The inside story of The Long Wave, the Guardian’s newsletter on Black life and culture

Good morning. This week, the Guardian launched The Long Wave, a weekly newsletter exploring Black life and culture around the world.

Every Wednesday, readers can expect top-tier insights, analysis, interviews, profiles, culture picks and (if you can believe it) more, delivered straight to their inbox, written by Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik and edited by Jason Okundaye.

In the west, media coverage on the experiences of Black people, with a handful of exceptions, has focused on race and racism in fairly localised ways. Together, Nesrine and Jason however have created a unique space where Black audiences can see themselves and their stories reflected, and discover new connections across the diaspora, through intelligent and accessible analysis.

The Long Wave offers a weekly dose of information, encouraging readers to spend the next seven days exploring things across the world they “would have no way of knowing about” otherwise, says Nesrine. It’s about connection and dialogue and fun.

For today’s newsletter, I sat down with Nesrine to discuss how The Long Wave came about, and the very personal story at the centre of it. All that, right after the headlines.

Five big stories

In depth: ‘The diaspora has become a second home for me, a place I can reach out to’

The Long Wave emerged from the Guardian’s Legacies of Enslavement programme, a 10-year restorative justice initiative launched last March, and evolved through months of research and development. “The Guardian has been considering for some time an editorial format that would truly serve Black audiences worldwide,” says Nesrine.

This focus aligns with the Guardian’s broader commitment to global coverage of the Black experience: earlier this year, the paper appointed Natricia Duncan as its first Caribbean correspondent, brought on Eromo Egbejule and Carlos Mureithi to cover Africa and stationed Tiago Rogero in Rio de Janeiro to report on South America.

“We recognised an underserved group of readers who weren’t finding the culture, news, and analysis they wanted in mainstream media,” Nesrine says.

What does the diaspora mean to you?

Nesrine, who was born and raised in Sudan and has lived in Kenya, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, hadn’t reflected deeply on what the Black diaspora meant to her personally until she began focusing on the newsletter. “I realised that the diaspora had become a second home for me, a place I could reach out to – whether on social media or in real life – that made me feel grounded,” she says.

“When I travelled, I didn’t notice until later that I was always seeking out ‘the Black stuff’ – Black food, Black music, Black culture.”

This search for familiar cultural markers was fuelled by the nostalgia and homesickness Nesrine experienced after moving to Europe in her mid-20s. “I don’t have a large family in the UK and I didn’t migrate with anyone, so I’ve often felt a bit on my own. The diaspora has made me feel far less alienated, less estranged – it made me feel like wherever I was in the world, I was kind of OK,” she says.

Why a newsletter?

Once this gap was identified, Nesrine and Jason explored numerous ideas for how they could fill it. Newsletters offer freedom – unlike other mediums, they could experiment more with form and length. “It seemed like the most exciting, expansive format for us. We can feature profiles, interviews, book reviews or in-depth analysis,” Nesrine says. The various sections also make it easy to spotlight events, recipes, films and discourse from around the world, tying them together in a cohesive way.

The Long Wave will have a distinctive tone and focus compared with Nesrine’s other work, including her column, she says. Newsletters create a more “intimate” space, fostering a “dynamic conversation” between writer and reader, which moves away from the top-down, distant style of reporting and column writing.

A new offering

The Long Wave is breaking away from conventional narratives about Black communities and countries: “The media tends to focus on either crisis or boosterism,” Nesrine says. In many newsrooms, space for Black stories has traditionally been limited to extremes – stories of conflict, famine or hardship dominate, balanced with hyper-positive portrayals of resilience to compensate for the glut of suffering. However, this strategy risks flattening the complexity of Black experiences worldwide.

Nesrine concedes that “you can’t capture the experience of such a vast, diverse and sometimes deeply incongruent diaspora. But all of humanity is full of these contrasts, and we share common threads.” The Long Wave seeks to pull at these threads with a fresh, authentic voice and thoughtful curation of stories that reflect an expansive, nuanced view of what it means to be Black across the world.

The Long Wave is here to bring readers perspectives they won’t find elsewhere. Sign up here to get the newsletter every Wednesday – and here’s the very first from this week, which expands on Nesrine’s personal story behind The Long Wave.

What else we’ve been reading

• It seems every news cycle introduces us to another reason to fear a Trump presidency, but Nathalie Tocci writes lucidly on what’s at stake for Europe in next week’s US election. While a win for Harris would be a boon for liberal democrats, a Trump win would only accelerate the “Orbánisation” of Europe, she writes. Charlie Lindlar, acting deputy editor, newsletters

• Sending emails at all hours of the day is bad – not just for your mental health but for the environment too. Chris Stokel-Walker did us all a favour by finding out the extent to which our collective internet addiction is contributing to the climate crisis. Nimo

• Our film team have pulled together 10 box office flops that became critical classics, from IMDb’s highest-rated film of alltime to a movie masterpiece apparently “saved” by 1950s French cinema critics. Charlie

• Ashifa Kassam and Faisal Ali’s visual guide shows how torrential rain triggered the deadliest floods Spain has seen in decades. Nimo

• Sarah Phillips consults the experts for 22 quick and easy ways to keep your teeth clean. Besides the simply laughable third one, it’s a handy list of ways for the intermittent flossers among us to protect our pearly whites. Charlie

Sport

Football | The FA wants 90% of schools to provide girls with equal access to football by 2028 under its new Reaching Higher strategic plan. It is also targeting winning another major tournament within the next four years, after the England women’s team won Euro 2022 and reached last year’s World Cup final.

Cricket | A new-look England have fallen to a crushing defeat in the first match of their Caribbean tour, as the West Indies secured an eight-wicket victory in Antigua with 55 balls to spare. West Indies opener Evin Lewis hit a sparkling 94 off 69 balls.

Football | Rúben Amorim says he has to “prove something” after agreeing to become Manchester United’s head coach. The Sporting manager will sign a contract until 2027 but will not start work at Old Trafford until the November international break.

The front pages

Budget reaction dominated Friday’s front pages, with the Guardian leading with “Reeves told she will have to raise further £9bn for public services”. The Financial Times reports “Borrowing costs tick up as investors digest Reeves budget debt demands”. The Telegraph says “Markets turn on Reeves over tax burden” and i has “Interest rates will fall more slowly after budget, economists warn”.

The Times leads with “Soaring cost of sickness claims”. The Mail says “Reeves’ tax taid to cost charities £1.4bn a year”. The Sun, also on the budget, launches “A kick in the bullocks”.

Something for the weekend

Our critics’ roundup of the best things to watch, read and listen to right now

Music
Peter Perrett: The Cleansing | ★★★★☆
A genuine sense of finality hangs around The Cleansing. Perrett himself has compared it to “Johnny Cash doing his best work right at the end”. From its title to its dimensions – it’s a 70-minute double album, twice as long as 2019’s Humanworld – to the cross-generational array of collaborators, including Johnny Marr and Carlos O’Connell of Fontaines DC (whose presence inevitably carries the tang of homage), it’s hard to avoid the sense of a last splurge from an artist who has unexpectedly managed to make it into his 70s, despite his best efforts to the contrary. “I don’t want to overstay my welcome,” he keeps singing on its opening track, a man with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, aware of his mortality. Alexis Petridis

TV
The Diplomat season two | ★★★★★
As season one gathered speed, The Diplomat morphed into a proper political thriller, a tale of layered agendas and hidden alliances. Season two carries straight on from the explosive twist that ended the first run – it was one of the best last two minutes of any season of anything, ever – and continues to be a masterclass in storytelling. No moment is wasted and, before you know it, it’s 2am and you’re still watching. Keri Russell’s Kate Wyler may never quite feel that she fits in at work, but The Diplomat should slot effortlessly into any list of the best dramas of the year. Jack Seale

Film
Heretic | ★★★★☆
The remarkable second act of Hugh Grant’s career continues. Or maybe it’s his third act, if we include the earlier period in which he appeared to withdraw from the romcom frontline to concentrate on making brilliant investments in property and contemporary art, before returning as a lethally outrageous character actor and scene-stealer. Now Grant is making his horror debut and does it with typical insouciance and cheek, starring in a verbose and disturbing chamber piece about religion from writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. Peter Bradshaw

Podcast
Brown Girls Do It Too: Big Boy Energy
While Rubina Pabani’s on maternity leave, Poppy Jay invites men to open up about what is going on in their heads. First up is Asim “Chabuddy G” Chaudhry, who talks death, rejection and swapping Curly Wurlys for kisses. Jay challenges his assumptions about women, and there’s an illuminating discussion about how he feels sorry for his little brothers growing up at a time when labels for men include “simp” and “sigma”. Hannah Verdier

Today in Focus

Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings

The Upside

A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad

As part of the Guardian’s alternatives series, Stephen Burgen looks at “cloud milking”, a zero-energy technique that helps to keep young trees alive. It started in the Canary Islands, and mimics the way laurel trees capture water droplets from fog by using sheets of plastic mesh erected in the path of the wind. Cloud milking can help with reforestation and provide drinking water without the need for fossil fuels or complex infrastructure. In the Canaries, trees grown using this technique have a survival rate of 86%, double the rate seen with traditional reforestation.

Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday

Bored at work?

And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until Monday.

• Quick crossword

• Cryptic crossword

• Wordiply