Samanth Subramanian

The real Scandi noir: how a film-maker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark’s self-image The Black Swan follows a repentant master criminal as she sets up corrupt clients in front of hidden cameras. But is she really reformed – and is the director up to his own tricks?

Engrossing read on the mind boggling Mads Brügger doc The Black Swan currently on iPlayer
@samanthsubramanian.bsky.social

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

lots of copies of The Web Beneath the Waves messily arranged on a table

Happy UK pub day to @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social's THE WEB BENEATH THE WAVES: The Fragile Cables that Connect our World
(of course still on sale now in the US!)

“A brief, lyrical survey of the internet’s underwater infrastructure.” —@economist.com

↪️Get your copy: uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

multi-storied #46: Old fish, new bottle Any young boy or girl setting out in the world must have questions about how to go about writing their first book.

On the occasion of the 15th-year reissue of my first book, I rambled a little on my Substack about its fortuitous backstory:

samanth.substack.com/p/multi-stor...

Extremely offline: what happened when a Pacific island was cut off from the internet Podcast Episode · The Audio Long Read · 07/11/2025 · 33m

“The safety of the cables in the ocean is a national security issue, a precondition for the economy, and a matter of literal life and death”

🎧ICYMI: The Guardian Long Read podcast features an excerpt from @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social’s THE WEB BENEATH THE WAVES
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/e...

EQUATOR Equator is a magazine of politics, culture and art.

Good wishes to @shainin.bsky.social, @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social, @nesrinemalik.bsky.social, Negar Azimi and all involved in @equatormag.bsky.social, which launches with its first batch of articles today:

www.equator.org

A man stands in front of a bookshelf filled with old books, wearing a dark blazer looking at the camera with a slight smile.

Pankaj Mishra and Nesrine Malik, the founding editors of new magazine Equator discuss its ambition to depict a new world that Western narratives have neglected.

When - 31 Oct
Where - London
Cost - From £20

disabilityarts.online/events/panka...

The AWS Outage is Only the Beginning How the AWS outage kept both engineers and people with very expensive mattresses up at night.

Just how delicate is the Internet?

After the AWS outage, @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social joins @lizzieohreally.bsky.social on the What Next: TBD podcast to explain how fragile the Internet's infrastructure really is, and how much that should worry us. 🎧
slate.com/podcasts/wha...

Extremely offline: what happened when a Pacific island was cut off from the internet | Samanth Subramanian A colossal volcanic eruption in January 2022 ripped apart the underwater cables that connect Tonga to the world – and exposed the fragility of 21st-century life

What happens when a whole country finds itself internet-less? Superb long-read by @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social, who visited Tonga after a volcanic eruption cut the cable that linked the archipelago to the rest of the world.
www.theguardian.com/news/2025/se...

Extremely offline: what happened when a Pacific island was cut off from the internet | Samanth Subramanian A colossal volcanic eruption in January 2022 ripped apart the underwater cables that connect Tonga to the world – and exposed the fragility of 21st-century life

1/5
🌋 In 2022, a volcanic eruption tore apart Tonga’s only internet cables. Overnight, a nation was plunged into silence.
What happens when the fragile threads that bind us snap?
🔗 www.theguardian.com/news/2025/se...

@samanthsubramanian.bsky.social
@theguardian.com

Extremely offline: what happened when a Pacific island was cut off from the internet | Samanth Subramanian A colossal volcanic eruption in January 2022 ripped apart the underwater cables that connect Tonga to the world – and exposed the fragility of 21st-century life

3. "Extremely Offline: What Happened When a Pacific Island Was Cut Off From The Internet" @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social

"What a remarkable engineering feat. How unsettling that this is what holds us together."

www.theguardian.com/news/2025/se...

The Web Beneath the Waves | Columbia Global Reports Samanth Subramanian charts the geopolitical tensions, corporate power grabs, environmental risks, and quiet heroics involved in maintaining the Internet.

From his excellent new book on undersea cables globalreports.columbia.edu/books/the-we...

Extremely offline: what happened when a Pacific island was cut off from the internet | Samanth Subramanian A colossal volcanic eruption in January 2022 ripped apart the underwater cables that connect Tonga to the world – and exposed the fragility of 21st-century life

“With the fracture of a single cable, Tonga was plunged into the kind of isolation it hadn’t seen in more than a century.”

Today‘s long read by @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/news/2025/se...

Had a few conversations recently that make me think, for the first time in ages, there are some exciting things happening in media. This is one of the highlights: Equator, a new magazine set up by Nesrine Malik, Pankaj Mishra, Jonathan Shainin and others. Sign up for info here: www.equator.org

A group of high-profile writers is launching a new magazine called Equator “to challenge the reigning assumption that global events should be narrated by and for the West,” according to a description shared with Semafor. Its founding team includes Pankaj Mishra, Mohsin Hamid, Nesrine Malik, Samanth Subramanian, and Suzy Hansen, with editing by Guardian long reads creator Jonathan Shainin. “In a post-American era, the task of a new magazine is to engage the rich variety of this historical moment on its own terms, without compulsively asking ‘What does it mean for the US?’” the nonprofit outlet, which is primarily based in London, will ask.

Our new magazine, Equator, is officially out in the world — and here @equatormag.bsky.social
Sign up for preview emails, donate, and get tickets to our launch event in London: equator.org

Our new magazine @equatormag.bsky.social is officially out in the world.

Sign up for preview emails, donate, and get tickets to our launch event: www.equator.org.

@alexis32.bsky.social Hi Alexis -- I'm a journalist based in London, looking to write to you about your YouTube channel. Would you be able to email me (samanth [at] gmail) or DM me here with your email ID? I'd love to explain more in full over email.

Thank you so much!

Out in the US and UK in less than six months! Pre-order here, pretty please — it makes a world of a difference to sales. And please RT / spread the word!

www.amazon.co.uk/Web-Beneath-...

Out in the US and UK in less than six months! Pre-order here, pretty please — it makes a world of a difference to sales. And please RT / spread the word!

www.amazon.co.uk/Web-Beneath-...

The real Scandi noir: how a filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark’s self-image The Black Swan follows a repentant master criminal as she sets up corrupt clients in front of hidden cameras. But is she really reformed – and is the director up to his own tricks?

Tricksters duping tricksters. Cons within cons. A gonzo documentary filmmaker runs into an unknowable subject in my piece, reported from Denmark, in
@theguardian.com today:

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

The real Scandi noir: how a filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark’s self-image The Black Swan follows a repentant master criminal as she sets up corrupt clients in front of hidden cameras. But is she really reformed – and is the director up to his own tricks?

A jaw-dropping story of corruption, duplicity and murky journalistic ethics. Today's Guardian long read by @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

@danielapinheiro.bsky.social Hi Daniela! I'm a journalist in London, and hoping to reach out to you about a project. Is there a convenient email to reach you? I am at samanth [at] gmail [dot] com.

Always a blessed relief to hold the manuscript of a NEW BOOK in your hand. This one, on the fragile undersea cables that carry our data, took 2 years of research…

…and Copenhagen, where I met Ture, who started in the cable business in the 1960s and is still on ships scouting ways to land cables in Greenland. (The older man is on the right, to be clear.)

…and Kuala Lumpur, where friendly cable executives showed me their landing stations and fed me chicken and rice by the Straits of Malacca’s shipping lanes…

…and Southampton, to examine a core of soil drilled out of the Pacific seabed…

…and various landing stations, their refrigerated rooms full of servers and batteries…

…and Taiwan’s outlying Matsu island, which suffered an outage of a cable deliberately sabotaged by a Chinese ship (or so the government thinks)…

…and Cornwall, at the beach where the world’s first subsea telegraphic cable landed in the mid 1800s…

…and Côte d’Ivoire to watch a ship land a branch of the world’s longest subsea cable...

…from places like Vava’u in Tonga (I know — the hardship) where an underwater volcano severed its only cable for close to 1.5 years…