Anmol Irfan

An estimated 840 million women – almost one in three – have experienced physical or sexual violence from a partner or someone else at least once. This figure does not include the many men and boys who are also affected by domestic violence and abuse. Despite these numbers, progress in reducing domestic viole...

A recent study published in January by George Washington University revealed a significant rise in permanent forms of contraception, such as tubal ligations and vasectomies, following the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. The increase was especially pronounced in states that were likely to ban abortion, reflecting a growing fear about reproductive rights among young adults, as captured in a survey of 638 participants.
By mid-2024, conversations around contraception in the...

In early October 2025, the Trump administration ordered that a 211-mile mining road through the Alaskan wilderness be approved. Known as the Ambler Road Project, it would allow the mining of copper, cobalt, gold, and other minerals.
The project has been debated since Trump’s first term in office, when he initially approved it only for the succeeding Biden administration to block it due to the threat it posed to caribou and other wildlife, as well...

In late December 2024, New York State Senator Andrew Gounardes’s legislation to protect domestic violence survivors was signed into law. Focused on the intersection of tech and domestic violence advocacy, the law is an attempt to ensure that abusers can no longer use tracking technology installed in vehicles. The legislation comes as law enforcement struggles to address the evolving role of technology in domestic violence cases.
Yet, beyond legal measures, a lack of awareness and resources co...

Wildfires and floods have dominated world news this year, impacting hundreds of thousands of people as these disasters continue to increase in intensity. Many people use these widespread events to point out that climate change does not discriminate. But the truth is, it does.
While it is correct that everyone will feel the effects of climate change, the extent to which it impacts people differs—people’s access to information and knowledge, for example, is one of the most important differentia...

“I am quitting because I’m tired,” Alex Hanna wrote on February 2, her last day on Google’s Ethical AI team. She felt that the company, and the tech industry as a whole, did little to promote diversity or mitigate the harms its products had caused to marginalized people. “In a word, tech has a whiteness problem,” she wrote in her post on Medium. “Google is not just a tech organization. Google is a white tech organization.”
Hanna did not take much of a break—she joined the Distributed AI Resea...

In early January, Meta put out a sudden and unexpected announcement that the platform would be ending its third-party fact checking model in the US, saying that their approach to manage content on their platforms had “gone too far.” Instead, Meta will now be moving to a Community Notes m...

Social media influences our real-life consumption. From fashion trends to Stanley cups, our so-called “sustainable” buying choices have become a cause of concern in a world where overconsumption seems to be rising exponentially.
A study published by the Journal of Modern Science last year showed that 80 percent of consumers’ buying decisions stemmed from online influences and social media impulse buys that can cost the average consumer up to a massive $754 a year. In a hyper-capitalist world ...

Despite some versions of various matchmaking and dating platforms having been available in the country for nearly a decade, the topic is not openly discussed.
Waseem and Ezza met in 2022 and immediately hit it off.
Within a year, they were married. For most Pakistani couples, there’s nothing that stands out about this particular story. After all, rishtas [marriage proposals] here often happen based on rather truncated timelines. But what makes Waseem and Ezza’s story stand out is that it didn...

Last week, I reached out to someone on Whatsapp to schedule an interview. We ended up chatting in Urdu – the actual Urdu script, not Roman Urdu – and I realised just how unfamiliar I am typing in my native script.

I guess it’s not surprising. As so much of our phones and interfaces are in English, I rarely use Urdu online. But as my grandmother would say: these phones have ruined everything. In this case, she’s not completely wrong.

I’m Anmol Irfan, a Pakistani journalist and author of the ei...

Over nine months into the violence that has been ransacking the lives of Palestinians, efforts to help are coming from all corners of the globe. As news outlets and social media feeds are flooded with endless images of violence against children, some in the Global North have expressed a desire to adopt Palestinian children to give them a chance at a better life.
This isn’t the first time that citizens in the Global North have wanted to adopt children from a specific crisis zone. In the late 1...