About
Lusophone culture, politics, and resistance — in English.
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1A+ Dispatch is an independent publication covering the Portuguese-speaking world — Brazil, Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, Timor-Leste, and Macau — for an international English-language audience.
We publish critical essays on the stories mainstream media ignores: the music that rewrites borders, the settlements that resist erasure, the artists who refuse to be credited after the fact, the policies designed to look like progress while repeating colonial logic.
The Dispatch is organised into eight editorial sections — from Street Syntax to Sonic Cartographies, Ancestral Echoes to Coded Dreams — each tracking a different frequency of how culture, power, and resistance intersect across the Lusophone Atlantic.
We are based in Almada, Portugal — across the river from Lisbon, in a city that mirrors the dynamics we cover: displacement, memory, transformation, and the daily negotiation of who gets to shape public space.
The Dispatch is produced by a two-person editorial team at 1A+. Our workflow uses AI as a production tool: we select, research, and frame every story; the writing process is AI-assisted; editorial judgment is entirely human. We are not a newsroom. We are a curatorial project — closer to a cultural radar than a newspaper.
We think about this constantly. Using AI to produce cultural criticism raises real questions about authorship, voice, and the ethics of machine-assisted writing. We don't have clean answers. We have a commitment to transparency and a body of work that we believe speaks for itself.
