as I navigate this project over the coming year, and in particular as I juggle writing a book on top of graduate school, my podcast, political organizing, and the million other things that are going on at any given moment (especially as my hometown continues to resist a fascist federal occupation that is now stretching into its third consecutive month). You may have noticed that my frequency of publishing on Substack has gone down since I started my PhD program, and I have a feeling that trend will only continue now that I have this major project to demand my energy and attention as a writer. In other words, if you were hoping for more regular essays from me on here, I’m afraid you may be in for a bit of disappointment—but I promise it will all be worth it in the end when this book is done!

I’ll keep this message relatively brief and leave things off here—after all, I’ve got a book to write!

Much love and solidarity,

Pranay

I hope that this summer has been treating you well so far (and that, wherever you’re located, it’s been less miserably swampy than it’s been here in D.C.)! It’s been a while since I sent one of these updates, but I’m writing today to share some exciting personal news:

At the end of this month, I’ll be moving back to my hometown of Minneapolis to start a PhD program in political science at the University of Minnesota!

I’m planning to specialize in political theory and international relations, with a specific research focus on how the administration of counterinsurgency practices in the British Empire shaped the construction of discourses around ‘terrorism’ and ‘counterterrorism’ that we still operate with today. This is a topic that builds on the research I did for my master’s dissertation in colonial and postcolonial India, and I’m sure that it will end up influencing at least some of the essays that I publish here over the next few years!

If you know me at all, you know that I thrive best in an academic environment, and I’ve been feeling restless to be back in school ever since I completed my master’s degree at LSE nearly two years ago. Of course, D.C. is a city that will always be extremely close to my heart, and saying goodbye to it is definitely bittersweet (stay tuned for a possible essay about this sometime in the coming weeks!), but I truly cannot wait to return to Minnesota to start this next chapter!

Of course, as anyone who knows anything about academia also knows, being a PhD student is not exactly the most lucrative thing a person can do in their 20s—especially in our current moment, with the academy as a whole facing sustained attacks and the humanities and social sciences being hit especially hard. Even in a more affordable city like Minneapolis, and even with the relatively generous contract that the UMN Graduate Labor Union won for PhD workers earlier this year, I’m still looking at about a 50% reduction in my income now that I’m leaving my nonprofit job to become a graduate student.

That’s why I’m appealing to you, my loyal and beloved readers, to please consider becoming a paid subscriber of culture shock today!

Your support will enable me not only to continue writing the essays that I share on this blog, but also to continue producing my biweekly podcast, Return to Bandung—another labor of love that, as much as I enjoy making, does require a truly immense amount of time, energy, and effort. By becoming a paid subscriber, you’ll help ensure that I can continue producing the high-quality, insightful commentary, analysis, and political education that you know and love, even as I juggle the many responsibilities and stresses that come with being back in grad school.

Upgrade to a paid subscription

But what’s in it for you? As I wrote about when I first launched paid subscriptions back in September, I really don’t like the idea of paywalling the words that I pour so much of myself into. I have decided to paywall a handful of my much older essays, mostly from the no more mangoes days, but for the most part, my work is and will remain open to everyone. Of course, the decision to keep the vast majority of my work publicly accessible means that there is less of an incentive for readers to become paid subscribers, which I totally understand—especially given that, in today’s Substack economy, there are quite literally thousands of publications jockeying for your $5 a month.

I’ve been thinking hard about what perks I can offer for paid subscribers while still maintaining the accessibility of my writing, and I was honestly at a loss until I attended a recent concert here in D.C., where the opening act had a sign-up sheet at the merch table for people to write down their mailing addresses to receive a physical newsletter from him in the mail. I found this to be thoroughly charming, and after receiving the first newsletter in my mailbox this week, the idea occurred to me that this would be the perfect perk to offer my paid subscribers—after all, who doesn’t love getting mail!

That’s why I’m very excited to announce that starting in August, all paid subscribers of culture shock will receive an ACTUAL PHYSICAL NEWSLETTER in the mail each month, lovingly written by yours truly on my beloved typewriter!

When you sign up as a paid subscriber, the confirmation email you receive will include a link to a Google Form where you can provide your mailing information. (If you’re already a paying subscriber, stay tuned for an email with the Google Form later this week.) The newsletter will come out each month, and first installment will go out in August once I am settled into my new place!

Thank you all SO MUCH for your support of this project and my work—you truly have no idea how much it means to me! I can’t wait to start this exciting new chapter in the Bold North, and bring you all along for the ride with me.

More soon!

Much love and solidarity,

Pranay

Is it just me, or has 2024 flown by for anyone else? I’m not entirely sure whether this is just due to things going on in my immediate life, or whether it’s reflective of some broader trend, but I feel like we were just ringing in the new year—and now, somehow, it’s already December. Perhaps this is just what growing up feels like, in which case I suppose every year from here on out is going to feel even shorter and like even more of a blur than the last. I sincerely hope not—I can’t say I’m particularly fond of it—but if any of my readers who have the wisdom of age and life experience would like to weigh in, please do so!

Anyway, on to the point of this post—when I launched paid subscriptions a few months back, one of the perks I had promised paid subscribers was a revival of the dispatch, the monthly newsletter that I had briefly started while I was in London. Thanks to a number of converging factors in my personal/non-writing life, that never really materialized (sorry guys!), but going forward I would like to make good on that promise—starting today!

This inaugural installment of the dispatch will take the form of a fall 2024 reading roundup, featuring short reviews of some of my favorite books from this fall, and going into the new year I hope to continue bringing back the dispatch in a more meaningful way! This section is, of course, for paid subscribers only, so if you’d like to keep reading (and hopefully get some great book recommendations!) please do consider becoming a paid subscriber—there are both monthly and annual subscriptions, and it would be such a lovely gift for me this holiday season <3

OK—without any further ado, here is the official culture shock fall 2024 reading roundup:

Read more

Dear reader,

It’s been just over two months since the first installment of the dispatch, and in that time, the first signs of spring’s arrival that I’d described in that newsletter have blossomed (both literally and figuratively) into the trappings of a proper springtime—Bloomsbury’s garden squares are bursting with flowers of all colors, the grass is a shade of green that I haven’t seen in some time, and by now nearly every tree I walk past is covered, if not with small leaves already, then with pale green buds that threaten to burst into full foliage at any moment.

All that said, I’ve unfortunately found that springtime in London isn’t exactly what I’m used to. In Washington, DC, spring’s arrival feels more like a warm-up (again, literally and figuratively) for summer—the days are considerably sunnier and warmer, so much so that it suddenly becomes possible to spend hours on end lounging in parks and on cafe patios. (Unsurprisingly, the therapeutic qualities of this transformation are not inconsiderable—as my partner Emma remarked the other day over WhatsApp, there’s nothing quite so life-affirming as springtime in DC.)

Here in London, however, spring feels more like the last gasps of winter—most days, the skies remain steel-hued and overcast, clinging to that same miserable color that they’ve had for the last several months, and while spending time outdoors is certainly not out of the question, it’s always only a matter of time (save for the few deceptively warm days that we have gotten) before one starts to feel that maddeningly inevitable chill seeping in through the fabric of their clothes. While it’s certainly nice to have some small reminders that summer is drawing nearer with each day that passes, I’ve been disappointed to discover that springtime in London lacks that indescribable feeling of joy and anticipation that I would always get around this time of year when I lived in DC.

I suppose my springtime blues, which have been considerably more acute these last few days, probably have something to do with the fact that Emma, who still lives in DC and who recently came to visit me (our first time seeing each other since January), finally headed back to the states this past Monday. Since then, I’ve been trying to readjust as best I can to my normal lifestyle and routine, but it’s certainly very odd to have my flat go from being filled with another person’s presence in one moment to feeling strangely empty in the next—it’s really quite amazing what missing someone can do to make even a tiny London flat feel positively cavernous.

Emma stayed with me for just over two weeks, and we had a truly wonderful time together—she’d studied abroad here for a semester in her undergrad and had already seen all the major tourist sights, so it was really nice to be able to take things a bit easier and pretend for a few precious weeks that we simply live together in this city. I know they say that time flies when you’re having fun, but somewhat paradoxically, lately I’ve found the opposite to be true—while those two weeks with Emma certainly felt far shorter than I would have liked them to be, there was a certain sense in which time seemed to slow down when we were together, as if the elongation of each moment was precisely what allowed me to cherish it. By contrast, I’ve found since moving to London that when I am alone, the relative mundanity of my daily routine causes the days to run into one another in a largely indistinguishable blur, so that before I know it a week has passed, and then two, and then a month, and so on.

The last few weeks have been quite productive for me in terms of reading—a pleasant surprise, given that I spent much of that time with Emma and have otherwise been somewhat buried under a mountain of schoolwork. I recently got around to reading Zadie Smith’s White Teeth after having meant to do so for well over a year now, and all I can say is: wow. This is a book that deserves every ounce of hype it has received, and then some—if not the best book I’ve read all year, then certainly one of the top three. The style, though certainly not magical realism by any stretch of the imagination, reminds me a bit of Arundhati Roy or Salman Rushie—something about the intricate sentence structure and wry sense of humor that, despite the fairly serious subject matter, somehow manages to render the book decidedly funny. After White Teeth I sped decently quickly through Manual of Painting and Calligraphy by José Saramago, which I bought from the oldest bookstore in the world during the four days that Emma and I spent together in Lisbon, and since then I’ve been reading Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. I’m really enjoying it so far—the only other Rushdie I’ve gotten to is The Moor’s Last Sigh, which I read last year and also enjoyed. There are certainly easier reads out there, but the prose is beautiful and I’m a big fan of the colorful cast of characters (a hallmark of Rushdie’s stories, like in any good magical realism book).

As I mentioned before, I’ve been quite busy, especially since Emma left, with schoolwork—our spring term ended at the end of March, which means that summative papers are due in the coming weeks. That said, as busy as it’s kept me, I’m actually quite enjoying writing these papers, in particular the essay I'm working on for my Internationalism and Solidarity class. I’m writing about the history of political Blackness in Britain, and the lessons that this framework may hold for anti-racist organizing in the present day. It’s a complex topic and not without controversy, but I find it absolutely fascinating and have had a really enjoyable time researching it so far. Depending on how this paper ends up going, it’s very possible that I may end up turning it in some form into an essay for no more mangoes, so stay tuned!

I’ll wrap this up by saying that I recently discovered the wonderful podcast If Books Could Kill, hosted by Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri, and I’ve been absolutely hooked. The basic premise of the show is that each episode, the hosts read and discuss a different horrible “airport book” (think Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, etc.) and absolutely rip it to shreds. It’s hilarious and extremely informative, and I very much recommend it.

That’s all for now, I think. Stay tuned for another essay dropping in a few weeks!

Until next time,

Pranay

Dear reader,

This term is absolutely flying by—there are just three weeks left, and then I’m officially done with classes for this master’s program. (I’ll still be in London for a few months longer, though—after my final exams and papers are wrapped up by early June, I’ll be spending the rest of the summer working on my dissertation.)

I felt a similar way about last term, which also went by far quicker than I had expected it to, but something about this term feels different—I think this is due in part to the fact that unlike last term, we’ve lost so many days of teaching due to strikes over the last several weeks. I support the strikes wholeheartedly and unconditionally, of course, but I’d be lying if I said that the lost instruction hasn’t done a number on my perception of time.

A few weeks ago, during LSE’s reading week in late February, I took the train up to North Wales to spend six days at Gladstone’s Library—the UK’s only residential library—for a little self-organized writing retreat. I’ve been working on a novel for the past year or so, and while I still have a ways to go, the end is drawing ever nearer (at least in terms of the first draft), so I thought it would be good to get away for a few days to work on it.

The retreat was incredible, and far more productive than I could have ever imagined. Over the course of 6 days (I’d originally planned to spend just 5 days there, but I ended up extending it), I wrote over 13,700 words—13,760, to be precise—and I had so many lightbulb moments and breakthroughs about various aspects of the story that I’d been struggling with for a while. I’m not sure what it was exactly, but something about the library just gave it this uniquely magical vibe that made it almost impossible to not write furiously. No doubt due in large part to my hectic schedule (I was working full-time when I started the novel, and now I’m in grad school), I usually only manage to draft a few hundred words at a time, typically in the morning before I leave for campus. In other words, working on my novel for hours at a stretch, several days in a row was certainly out of my comfort zone, but I was genuinely amazed to find out just how much I’m capable of writing under the right conditions.

Given that I was able to write more than twice as many words in the span of a single hour as I normally do, I’d hoped that this experience would unleash something in me that would allow me to continue working at this rate even after the end of my retreat, but sadly that has proved not to be the case—since returning to the Real World™, I’ve slipped back into my previous, considerably less prolific pace. Unfortunately, it seems that I’m just not destined to be the kind of writer who can churn out thousands of words at a stretch.

With regard to that last point, now that I’ve been working on this book for about a year (that’s about how long I’ve been seriously drafting it, although the earliest version of the idea for it came to me during the early days of COVID), it’s been really interesting to observe the countless lessons this process of novel-writing has taught me about myself as a writer—my preferred working conditions, the way ideas come to me, my approach to outlining, etc. I’m dead set on seriously pursuing this project and seeing it through to the end (even if it feels at times like that’s never going to actually happen), but regardless, it’s nice to know that even if nothing ends up coming of the endeavor, it will have been worth it just for the incredibly valuable (and largely unexpected) lessons it has taught me about myself and my creative process.

This is the first time I’ve mentioned my novel on here—it feels weirdly vulnerable to share something like this with such a large audience, but it also feels motivating in a way. Perhaps I’ll provide more updates in future installments of The Dispatch!

what i’m reading

I’ve been drowning in course readings since returning from my retreat, so my leisure reading has unfortunately been crawling along at a slower pace than normal, but I’m still doing my best (with mixed results) to use my free time to read instead of mindlessly scrolling through Twitter or TikTok. I recently finished reading Personal Writings by Albert Camus, which I’d bought several weeks ago at the London Review Bookshop because I thought that personal essays would make for a lighter Camus read than his other, more explicitly philosophical work. To be entirely honest, I was a bit disappointed—I found the prose truly stunning, but much of the text’s actual substance went over my head and often felt like a series of beautiful but impossible-to-follow sentences. I think this book will warrant a reread at some point in the future, perhaps with a pen close at hand for annotations.

After finishing Camus, I read Hua Hsu’s 2022 memoir Stay True, which I adored—I read it in just a few days, 60 or 70 pages at a time. The book was given to me as a Christmas present by my dear friend Jess, and I didn’t know anything about it going in, but I was absolutely blown away by Hsu’s writing. Since finishing Stay True a few days ago, I’ve been reading Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin. I’ve read Baldwin before (The Fire Next Time when I was in high school; Giovanni’s Room and Another Country last summer) and I really, really love his writing. This book has been on my list for a while, and I’m finally getting around to it.

This isn’t so much “what I’m reading” as “what I’m writing,” but I thought I’d take this opportunity to engage in a little shameless self-promo—a few days after my last installment of The Dispatch, I published this piece in The Drift, about the Koh-i-noor diamond and the reduction of anticolonialism from a radical political ethos to a hollow, defanged aesthetic. Do check it out if you feel so inclined—this is also my first time ever appearing in print (!!!), so if you’d like to read a hard copy of the magazine, you should be able to find one at your local independent bookstore!

I’ll wrap things up here—I’ve got a few essays in the pipeline that I’m really excited about, so keep an eye out for those in the coming month or so!

Until next time,

Pranay

Dear reader,

It’s that time of year when spring isn’t quite here yet, but the first signs are just beginning to appear that a change of seasons is waiting around the corner—the days are getting ever-so-slightly longer, the yellow heads of daffodils in Russell Square are starting to poke up through the earth, and as I was walking along Marchmont Street the other day, I passed a tree that was already covered in small pink blossoms.

It’s hard to believe that it’s already been more than four months since I moved to London. It still doesn’t always feel entirely real, but every so often I will find myself struck yet again by the sudden awareness that this really is my life; that I do, in fact, live in an entirely new country, an ocean away from the existence to which I had grown so accustomed. These flashes of realization tend to strike me when I’m least expecting them, typically when I’m in the midst of some mundane activity—riding the Tube, for example, or standing in the produce aisle at M&S. They are familiar to me by now, but that familiarity does little to reduce the intensity of the feeling that these moments still evoke—a strange, thrilling combination of exhilaration, apprehension, and disbelief. I wouldn’t be surprised if that feeling doesn’t ever really go away.

Now that I’ve been here for several months, it’s been interesting to measure my actual experience of living abroad against what I expected—particularly in terms of the more negative aspects. I’d like to think that I had a pretty clear-eyed understanding going in, and resisted the urge to over-romanticize or create unrealistic expectations for myself. At the same time, it’s become clear that I certainly underestimated—perhaps naïvely—the loneliness that I would feel in a new country. I think that because I had already been living alone for the past year and a half, and in all honesty really enjoyed that experience, I fell into a false sense of complacency and simply figured that living alone in London would be no different.

Of course, that belief proved to be entirely unfounded—there is, in fact, a world of difference between living alone in a city you’ve known like the back of your hand for years, with the majority of your friends and loved ones just a short walk or bus ride away, and living alone in a much larger, much less familiar place, where the people you love most are on the other side of an ocean and even the friends you do manage to make are scattered across the sprawling city. To the extent that I did predict any feelings of loneliness, I think some part of me thought that I would simply adapt and become more comfortable being alone with my thoughts, when in reality I’ve taken to filling the silences, of which there are many, with music and podcasts.

None of this is to say that I’m unhappy here. I’ve met and befriended truly incredible people from all over the world, been exposed through my studies to ideas that have challenged my thinking in ways that I never thought possible, and experienced the manifold joys that come with spending part of one’s early twenties in a city that feels, in many ways, like the center of the universe. The idea to apply to graduate school in London first came to me in April 2020, when the realization was just starting to set in that the COVID pandemic was going to seriously disrupt my plans—including that of studying abroad during my undergrad—for the next year or two. Getting my master’s abroad seemed to be the perfect solution—not only would I get the experience of moving to another country, like my parents and grandparents did, but I’d also get another degree out of the bargain. Fast forward two years and ten months later, and here I am.

what i’m reading

The other day, while scrolling on Twitter, I came across this beautiful essay by Ken Chen in n+1, titled “Corky Lee and the Work of Seeing.” The piece is a tribute to the Chinese American photographer and activist Corky Lee, who passed away from COVID in January 2021, and whose photographs captured the lives and political struggles of Asian American communities. I’ll admit that I wasn’t familiar with Lee before reading this essay, but I was nevertheless struck by the intimate and extremely compelling picture Chen paints of Lee’s life and work, which he interweaves with poignant reflections on capitalism, structural violence, and the #StopAsianHate movement. The whole essay is beautifully written, but I was particularly enchanted by the penultimate paragraph:

So much of our vocabulary of representation comes premised on visuality (“I feel seen”), but I never saw myself in Lee’s photographs and that is why his work felt so crucial. “Identity” suggests something private and individual—and when looking at who Lee photographed, I was struck by how no one alive could literally see themselves in every portrait. They showcase the difference at the heart of “Asian America.” Today, people often remark that Asian Americans don’t have anything in common, that nothing really unites us. What they are really wondering is why they don’t feel the magic of their own self-essentialism. The Sikh flag-bearer, Miss Saigon protester, and Chinese seamstress do not resemble each other, but Lee honored them into a portraiture that implied some larger commonality, a coalition that need not be constricted by nationalism. We live in a moment of Asian American fear, but looking at Lee’s photos, I thought about the tremendous courage it would take to proffer yourself to a country that pictures you as its adversary. I considered the bravery required to rebut a cop, push back against your boss or transplant yourself from your home into some dismal American sweatshop. Unlike identifying with someone just like you, solidarity suggests “you” constitutes something suppler than the cell of yourself.

The idea expressed here, of building immigrant identity through “a coalition that need not be constricted by nationalism,” is one that I identify with very strongly. It’s an ethos that I try as best I can to express in my writing, through pieces such as my essay “reimagined communities” from last June.

In terms of books, I recently finished Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pnin, which is the second Nabokov I’ve read this year (the first was Despair). My takeaway from both of these books is that Nabokov’s prose is, in my opinion, every bit as gorgeous as it is said to be, but that the story was a bit underwhelming for my taste—in both cases, it took me about half of the book to actually become at all invested in what the words on the page were saying, rather than just the beauty of the words themselves. Perhaps I’ll feel differently when I eventually get around to reading Lolita, which I still have yet to do.

After finishing Pnin, I started reading Annie Ernaux’s The Years, which I am absolutely loving. I finished it this morning, and all I can say is: holy shit. I honestly don’t have the words to adequately express just how stunned I am by both the lyricism of Ernaux’s prose and her ability to take tiny fragments of life and culture and delicately weave them together to form a cohesive, compelling picture of the world around her over the span of several decades. Some aspects of the style and voice, particularly in the early parts of the book, remind me a bit of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (interestingly, in 2020 Ferrante named The Years among her 40 favorite books by female authors). Despite loving literature, I’ve never followed the major literary prizes too closely, and this is the first time I’ve chosen a book specifically because its author won the most recent Nobel. I have not been disappointed.

what i’m listening to

I know I’m terribly late to the game on this, but I recently listened to the entirety of Once Upon a Time at Bennington College, a really great podcast about the college days of literary stars Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jonathan Lethem, who all attended Vermont’s Bennington College together in the 1980s. It’s based on this 2019 Esquire feature by Lili Anolik, who also hosted the podcast. To be honest, I don’t particularly care about Bret Easton Ellis or Jonathan Lethem, but Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is one of my favorite novels of all time, and it was so fascinating to learn about the extent to which the setting and characters of that book was copied almost directly from her experience at Bennington.

In terms of music, I’ve honestly been in a bit of a rut as of late—partly because I’ve really been enjoying podcasts (no doubt due in large part to the aforementioned loneliness; having a podcast on is like having friends talking in the background), and partly because when I do listen to music, I tend to fall back on old favorites rather than branching out and discovering something new. Some highlights from my “winter/spring ‘23” playlist include:

• Valerie (Live at BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge) – Amy Winehouse

• Oogum Boogum Song – Brenton Wood

• Die/Cry – Indigo De Souza

• Tezeta (Nostalgia) – Mulatu Astatke1

Please sound off in the comments with any and all recommendations—books, music, podcasts, films, whatever! I’m always on the hunt for new Content™.

This post is getting a bit long, so I’ll wrap things up now. Hopefully it was at least somewhat interesting—like I said in my “introducing the dispatch” post, I don’t really have a set vision for what this series will look like, so I’m absolutely open to suggestions and feedback!

Until next time,

Pranay

Since I posted my most recent essay last Monday, no more mangoes has gone from 287 subscribers to 335 and counting. First of all, I just want to say—holy shit. To all of my new subscribers, welcome, and to those of you who’ve already been subscribed, welcome back. And to all of you, new and old alike—thank you all so, so much for your readership and your support.

I know that my tone in this message is a bit more conversational than my usual posts here. That’s because today, I’m excited to introduce a new series in the no more mangoes cinematic universe, called the dispatch. Here, I’ll be posting updates on what I’m reading, listening to, etc., as well as shorter musings and reflections. I’m not 100% sure what this will end up looking like, but that’s the general idea.

The idea for the dispatch arose out of the fact that since moving to London for grad school in August, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to produce longform essays as regularly as I would like—especially because no more mangoes is just one of several writing projects that I’ve been juggling. I want to be realistic about my capacity and avoid overextending myself and burning out, but I also want to continue engaging with my subscribers as frequently as I can. To that end, I thought it would be nice to have a platform that’s more akin to a traditional newsletter/blog, with shorter and more informal posts. Enter the dispatch.

Going forward, I’ll definitely still be writing the sort of longer essays that I’ve been sharing thus far, but hopefully with less self-imposed pressure to churn them out on a particular schedule. Meanwhile, I hope to send out new installments of the dispatch with as much regularity as possible, all of which will be available in one place under the “dispatch” tab on the no more mangoes homepage.

At the moment, the dispatch is 100% free along with the rest of the content on this blog, but as the no more mangoes community continues to grow and I continue to pursue writing as a more serious endeavor, at some point in the future I do hope to transition to a premium subscription model so that I can keep sustaining this work into the future. When does that happen, this newsletter will probably become one of the perks reserved for premium subscribers, but for now it remains completely free to all.

I don’t have any concrete plans to shift to a paid model anytime in the immediate future, but if you really love no more mangoes and you think that you would be interested in becoming a premium subscriber when that option does open up, I would really love if you could pledge a future subscription by clicking the “pledge your support” button at the bottom of this email (or, if you’re reading this on a desktop browser, at the top right of the screen)! If you do make a pledge, you won’t be charged until I enable premium subscriptions at some point in the future. But even if you don’t want to pledge a future subscription, I hope you can share this blog with anyone in your life who might appreciate it! So many of my subscribers have come from my essays being shared on social media and through word of mouth, and it makes me really happy to wathc this community continue to grow.

Thank you all again from the bottom of my heart for all of your kind words and support since I launched no more mangoes last May. As I wrote about in my essay “finding my way back home” back in July, the last year or so for me has been defined in large part by my rekindling my relationship with writing, and this Substack has been a huge part of that. I am so excited to keep writing and keep sharing my words with you all in the future, and I hope you’ll stay a part of this community!

Stay tuned for the first official installment of the dispatch, hopefully coming out sometime next week :)

Best,

Pranay