The Lede | New Lines Magazine: Recent Episodes
New Lines Magazine
This is The Lede, the New Lines Magazine podcast. Each week, we delve into the biggest ideas, events and personalities in the Middle East and beyond. For more stories from New Lines, visit our website, newlinesmag.com
Tomorrow, Nigerians will head to the polls to elect a new president and vice president, as well as members of the Senate and House of Representatives. This election is Africa's first in 2023 and has been described as the most consequential election this year — not only for Africa but for the rest of the continent. Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation and has its largest economy. So when Nigeria sneezes, the rest of the continent catches a cold.
“Citizens are tired of simply repeating and rinsing electoral cycles. So they want elections that lead to governance, not just governance, but good governance, and the benefits of having democratic processes,” Oby Ezekwesili tells New Lines magazine’s Kwangu Liwewe.
“People actually boasted that they didn't waste their time to go and vote, because they're all the same. That was the basic premise on which people didn't waste their time with our democracy. And it's not just in Africa, it's actually across the continent.”
But elections have consequences, especially in a country like Nigeria. In an effort to curtail attempts at corruption related to the elections, the Central Bank of Nigeria, working with the Independent National Electoral Commission, announced that the country will move to a cashless economy and that the current naira notes will no longer be valid in the days close to the elections. But this creates its own set of systemic issues for low-income groups who rely on cash transactions. Ezekwesili, who is the senior economic adviser of the Africa Economic Development Policy Initiative and the former vice president of the World Bank (Africa region), predicts that this will affect Nigeria’s productivity in the months ahead.
For now, she is among those who remain hopeful that this election has the potential to deliver what Nigerians ultimately want: accountability, economic growth, human capital development, infrastructure to support their needs as citizens as well as businesses and a better environment for doing business. And though Ezekwesili says that the presidential candidates put forth by the incumbent All Progressives’ Congress (APC) and long-dominant People’s Democratic Party (PDP) simply don’t resonate with the culture of good governance that citizens want to see, it is ultimately up to those citizens to make the decision that will move their country, and indeed the continent, forward.
“The less attention that citizens pay to democracy, the more that they should be ready to take any consequences of their absence from a process that is actually defined by the level of participation,” Ezekwesili says. “But it is vital, it is critical for us to have a peaceful election — Nigeria is too big to fail.”
And so when polls open Saturday morning, the elections will be watched closely — even by those not participating in them, whether in Nigeria or abroad.
Produced by Faisal Al Yafai, Sabrine Baiou and Christin El-kholy
The Russian invasion of Ukraine began on the 24th February, 2022.
“I'll never forget that night,” Olesya Khromeychuk tells New Lines magazine’s Amie Ferris-Rotman, as she looks back on it almost a year later. A historian and the director of the Ukraine Institute London, Khromeychuk says that her shock soon turned to defiance and determination. “We were all prepared for an escalation. We expected it to happen.”
The invasion, she points out, was not the beginning. It was the culmination of centuries of repression and eight years of war — a war which started when Russia began arming separatist paramilitaries in the Donbas region, in response to the overthrow of the Kremlin-backed Yanukovich regime during the 2014 Maidan revolution.
“My brother was the first one who warned me of it when he returned to the frontline after his first deployment,” she says. “He was absolutely certain that it was going to escalate. All of my veteran friends said the same thing. It was just a matter of time.” Yet Khromeychuk’s brother never lived to see it. He was killed in action in 2017, five years before his prediction came tragically true.
She wrote a book about him, called The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister. “I wrote it in order to try and raise awareness about this forgotten war,” she recalls. At the time of his death, the Donbas war had faded from view in the eyes of the rest of the world.
“It took a full-scale war for the world to actually discover Ukraine.”
Produced by Joshua Martin
“It is a movie-crazy culture,” says journalist and film critic Anupama Chopra. “Cinema is the number one choice of entertainment. The Indian movie star is somewhere between human beings and god.”
Since 1993, Chopra has been covering India’s cinema industry — or industries — and is the founder and editor-in-chief of the digital platform Film Companion. In the past, she tells New Lines magazine’s Surbhi Gupta, the Indian movie culture was dominated by the goliath that is Bollywood, the Hindi-language industry. Yet Indian film is larger than Bollywood alone. “Every other state has its own thriving, regional cinema, with its own local stars,” she explains.
With the rise of streaming, a trend accelerated by the Covid pandemic, those regional cinema industries have burst through the boundaries of state borders. “We all discovered the brilliance of Malayalam cinema and how Telugu cinema does the sort of over-the-top commercial film in such a brilliant way, or all the kinds of really exciting stuff happening in Tamil cinema or Kannada cinema,” says Chopra. “We are no longer fixating on what region of India a film comes from. We are all watching everything.”
And it isn’t only domestic audiences who are watching, either. The Telugu language movie “RRR” was a surprise hit with international audiences, including in the United States, where it won several awards. “Honestly, I've never seen anything like it for any other Indian film,” Chopra says. “It's not just playing in the U.S.; it's running to packed houses in Japan.”
But back in India, not everyone has been celebrating. At a time of rising nationalistic fervor, the movie is one of several to draw criticism from those who believe such films are fanning the flames. Chopra is skeptical. “Films are not removed from society,” she says. “That is the current mood, and that is what films will reflect.”
For better or for worse, film and society are inextricably linked. “You have to understand that films in India are not just entertainment, right? It's a way of life.”
Produced by Joshua Martin
In 2019, the writer Sohrab Ahmari launched a blistering attack against David French, a former lawyer and political commentator who now works as a columnist for The New York Times. Both men were known as committed conservatives and prominent figures on the religious right. Yet their dispute became emblematic of the deepening division within conservative intellectual circles since Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 — the ripples of which have been felt throughout the entire American political landscape.
“It's weird that we're both considered conservative,” French remarks to New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai. “Someone can say that they're a Republican, and it won't necessarily tell you their view of individual liberty or their view of the power and role of government and economic affairs or their view of foreign policy. That's how divided the right is right now.”
The author of the book “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation,” French has spent the past few years increasingly worried by the intensity of partisanship that now characterizes U.S. politics. “I think it's a public service to humanize each other,” he says. But that was precisely Ahmari’s objection.
“The right is, I would say, by and large on Ahmari’s side,” explains French. “In other words, this idea that we're not going to play by gentlemen's rules here. We're going to roll up our sleeves and we're gonna have at it.” From the point of view of Ahmari and his fellow travelers, that partisanship is a feature, not a bug. Feeling increasingly out of step with the direction of American society, French argues that they have embraced an uncompromising, ends-justify-the-means approach to politics embodied by politicians like Trump or his potential rival Ron DeSantis — even to the point where some are questioning their commitment to democracy itself. "Many folks are not necessarily after majority rule at all.”
It’s a line of thinking that extends beyond the realm of the strategic and into the intellectual.“This is sort of where you're going to see the classical liberal versus authoritarian approach,” he explains. “The more authoritarian approach takes a very negative view of individual liberty, because they argue it breeds individualism, which fractures, community bonds and ultimately harms all of us. What Ahmari and others are saying is, ‘Well, when people fail in their responsibility to exercise liberty virtuously, then the government has to step in and eradicate that liberty.’ And I firmly disagree with that.”
So that may be what the division comes down to — power vs. persuasion. “And it's so weird that in our politics, we've become so polarized that a lot of people just scorn persuasion entirely,” French says.
Produced by Joshua Martin
“I said, ‘I'm showing these images to you for a reason,’” recalls Erika López Prater, a former adjunct professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. “I wanted to demonstrate the rich variety of art-making within Islamic traditions.”
The images in question were medieval paintings of the Prophet Muhammad. At the time it was produced, the art was intended to be celebratory. However, due to shifting religious practices, many Muslims have come to consider such depictions of the prophet to be forbidden or offensive. López Prater says that she tried to be mindful of these sensitivities and warned students before displaying them. But after a complaint was lodged with the administration, university officials turned on her and her contract was subsequently canceled.
After Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan, wrote an essay in New Lines condemning the university’s actions, López Prater’s story became a national controversy. In this podcast with New Lines magazine’s Rasha Elass, they discuss the rich variety of artistic traditions within Islam and unpack the complicated web of factors behind the current controversy.
“These anxieties around images of the Prophet Muhammad started to really emerge over the course of the 20th century,” Gruber says. Attitudes among Muslims have varied widely across time and place, and aniconic beliefs were far from universal historically. She traces modern concerns back to very recent origins — to controversies over disrespectful cartoons published in Charlie Hebdo in France and the Jyllands Post in Denmark. Such depictions should not be conflated with the depictions found in Islamic art, she argues: “The intent behind those cartoons was to shock. And of course it overlapped with xenophobia.”
But another big part of the problem, López Prater says, comes from the increased marketization of higher education in recent years. “Colleges and universities have adopted a customer-service model,” she explains. “They’ve slashed tenure track positions in favor of cheap adjunct labor. Meanwhile, that is accompanied by administrative bloat.” That trend, she suggests, has encouraged institutions to prioritize financial and reputational concerns over academic enquiry and enabled officials to treat academic staff as disposable.
“There is this hugely tragic irony that the administration was trying to sweep this issue under the rug through the quick dismissal of an adjunct professor,” she adds. “And instead have been having to reckon with a long history of racist and Islamophobic events on their college campus and within the Twin Cities and within our country.”
Two years after his 2021 power grab, Tunisian President Kais Saied is still struggling to consolidate his rule. His appeal to supporters was largely predicated on his promises to fix the country’s economic crisis — a promise he has failed catastrophically to deliver on. And yet despite rising inflation and shortages of basic goods, no coherent opposition has managed to emerge.
Monica Marks, an assistant professor of Middle East politics at New York University Abu Dhabi, has been a keen observer of Tunisian politics for over a decade. “I think if we're going to really understand Saied’s ‘self-coup’ in 2021, what led to it and whether or not Tunisia can return to some sort of democratic path, we have to grapple with the so-called ‘Ennahda problem,’” she tells New Lines magazine’s Erin Clare Brown.
Ennahda is Tunisia’s Islamist party. After the Arab Spring swept away the regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the party emerged as the new democracy’s foremost political force. But the optimism of the revolution soon gave way to disappointment. It was in the face of corruption and economic woes that many Tunisians turned to a demagogue like Saied. “They claimed that Ennahda was primarily or even single-handedly responsible for the country's failures to make good on its revolutionary promises of 2011,” says Marks.
Likewise, many secular Tunisians fear that the party’s relatively moderate platform is a front for a more sinister agenda. They point to Erdogan in Turkey, whose stated commitment to secularism fell away the moment it became unnecessary. In Marks’ view, “When a lot of people remember that and say, well, listen, there's no reason to think Ennahda wouldn't do the same thing.”
But whatever reservations the opposition may have about working with Islamists, they may have to if they want to challenge Saied’s autocratic rule. “Do I think that there's a future for democratic politics in Tunisia without Ennahda? Absolutely not,” says Marks. “The fact remains that Ennahda is the only political party that can mobilize big numbers on the streets.” Without a broad united front, the dream of the 2011 revolution may well be dead for good.
“Exiting dictatorship relies on building cross-ideological opposition coalitions,” she adds. “There is strength in unity.”
Produced by Joshua Martin and Erin Clare Brown
For most of human history, settled people have lived in fear of conquest by their powerful nomadic neighbors. Most powerful of all was the Mongol Empire, which brought most of Eurasia under their rule for almost 300 years. But in this second episode on nomads, Marie Favereau, a historian at Paris Nanterre University, says that the Mongols have been either neglected by history or unfairly represented as mindlessly destructive barbarians. Her book, “The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World,” was written to change all that.
The use of the word horde, she says, was quite intentional, given the negative connotations associated with the word today: “It's a very old word especially in Asian culture and Indo-Asian languages,” she tells New Lines magazine’sFaisal Al Yafai. “The word itself means an organized nomadic state. I think it's important to think about the words we use and, you know, how we can change the meaning.”
Historians have to put their bias aside and be fair in examining the record, she says, which can help us start to see the benefits and rationale behind the Mongols’ decisions. And there are lessons we can learn from the Mongols about how to strike a balance in our relationship to the natural environment and how to combat xenophobia: So long as they swore allegiance to the khan, the Mongols didn’t attempt to force their religion or way of life on their subjects.
But Favereau rejects any romanticized view of nomadic living.
“I know how difficult nomadic life can be. So the idea is not to say, ‘Oh, this is the ideal way of living.” Instead, when looking at past nomadic empires like the Mongols — and nomadic societies still in existence today — we can begin to envision different possibilities for living and doing today.
“It's important to know that it was not always like this,” she says.
Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El-Kholy
In this special episode, New Lines magazine’s Joshua Martin looks back at some of the key events of 2022 and how we tried to make sense of it all on The Lede.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine was, for many, the defining story of 2022. A year on, it’s easy to forget how shocked the world was when Vladimir Putin’s forces pushed across the border and along the road to Kyiv. But even in those first weeks, many signs already hinted at the direction the war would take. As Ukraine pushed back, the extent of the rot in the Russian armed forces became increasingly clear, as did the evidence of atrocities against civilians.
But while Ukraine dominated headlines, conflicts elsewhere went increasingly ignored. In Ethiopia, the central government’s wars in the regions of Tigray and Oromia were fought with no less brutality than the war in Ukraine. In the face of the international community’s apathy, peace seemed a distant prospect. And yet in November, government and Tigrayan forces did manage to reach a peace agreement. The war in Oromia, however, appears only to be intensifying.
The year 2022 also marked a historic anniversary — a century since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. For better or for worse, its rise, 600-year reign and ultimate collapse left an undeniable mark on the vast swathe of territories it once ruled. The Empire might be gone, but its legacy remains, serving as a reminder that the past is never really past. Similarly, the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September was another perfect case in point, pulling 70 years’ worth of history into the public consciousness and provoking fierce debates across the Commonwealth about what that history meant.
Such battles over history have become increasingly prominent in recent years, and 2022 continued that trend. For strongmen like Putin, Ethiopia’s Ahmed Abiy and others, these battles have proved to be a crucial part of their political strategy. In an age in which old certainties about history, identity and nation no longer hold firm, such autocrats and would-be autocrats offer a seductive promise: to turn back the clock to a simpler time.
If the past year is anything to go by, 2023 will be anything but.
[This episode originally aired August 5, 2022]What if you woke up one morning to discover everything you knew about the world was wrong? That all the truths you’d been taught to take for granted were actually lies? For author and political philosopher Lea Ypi, that’s not a hypothetical question. In her recent memoir “Free: Coming of Age at the End of History,” she tells the story of growing up in communist Albania only for the regime to collapse during her teenage years.
“It really was like being taught a new language,” she tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede. “Almost overnight, you’re told that all of these names that you had for things are now different—you have different names and different categories and different ways of making sense of the world.”
They talk about how to see the gap between ideology and reality, where people look for certainty in uncertain times and what it actually means to be free.
Produced by Joshua Martin & Christin El Kholy
For this special Christmas episode of “The Lede,” New Lines magazine’sOla Salem, Maysa Mustafa, Amie Ferris-Rotman and Surbhi Gupta gather ’round the mic with host and producer Joshua Martin to talk about the worldwide rise of Christmas and whether it’s outgrowing its Christian roots — before finishing off with our traditional holiday quiz.
Nearly 10 months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it seems crystal clear that there is no turning back to placing Russia on the global stage in either business or politics in the way it once was.
Bill Browder, author of two books about Russia (including his latest, “Freezing Order”) and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, was once one of the largest foreign investors in Russia and has seen the country go through pivotal changes before. But during his time in Russia, massive corruption was revealed in some of the companies that Hermitage had invested in. Browder knew he couldn’t continue to turn a blind eye to what the oligarchs and corrupt officials were doing.
“So I started to do what are known as naming and shaming campaigns, where we would research how these people went about doing the stealing, and then share the research with the international media,” he tells New Lines magazine’s Amie Ferris-Rotman. By 2005, Browder had been expelled from Russia after having his offices raided and being declared a threat to national security.
One young Russian lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky investigated the raids, reporting on the subsequent $230 million fraud involving Russian tax officials. In retaliation, Magnitsky was arrested, tortured for 358 days and beaten to death in Russian police custody. This tragedy marked a pivotal moment in Browder’s life and a turning point in his career. “I've made it my life's work to go after the people who killed him to make sure they face justice. I can use these skills to try to help all of these new victims as best as I can.” One result is the Magnitsky Act, which freezes the assets and bans the visas of human rights violators. It became law in the U.S. in 2012, and 35 other countries have since adopted its standards.
Browder continues working tirelessly to expose the web of corruption among Russian leadership. “There's two ways you can fight the Russians: You can fight them with tanks, which I have no expertise in, and you can fight them in the banks. And I'm one of the people who knows more about this than just about anybody.”
It’s easy to see why today Browder is one of the Kremlin's biggest enemies and a thorn in Vladimir Putin’s side.
According to Browder, there’s still plenty of corruption left to uncover, not least of which stems from Putin himself. He calls the war in Ukraine “a war of distraction,” aimed at redirecting the potential backlash over this to a foreign enemy. “There’s nothing new about this. Dictators have done this, you know, through eons.” And the West ought to bear responsibility for enabling Putin, if not encouraging him. Now the sanctions are too little, too late.
“This is probably the biggest misconception that most Western policymakers and politicians have: that there is some kind of end game, that there's a negotiated settlement,” Browder says. “That if Putin gets X and Y, he'll be happy. And then we can all go and live in peace. But I don't believe there's any chance whatsoever of a negotiated settlement.”
Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El-kholy
“We want better. Reform our institutions.”
Those were the words on Tsitsi Dangarembga’s placard when she was arrested in July 2020 for a peaceful protest against Zimbabwe’s government. Recently she was convicted on a charge of inciting public violence for that act. And yet, the award-winning novelist, playwright, poet and filmmaker— named one of the Top 25 Most Influential Women of 2022 by the Financial Times — hesitates to label herself as an activist.
“I do not call myself an activist, but I call myself somebody who believes in citizen engagement as a responsible citizen of the country,” she tells New Lines Magazine’s Kwangu Liwewe. “I think that is an idea that they simply do not want to prevail in Zimbabwe. They cannot afford to have increasing numbers of Zimbabweans thinking of themselves as responsible citizens who need to be engaged.”
Dangarembga is referring to what she calls Zimbabwe’s current military dictatorship, which came to power after November 2017, when Robert Mugabe was removed and replaced by Emmerson Mnangagwa as president and party leader of ZANU-PF. While Dangarembga is resolute in her view of those events, she recognizes that not all Zimbabweans share her view. To her, this signals the skill with which the military manipulated the narrative, getting people out into the streets to celebrate the coup.
“Zimbabweans will debate anything from here to heaven,” she contends. “They were able to pretend it was not a coup. But what happened was a coup.”
While she recognizes that the economic situation in Zimbabwe is dire—and much worse now than during Mugabe’s time—she argues that this is not due to mismanagement, as some might suggest. Rather, it is a deliberate attempt to force Zimbabweans to rely on the ZANU-PF for basic survival resources. So why haven’t the Zimbabweans revolted? It has nothing to do with weakness, says Dangaremba.
“Zimbabweans are afraid that if they go against the government, the military will retaliate. I think that Zimbabweans have been so oppressed, that they are no longer able to access the necessary agency. Yet they are the ultimate power”
Produced by Joshua Martin
Otto Skorzeny was the Waffen SS commando behind some of Nazi Germany’s most significant special operations. When Mussolini’s government fell, it was Skorzeny’s team who were parachuted into Italy to rescue the dictator. At the end of the war he was detained by Allied forces and awaited a denazification trial.
But Skorzeny’s story didn’t end there. He escaped prison and fled to Franco’s Spain before continuing his career in the shadowy world of Cold War intelligence. He became a military adviser to the Spanish, Egyptian and Argentinian governments, and spent time as a bodyguard for Argentina’s first lady, Eva Peron. Over the course of his post-war career, he worked for the CIA, West German intelligence and even Israel’s Mossad.
“As a CIA official wrote after the war, old intelligence hands are always attracted back to the job they know best,” says Danny Orbach, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of “Fugitives: A History of Nazi Mercenaries During the Cold War.” This is why, he tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai, Skorzeny and those like him ended up as mercenaries, informants and spies.
And there were many like him. “The vast majority of Nazi criminals either got off with meager punishments, or just escaped completely unharmed,” Orbach says. As the Second World War ended and the Cold War began, intelligence services on both sides of the Iron Curtain quickly shifted their priorities from hunting down Nazi war criminals to recruiting them, in hopes of getting some sort of advantage over their new adversaries. “People are very, very quick about forgetting past hatreds when a new enemy comes on the agenda,” Orbach remarks.
This, he explains, was why so many agencies were willing to work with such men — some of whom, like Alois Brunner or Klaus Barbie, were personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of killings during the Holocaust. The calculus was as simple as it was cynical: “What's more important: the past or the future?”
“The condemnation usually comes after there is no longer a practical need in employing them,” he adds.
Produced by Joshua Martin & Christin El-Kholy
In an age defined by disinformation, it has become almost a cliche to talk about “post-truth politics.” But while truth has been the media's foremost concern in the era of "fake news," there has been surprisingly little reflection on what it actually means in the first place. We're exhorted to defend it from authoritarian leaders and conspiracy theorists alike, yet we seldom consider what precisely it is that we’re defending. But Sophia Rosenfeld, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, certainly has.
“Truth is definitely a slippery idea,” she tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai. “The way truth works, especially in democratic settings, is that we don't authorize any one person, or one institution, or even one method, say, as the way to know something. That is wonderful in certain ways. But of course, it also makes knowing anything very messy.”
But while the truth may never have been as certain as many like to imagine, today’s degree of polarization nevertheless poses a new and dire challenge.“To have a good debate, we have to first agree that there's a problem,” says Rosenfeld. “If we can't even agree on something like the unemployment rate, democracy starts to fall apart.”
“The law doesn't help us much here,” she adds. “The technology doesn't help us much here. We're catching up with a phenomenon that we didn't know we were unleashing when we did."
Produced by Joshua Martin
If the urge to travel is a universal human instinct, the urge to tell others of your journey may well be too. In medieval North Africa, travelers and tourists produced a plethora of travelogues and guidebooks for a readership eager to read about their voyages. “There's a variety of reasons why people wanted to read this kind of writing,” Amira K. Bennison, a historian at the University of Cambridge, tells New Lines’ Lydia Wilson. For merchants, it was important to know which cities produced which goods and what they could expect on their own journeys. For rulers, it was a source of information or even intelligence about what was happening in their realms. But for many people, it was simply because they wanted to read stories of far-off lands. “It takes them out of what for some readers must have been a much more humdrum existence, with little chance of travel beyond their own town or country.” Not all of these were accurate. “There are tales of a statue in Cadiz which speaks, or cities of bronze in the desert,” explains Bennison. “I don't think that people in the past were necessarily naive or necessarily taken in by these kinds of stories, but the world was much more mysterious. There were lots of places where most people had never been and would never go, and really weren't quite sure whether these things existed or not.” But just like today, travel writing could be as much about the author’s experiences as the place itself. Medieval readers didn’t just want to know what was there; they wanted to know what it felt like to be there too. “I think it's that which really captures people's imagination and gives them the sense of the expansiveness of the world,” Bennison says.
Produced by Joshua Martin
As the first nationwide elections since the January 6 Capitol attacks, America’s 2022 midterms were something of a test for the country’s troubled democracy. Americans went to the polls in the shadow of a year of turbulence and rising political violence. With the votes still being counted, journalist Robert Evans joined New Lines’ Lydia Wilson to try to make sense of the results.
“The last time we had a midterm election that went this well for the party in the White House was 2002, in the immediate wake of 9/11,” he explains.
Few expected such a successful showing for the Democrats. Between the nation’s economic woes and Joe Biden’s struggling approval ratings, conventional wisdom predicted a “red wave.” But predictions of Republican revanchism turned out to be greatly exaggerated. High youth turnout meant that progressive candidates like Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman performed much better than had been predicted, while the increasingly extreme rhetoric of many Republican candidates proved alienating. “The thing that we couldn't have known was the degree to which voters were going to react against the power grabs that the right has made,” says Evans. “And I'm happy to say that it does look like that's one of the stories from last night.”
But what that rejection means for the increasingly violent climate of American politics remains to be seen. A recent YouGov poll found that nearly 40% of Americans believe the country is heading for civil war. “I'm still very worried about how hot the temperature has gotten, and how deeply angry American politics still is,” Evans remarks. “The fact that maybe they're not going to continue to win elections doesn't mean that they're not going to keep getting angrier.”
“Americans do have a pretty long, proud tradition of murdering each other over politics,” he adds. “The worst thing you can do is assume this terrible thing could never happen here because we're somehow special.”
“This BMW gets hit by a truck in the Aegean region,” explains former U.S. diplomat Josef Burton. “And driving it are a Kurdish clan leader, a police general and a far-right mafia drug baron. And the trunk is just full of Deutschmarks and silenced submachine guns.”
The incident caused a major scandal in Turkey, and subsequent parliamentary investigations revealed the existence of a rogue network of intelligence officials, army officers, mafiosos and ultranationalists. Implicated in hundreds of killings over several decades, it was this network that the term “deep state” was coined to describe.
“This wasn’t just state repression,” Burton tells New Lines’ Joshua Martin. “The idea of the deep state is that there's elements within the state which are just doing what they want, without any going back to the chain of command. They're just doing it.”
For Americans, though, the term has taken on very different connotations. “The meaning shifted between this very specific historical phenomenon to any structure of power you don’t like,” Burton says. It became heavily associated with former President Donald Trump, who uses it to denigrate his political opponents and encourages his supporters to do the same — particularly in the months since August’s FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago residence. “It really raises the temperature,” says Burton.
“The more unhinged and irrational these sorts of terms become, I think the more we have to point to concrete historical examples of this defined thing,” he adds.
Produced by Joshua Martin
Since the turn of the century, the global tide of democracy has begun to recede. Men like Putin in Russia, Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey and of course Trump in the United States have all sought to subvert their countries’ institutions and consolidate their own authoritarian rule.
“These men have similar personalities,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai. “They're ruthless. They have no moral code. They are opportunistic. They will be whatever the public needs them to be at that moment.”
Ben-Ghiat, a historian of Italian fascism at New York University, watched their rise with a combination of horror and recognition. In her book, “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present,” she compares the men behind the current wave of autocratization to their counterparts from the 1930s and the Cold War. “The way they get to power changes over 100 years. But the net effect of what they do is much the same.”
She believes there are two main things that define a “strongman”. The first is personalist rule. “These are people who come to power and organize the state around their personal obsessions and needs,” she explains. The second is their appeal to masculinity — “all strong men use machismo as a way of legitimizing themselves.” This, she says, is the reason Putin is so often photographed shirtless and why Trump brags about his sexual prowess.
This emphasis on masculinity is why most strongmen tend to be just that — men. But the recent election of far-right populist Giorgia Meloni as prime minister of Italy complicates that picture.
“She is actually a strongwoman,” Ben-Ghiat says. “The first one we've had.”
Produced by Joshua Martin
The U.K. has had months of political chaos, with Liz Truss not even the first British prime minister to resign this year. In June, MPs began to realize that the only way to rid themselves of the scandal-prone Boris Johnson was to force him out of office. Johnson refused as long as he could manage. For satirist and architect Karl Sharro, recalling the many long revolts against British colonialism over the 20th century, the irony was too delicious to ignore: “It's great that the British are discovering how difficult it is to get rid of British rule,” he tweeted.
Sharro’s absurdist humor is aimed at many targets – corrupt politicians and soccer referees among them – but perhaps at the media above all. His observations have resonated widely with those frustrated by patronizing international news coverage, even earning him a book deal — “And Then God Created the Middle East and Said ‘Let There Be Breaking News.’”
“It’s just a way of poking fun at certain Western narratives and attitudes,” he tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai.
It’s something that occasionally gets him into trouble with those who don’t see the funny side. He argues that ”secular taboos” are emerging, stifling creativity and leaving humorists like him with little room for error. “And these sorts of things — you go talk to anyone from a Middle Eastern or Arab background, and these are things you struggle against all your life,” he says. “You struggle against societal norms and restrictions, family norms and restrictions, authoritarian norms and restrictions. You want to be consistent with yourself, you want to say these transgressions should be dealt with through a freer form of critique.” He’s uncomfortable with the idea that any topic should be decisively off-limits: “You can joke about anything; it depends how you do it.”
He reserves particular ire for those Westerners who were happy to laugh at his tweets about the Middle East but who failed to see the joke when it landed closer to home. Sharro has greeted the “general sense of dysfunction creeping in the West” with both anger and unabashed schadenfreude, despite living in the U.K. himself.
“The collapse of the country has been very rewarding for me personally, in whatever comedic capacity I have,” he remarks.
The question of how the past is remembered will always be unavoidable. But in recent years, it has loomed particularly large and proved particularly contested. These “memory wars” are fought so hard and argued so passionately because, ultimately, they’re battles for control of the narrative. How we remember the past determines who we believe ourselves to be.
“There is actually no way to understand who we are and how we think about each other and how we think about our relationship to the world without thinking about history,” says author and academic Priyamvada Gopal. In this conversation with New Lines’ Lydia Wilson, she argues that we never really leave the past. “I tend to use the word ‘afterlife’ rather than ‘the past,’ because I think that things that have happened in history have a life in the present. It’s ongoing.”
Such disputes over history are shaping politics the world over. In the U.K., the death of Queen Elizabeth II has brought to the surface fierce disputes over the darker chapters of British history. Likewise, many of the Commonwealth countries for whom the British monarch is still head of state are now reassessing their relationships with the crown. Conversely, in India, the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi has promoted a belligerent and exclusionary reinterpretation of India's past — and wielded the power of the state to suppress competing narratives.
"Muslims are a deeply endangered community in India because of this mythology," Gopal explains. "Myths are not innocent."
Produced by Joshua Martin
Seven months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin’s mobilization order has sent shockwaves through a society that had previously still been able to ignore the fighting.
“If you were in Moscow this past summer, you wouldn’t know that Russia was fighting a costly, bloody and totally unnecessary war in Ukraine,” Russian-American journalist and author Julia Ioffe tells New Lines’ Amie Ferris-Rotman. “It was easy for Russians to push it off to the edge of their minds, but now it has come home to them.”
As security forces battle protests across Russia, about 700,000 Russians are estimated to have fled the country. Traffic jams at border checkpoints, Ioffe explains, have been visible from space. “When they’re asked to actively participate in the war and asked to go into the trenches themselves, they don’t want to take part in it.”
For Ioffe, watching Russia’s civil society implode since the invasion has been particularly painful because of her ties to the country — and to Moscow especially. “It was my favorite city in the world,” she says. But now, its once-vibrant society has been driven into exile by the regime. “How long will it take to rebuild a new Moscow, a new Russia, after this one collapses?”
But, she adds, it’s nothing compared with what was done to Mariupol and other cities across Ukraine.
Produced by Joshua Martin
For thousands of years, most humans were nomads, living their lives on the move. They were raiders and traders, herder and hunters — and conquerors. From Genghis Khan to Osman I, nomads changed the course of history on countless occasions. And yet, says historian and travel writer Anthony Sattin, we still tend to underestimate their influence on history.
“Our histories glorify people who build monuments,” he tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai. “We don’t tend to value tribes in the Amazon, for instance, who didn’t chop down their forests, who maintained an equilibrium and flourished without disturbing the ecological balance in their world.” Plenty of nomad cultures have been literate, but on the whole, most of the societies keeping substantial written records were sedentary societies. Traditionally confined by historians to anecdotes and afterthoughts, oral histories recently have been recognized as just as useful as written histories for reconstructing the past. “The stories are still being told, but the research hasn’t been done,” says Sattin.
Those past biases come at a huge cost to our understanding of history, Sattin says: “I don’t think we can know who we’re going to become unless we know who we were, and half of our story is missing, because for most human history nomads have been half of our story, and yet they’re not in our books.”
Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El-Kholy
For two years, Ethiopia has been caught in the grip of a war between government forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), who control the country’s northernmost state. As the power struggle polarized the country along ethnic lines, the number of mass killings and other atrocities led one Ethiopian general to dub it a “very dirty war.” An agreement in March led to a truce, but after five months, fighting was reignited on Aug. 24.
Yet hope for a lasting peace may not yet be lost. “Initially, the Tigrayans insisted that they were not going to be part of the peace process,” Dr. Adeoye Akinola tells New Lines’ Kwangu Liwewe. But thanks to the diplomatic efforts of the African Union (AU), both the federal government and the TPLF have agreed to allow the international organization to mediate negotiations between the warring factions.
As the United Nations convenes in New York, Ethiopians are watching closely in the hope that diplomacy can triumph. “We cannot hide from this,” says Tedla Asfaw. “We have to face it.” But with neighboring Eritrea, a government ally, launching a new offensive into Tigray, the conflict looks as if it may descend once more into total war.
“Whether it’s the AU or the United Nations,” says analyst Chris Maroleng, “It’s quite clear that what is actually required is a reformation of not just the institutions, but the manner in which politics is carried out in Ethiopia.”
Produced by Joshua Martin
Producer and screenwriter Hayat Aljowaily joins New Lines’ Ola Salem and Anthony Elghossain to talk about cinema, identity and the making of Marvel’s “Moon Knight.” The Emmy-nominated show stars Oscar Isaac as the titular protagonist, a man with dissociative identity disorder who finds himself sharing a body with a mercenary battling Egyptian gods.
“Portraying Egypt accurately was really at the core of what we were trying to achieve,” explains Aljowaily. With much of the action taking place in the country, the creators were determined to avoid the usual cliches. “That meant not going to shoot in Morocco and pretend that it’s Egypt, because then it’s not going to look like Egypt. And so we built Egypt.” The crew started with a vast empty set in Budapest and set to work. “And within two weeks, it was Cairo.”
But perhaps the biggest responsibility of all was the portrayal of the protagonist’s love interest, Layla, the first female Arab superhero to appear on television. “It was a big responsibility to create Layla, because we knew how important it was to young Arab women — to Arab women, period.”
“Having her was such a game changer,” adds Ola. “Just having someone with curly hair, that kind of resembles you, and you kind of can see yourself in, is such a big deal.”
Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, has died.
For 70 years, the queen was a fixture in the national life of Britain and indeed the wider world. The world changed immeasurably in the decades since she came to the throne in 1952. The country when she first ruled was quite unlike the one she died in. She inherited not merely a country but an empire and presided over its dissolution.
Although her death was expected, as the ritual of its declaration demonstrated, it still leaves the country in a deeply uncertain state — an uncertainty that extends to the 14 other countries in which she was the head of state as well as the wider Commonwealth.
As the crown passes to her son, Charles III, New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai speaks to Lydia Wilson outside Buckingham Palace and talks to Amie Ferris Rotman and Kwangu Liwewe about what the passing of such a consequential figure may mean for the world.
Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El-Kholy
Since October 2021, Iraq’s politics have been deadlocked in a showdown between two of its most powerful political factions. The rivalry between the Coordination Framework, a pro-Iranian Shiite bloc, and the supporters of populist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has left the country’s Parliament paralyzed since last October’s elections, unable to form a government or elect a new president. But after Sadr announced his withdrawal from politics at the end of August, the rivalry turned deadly as protesters from his movement marched into the heavily fortified Green Zone and paramilitaries battled each other in the heart of Baghdad. Only after Sadr called for the violence to end and for his supporters to withdraw did the fighting die down. New Lines’ Rasha Al Aqeedi joins host Faisal Al Yafai to talk about what this latest escalation may mean for Iraq’s future.
Produced by Joshua Martin
In May 1948, at the onset of the Arab-Israeli War, Egyptian soldiers crossed into Palestine at Rafah as military leaders promised a swift victory. Yet despite their defeat by the year’s end, this war would give way to military rule less than four years later.
“A military loss was not what Egyptians expected,” historian Chloe Bordewich tells New Lines’ Lydia Wilson in The Lede. Egyptian media carried images and footage of successful operations, helping to reinforce pronouncements of imminent victory.
But victory never materialized. In the face of official obfuscation, alternative explanations for why the war had been lost began to circulate among the public and in the press. One rumor in particular began to take on a life of its own — “that Egypt had lost the war in Palestine because political leaders had procured, profited from and knowingly supplied their own troops with dysfunctional weapons.”
The rumor tapped into something that resonated deeply with the Egyptian public. As time went on, it migrated from page to screen and into popular memory. The government’s reputation never recovered, and in 1952, a group of mid-ranking officers overthrew the king.
Produced by Christin El-Kholy
Tunisia was the cradle of the Arab Spring, and had been hailed as its biggest success story. But President Kais Saied’s new constitution, narrowly approved in a controversial referendum last July, has changed that.
“Kais Saied has unchecked power,” Mohamed-Dhia Hammami tells New Lines’ Lydia Wilson in The Lede. “Even under Ben Ali, we used to have some sort of balances and checks. There are some people who even compare his power to the North Korean leader’s.”
Saied ran for president as a political outsider in 2019, vowing to tackle ‘moral and financial corruption’. The country’s continuing economic crisis left many Tunisians disenchanted with the status quo, and Saied’s populist platform won him the election. Even as he suspended parliament and began ruling by decree in 2021, he continued to attract support. But, Hammami says, his latest move may have been a step too far. “Saied is having serious problems consolidating his power.”
Produced by Joshua Martin
One year after the fall of Kabul, this special anniversary episode of The Lede looks back on the momentous events of Aug. 15, 2021, and explores how Afghanistan has fared in the aftermath. New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai talks to Afghanistan correspondent Fazelminallah Qazizai, who was in Kabul the day it fell, about what the first year of Taliban rule has looked like from the ground. He also speaks to human rights specialist Nazila Jamshidi about how the millions of Afghans in the diaspora have been affected. Finally, Rasha Elass catches up with Chris Sands, the magazine’s South Asia editor, about ISIS’s plan to weaken the Taliban and plunge Afghanistan back into war.
Produced by Joshua Martin
What if you woke up one morning to discover everything you knew about the world was wrong? That all the truths you’d been taught to take for granted were actually lies? For author and political philosopher Lea Ypi, that’s not a hypothetical question. In her recent memoir “Free: Coming of Age at the End of History,” she tells the story of growing up in communist Albania only for the regime to collapse during her teenage years.
“It really was like being taught a new language,” she tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede. “Almost overnight, you’re told that all of these names that you had for things are now different—you have different names and different categories and different ways of making sense of the world.”
They talk about how to see the gap between ideology and reality, where people look for certainty in uncertain times and what it actually means to be free.
Produced by Joshua Martin & Christin El Kholy
Selma Dabbagh is a British-Palestinian writer and the editor of the 2021 anthology “We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers.” Through poetry and short stories, novel excerpts and letters, the collection pulls from more than 1,000 years of Arab women’s writing — from pre-Islamic poetry to contemporary fiction.
“There seemed to be something so modern and pithy and frank and refreshing about their voices,” Dabbagh tells New Lines’ Lydia Wilson in the first episode of the magazine’s new podcast, “The Lede.” “My interest was really in looking at how these voices had changed over time.”
They talk about the difficulty of writing about love and intimacy, Orientalism and the male gaze, as well as why Arab women writers are expected to be “political.”
Produced by Joshua Martin & Christin El Kholy
The Ottoman sultans reigned for more than 600 years. In that time, they conquered almost all of what we consider to be the Middle East today, as well as North Africa, parts of East Africa and Southeastern Europe. But over the course of the 19th century, their power waned, and the beleaguered empire finally collapsed after a bitter defeat in World War I. Their fall created the Middle East as we know it today: It opened the region to European colonialism, invigorated nationalism and ended the spiritual leadership of the caliphate.
But one cannot understand why the empire’s fall was so consequential — why an Ottomanless Middle East was such a big deal — without understanding how the Ottomans made their mark in the first place. Professor Marc David Baer is a historian at the London School of Economics and the author of “The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs.” For this third installment of our series on the empire’s fall, he joins New Lines’s Faisal Al Yafai to explore the Ottoman world that was lost, for better or for worse, 100 years ago.
Produced by Joshua Martin
Maz Jobrani is a comedian, actor and writer who lives in Los Angeles. In this podcast, he joins New Lines’ Anthony Elghossain for a conversation on comedy and life. He talks about how he got started in comedy, what it was like playing terrorists on TV and how he broke out of the box as a comic observer on issues great and small—from the geopolitics of the so-called War on Terror to the Lebanese sense of militant hospitality.
Produced by Joshua Martin
Lebanese poet Zeina Hashem Beck has been publishing poetry in Arabic and English for over a decade. Her latest collection of bilingual poems, titled “O,” was published at the beginning of July. In this episode she joins New Lines’ Rasha Elass to share her thoughts on what inspires her bilingual verses and how they intertwine over themes of language, country and womanhood. They talk about abortion, leaving Lebanon and why she can’t live without the sea.
Produced by Joshua Martin
Since Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year, there has been a renewed interest in the wealth and influence of Russian oligarchs in the U.K. Moscow’s elites have bought mansions in London’s ultra-exclusive neighborhoods and send their children to British private schools. But Russians are not the only ones taking advantage of Britain’s willingness to turn a blind eye to overseas corruption. Investigative journalist Oliver Bullough is the author of “Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals.” In this podcast, he talks to New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai about how London has grown into the world’s kleptocracy capital — by providing the world’s wealthiest not only a place to hide their stolen money but also to spend it with no questions asked.
Produced by Joshua Martin & Christine El Kholy
Ibn Arabi was a 12th-century philosopher, poet and “one of the great spiritual teachers of the Muslim world.” Both his philosophical works and his poetry have been translated countless times, most recently by Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger in their highly experimental 2022 collection “Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi.” In this podcast, the two join New Lines’ Lydia Wilson to talk about the subtle yet significant differences between English and Arabic poetry, how they developed their innovative approach to co-translation and how that approach reflected the themes and ideas already present in Ibn Arabi’s original text.
Produced by Joshua Martin
The First World War put an end to 600 years of Ottoman rule. Buoyed by promises of self-determination on the part of the victorious powers, the region’s peoples prepared for a future free of imperial rule. They were to be bitterly disappointed. European rhetoric about self-rule had never been sincerely intended to apply to non-Europeans — which was made brutally clear by Britain and France as they divided the post-Ottoman Middle East between themselves in the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement.
“It was a secret deal to carve up the Levantine part of the Ottoman Empire between France and Britain,” explains historian James Barr, author of “A Line in the Sand and Lords of the Desert.” “There was a diagonal line drawn, in Sykes’ infamous words, from the ‘E’ in Acre to the last ‘K’ in Kirkuk.” In this follow-up to our episode with Eugene Rogan on the Ottoman collapse, Barr joins New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai to talk about how European colonial powers attempted to take their place, why the region seems to be so attractive to foreign imperial powers and why their efforts to control it are almost always doomed.
Produced by Joshua Martin
The bishop of Toledo, Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada, wrote “Historia Arabum” in the 13th century. The book is one of the earliest accounts of Arabic history written by a Western author. It was translated from the original Latin into Arabic by Aymenn Al-Tamimi, a nonresident fellow at the New Lines Institute and a Ph.D. student at the University of Swansea in Wales. In this podcast, he joins New Lines’ Lydia Wilson to discuss why he decided to take on such a difficult translation, what the text says about Christian-Muslim relations in medieval Spain and why it remains relevant today.
Produced by Joshua Martin
At a moment when it seems as if Americans can’t agree on anything — when political divisions seem to run deeper than they have since the Civil Rights Movement — political scientist, professor and pundit Yascha Mounk of Johns Hopkins University remains optimistic that an answer can be found.
His latest book, “The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure,” combs through history, psychology and personal experience in search of that answer. In this podcast with New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai, he shares his thoughts on how to make a diverse, democratic America work. They discuss whether diverse democracies pose unique challenges, what the United States can learn from Lebanon and whether U.S. government reparations for slavery could ever work.
Produced by Joshua Martin
When Amjad Youssef met “Anna,” a young Alawite Syrian who was studying abroad, the military man was skeptical at first. But as the months unfolded, he began to open up to his fellow pro-regime partisan over Facebook. What he didn't know was that Anna had been created by genocide researchers Annsar Shahhoud and Uğur Ümit Üngör. In this podcast with New Lines’ Rasha Elass, they talk about how they used Anna to expose Amjad’s participation in the 2013 Tadamon massacre, carried out by the Syrian regime. They explain how they set about luring Amjad through social media, dark humor as a coping mechanism in a line of work which few can relate to, and what to do with the knowledge of such atrocities when facing the families of the victims.
Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El Kholy
Marcel Kurpershoek is a former Dutch ambassador and accomplished scholar at NYU Abu Dhabi. His most recent work is “Love, Death, Fame,” a translation of poems by al-Mayidi ibn Zahir, a 17th-century poet from what is now the United Arab Emirates. In this podcast, he catches up with New Lines’ Kevin Blankinship to talk about Nabati poetry, the thousand-year-old oral poetic tradition of the Arabian Peninsula. They discuss Marcel’s decades of fieldwork in Central Arabia recording oral poems among Bedouin tribes, why the ancient tradition continues to be such a central part of Khaleeji culture and identity, and how it has found a worldwide audience through the United Arab Emirates’ answer to “American Idol”: the smash-hit competitive poetry show “Million’s Poet.”
Produced by Joshua Martin
For six centuries, the Ottoman Sultans held dominion across most of the Middle East, North Africa and Southern Europe. But by the eve of the First World War in 1914, the empire was already in steep decline. It is at this moment of crisis that the preeminent historian Eugene Rogan begins his bestselling book “The Fall of the Ottomans.” In this podcast, he talks to New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai about those decisive final years. They discuss the Ottoman experience of the Great War, whether the empire’s ultimate collapse was inevitable and how the Middle East of today emerged from the ashes of its defeat.
Produced by Joshua Martin
William Maynard Hutchins is a professor emeritus at Appalachian State University and an award-winning translator of Arabic literature, most famous for his work on “The Cairo Trilogy” by Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. In this podcast, he joins New Lines’ Kevin Blankinship to discuss his long and storied career. They discuss how he began his career, what it was like working with figures like Mahfouz and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and why, even after retirement, he continues to translate new novels.
Produced by Joshua Martin
Ahmed El Shamsy is an associate professor of Islamic thought at the University of Chicago. As part of a new series from New Lines exploring big ideas from history, El Shamsy joins culture editor Lydia Wilson to talk about how the Middle East changed in the age of printing. They discuss how the “European book drain” induced the Arab world’s adoption of the printing press, why printing enabled a revival of Islamic classical tradition, and how that revival led to the creation of the modern Middle East.
Produced by Joshua Martin
Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton has circled the globe three times in pursuit of the Earth’s rarest sounds. His sound portraits record quickly vanishing natural soundscapes. In this episode he joins New Lines’ Rasha Elass to talk about the quiet he found during the pandemic, when human noise pollution subsided, and what that brief but profound period of respite can teach us about our world.
Produced by Joshua Martin
Author and historian Haris Durrani speaks to New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai about representation and religion in the classic sci-fi novel “Dune” and its recent film adaptation. They discuss how the book’s Islamic themes are ignored or missed by non-Muslim audiences, why Hollywood fails at representing the Middle East on screen and how a new generation of Muslim authors is changing science fiction.
Produced by Joshua Martin
Pakistani writer and novelist Fatima Bhutto speaks to New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai for this podcast about what we mean when we talk about political fiction — and how the stories we are most attracted to reflect not just the world we live in but what we think that world should be. They discuss why she decided to be a writer, rather than a politician like her aunt Benazir Bhutto, why the CIA has a department for script writers and why people increasingly identify more with stories from outside the West like “Squid Game” than with “Friends.”
Produced by Joshua Martin. Photo courtesy of Allegra Donn.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shattered the precarious geopolitical balance in Eastern Europe. Yet the ripple effects from the conflict extend far beyond that region. In this podcast presented by New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai, Lydia Wilson reports from Amman where she speaks to freelance journalist Suha Ma’ayeh and international relations expert Amer Al Sabaileh about the impact the war is having on the Middle East. They discuss how the public have reacted, why the war is such a threat to the region’s food security, and why many Arab governments have been reluctant to condemn Russia — despite pressure from the U.S.
Produced by Joshua Martin
The Arab world has a rich literary heritage and a vibrant contemporary literary scene which has attracted many English speaking readers – Arabic is one of the top-ten most translated languages for American audiences. But the process of translation is complex and often politically fraught.
In this podcast, Reem Bassiouney, sociolinguistics professor and award-winning author of Sons of the People: The Mamluk Trilogy, and M Lynx Qualey, editor of ArabLit.org, join New Lines’ Lydia Wilson and Faisal Al Yafai to discuss the many challenges of translating Arabic literature.They talk about why a translation is never finished, the power that translators have as a bridge between cultures, and what it means to be a ‘victim’ of translation.
As Ukraine braces for a fourth week of war, Syria marks 11 years of brutal fighting. The same Russian bombs pounding Kharkiv have been continually used against Syrian cities like Idlib and Aleppo since Vladimir Putin intervened in 2015.
In this podcast, Anand Gopal, award-winning journalist and author of “No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes,” joins New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai to discuss Russia’s wars. They talk about how the intervention in Syria may be a blueprint for the war in Ukraine, why the anti-war movement has struggled to adapt to a multipolar world and why Ukraine will not be Russia’s Afghanistan.
Produced by Joshua Martin
Eight years before the recent Russian invasion, a popular uprising in Kyiv overthrew the old Moscow-backed government in favor of moving toward the European Union — an act for which Russia has been punishing Ukraine ever since.
It is those events that inspired Kalani Pickhart’s recent novel, “I Will Die in a Foreign Land.” Hailed as one of the best books of 2021, it has found renewed relevance in the aftermath of the invasion. In this podcast, she joins New Lines’ Lydia Wilson to discuss what first drew her to the story, the relationship between fiction and journalism, and how the long history of Russian aggression against Ukraine led to the current crisis.
(Produced by Joshua Martin)
In the new age of counter-insurgency, civil conflict and proxy wars, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine stands out as a rare modern example of so-called ‘“conventional’” warfare fought between the armed forces of two nation-states. In this podcast, New Lines’ Lydia Wilson talks to Mary Kaldor, author of the pioneering 1999 book ‘“New and Old Wars,”’, to discuss what Russia’s goals are, why the invasion is a departure from their usual strategy — and whether Putin has miscalculated.
Produced by Joshua Martin
The war in Afghanistan may be over, but a humanitarian crisis threatens to be even deadlier than the 20 years of fighting. In a follow-up to our podcast episode from September, New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai talks to Fazelminallah Qazizai, Pashtana Durrani and Emran Feroz to explore how the country’s situation has changed over six months of Taliban rule. They discuss how U.S. sanctions have left Afghans without money or food, how the Taliban govern and what will happen to their regime if the crisis continues into the spring.
(Produced by Joshua Martin)
Few topics evoke as much passion as food; recipes have become political battlegrounds. In this podcast, New Lines editor and hummus-opinion-haver Kareem Shaheen is joined by Dr. Suna Çağaptay of Bahçeşehir University and contributing editor Riada Asimovic Akyol to talk about what food means to them. They discuss what we mean when we call food “authentic,” the problem with pesto hummus and why you should never ask for a Turkish coffee in Greece.
(Produced by Joshua Martin)
For this special crossover episode with the podcast “The Fire These Times,” its host, Joey Ayoub, joins New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai and Lydia Wilson to talk about Lebanon’s civil war, which ended in the 1990s but was never truly resolved. They discuss how the absence of public memorialization has intensified sectarian divides, why there can be no peace without accountability and what Syria can learn from Lebanon’s warning.
Find more episodes of "The Fire These Times" at https://thefirethisti.me.
Produced by Joshua Martin
More than a year into Ethiopia’s brutal civil war, the country stands on the brink. The conflict has seen widespread violence against civilians and left millions at urgent risk of starvation. But a recent lull in the fighting has been hailed as an “opportunity for peace.”
In this episode, New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai asks what comes next. He talks to journalist Zecharias Zelalem, VICE News’ Julia Steers and Biniam, a civilian from the Tigray region who lost several of his best friends to one of the war’s most notorious massacres. They discuss how the war started, why reporters have struggled to get it right and what it will take to end the bloodshed.
(Produced by Joshua Martin)
Not only is the Middle East one of the world’s most urbanized regions, but it’s also where the story of the city began. In this podcast, New Lines’ Lydia Wilson is joined by Yasser Elsheshtawy, adjunct professor of architecture at Columbia University, and Mona Fawaz, professor of urban studies and planning at the American University of Beirut, to talk about cities in the modern Middle East — and explore what opportunities and challenges the next chapter in this 10,000-year story might hold for the millions of Middle Easterners who call cities their home.
[Produced by Joshua Martin]
In her latest book, The Vanishing, celebrated war reporter Janine di Giovanni reports from some of the Middle East’s most ancient Christian communities — communities she argues may be at risk of disappearing.
In this podcast, she joins New Lines’ Lydia Wilson to talk about a career reporting conflict, what drew her to the subject of the book, the complex reasons why Christians are leaving the Middle East, and how the experiences of minorities in Iraq, Syria and Palestine differ.
Produced by Joshua Martin
Veteran foreign correspondent Luke Harding has reported from all over the world, but there’s one subject he keeps returning to: Russia. His latest book, “Shadow State,” offers a glimpse into the country’s ruthless intelligence services.
In this podcast, he speaks to New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai about how he uncovered their activities, from social media trolling campaigns to mercenary black ops in Syria and Sudan. They discuss the challenges of reporting on such a secretive world — and the heroism of the Russian citizens working to expose it.
Produced by Joshua Martin.
Kamran Bokhari is a foreign policy specialist and director of analytical development at the New Lines Institute. In this episode, he joins host Rasha Elass to talk about his essay in New Lines Magazine on Deobandism, a major fundamentalist Islamic movement with influence across South Asia and beyond. They discuss how it emerged from one of the Sunni tradition’s most liberal schools of jurisprudence - and why so few in the West have heard of it.
REBROADCAST:
In a special podcast on the fall of Kabul and its aftermath, New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai speaks to three reporters who were on the ground in Afghanistan before, during and after the takeover by the Taliban. Emran Feroz, Fazelminallah Qazizai and Shelly Kittleson discuss reporting from around the country, firsthand testimony of what it felt like to see the Taliban walk unopposed into a city they were exiled from 20 years ago — and what the Taliban might do in the next weeks and months.
[This episode originally aired August 27 2021]
In this festive special, New Lines’ Ola Salem is joined by colleagues Riada Asimovic Akyol and Kareem Shaheen for a wide-ranging conversation about all things Christmas. They discuss what the holiday means for Muslims, share Christmas traditions—and try their luck playing Ola’s Christmas quiz.
James Barnett is a Fulbright scholar and a researcher at the Center for Democracy and Development in Nigeria.
In this podcast he joins New Lines’ Rasha Elass to talk about how he became interested in the underreported crisis of Nigeria’s bandits, how he managed to convince the warlords to talk to him, and what it was like to sit down with such dangerous men.
Earlier this year, the Syrian journalist Asser Khattab stopped writing about Syria. A week ago, in a viral essay for New Lines magazine, he finally explained why - and sparked a much-needed conversation in the media about how international outlets treat the local reporters who make their coverage possible.
In our latest podcast, Asser Khattab and New Lines’ Kareem Shaheen continue that vital conversation, talking about why his employers never let him be a full member of the team; how he realized he would never be given a Syria correspondent job despite his contacts, experience and expertise; and how being granted asylum in France forced him to make a choice between his job and his safety.
Rising authoritarianism, social atomization and looming climate change — the world feels like it is falling apart. In this wide-ranging podcast, the acclaimed Turkish novelist and journalist Ece Temelkuran speaks to New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai about her book, “Together: 10 Choices for a Better Now,” and the urgent issues that compelled her to write it. They talk about what it felt like to watch democracy die in Turkey, why she refuses to play the exile — and why, no matter how bad it gets, we can’t afford to lose faith in each other.
Award-winning investigative journalist Tam Hussein’s latest article for New Lines explores the mythologization of Afghanistan by Islamists in Europe and America. In this episode, he talks to New Lines’ Lydia Wilson about how his experiences growing up in London informed his essay, how pro-jihadist propaganda spread before the internet, and why the far-right admire the Taliban.
Art and archaeology have always been used to tell stories about the present. In this new podcast, author and journalist Olivia Snaije and contributing editor Lydia Wilson talk to New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai about how the Middle East’s ancient heritage continues to shape modern politics. They discuss why Lebanon’s heritage took on new importance after the Beirut port blast last year, why Iraq’s Saddam Hussein styled himself after a Babylonian king — and how the story of a nation depends on who’s telling it.
Days after a drone was used in an assassination attempt on Iraq’s prime minister, military tech journalist Kelsey D. Atherton spoke to New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai about their use in the wars of the past, present and future. They discuss how drones changed modern warfare, how emerging technologies will affect future conflicts — and why we worry about the wrong thing when we talk about killer robots.
In this special episode on the Oct. 25 military takeover in Sudan, Sudanese American journalist Isma’il Kushkush and Khartoum-based activist Dallia Abdelmoniem talk New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai through the chaotic events of the past two weeks — and the two years leading up to them. They explain why the coup has deep roots in Sudan’s troubled political past, what it feels like to be back out on the streets — and why the generals may have overplayed their hand.
Jonathan Powell is CEO of the conflict resolution charity Inter Mediate and has made a career talking to some of the world’s most dangerous people. He was U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief of staff, chief negotiator in the Northern Ireland peace process, and the author of “Talking to Terrorists: How to End Armed Conflicts.”
In a frank, thoughtful and occasionally tense conversation with New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai, they discuss why he advocated talking to the Taliban 10 years ago; the missed opportunities of the war on terror; what it was like negotiating with the IRA; how history will remember Tony Blair — and whether he has sleepless nights over the invasion of Iraq.
Nina Jankowicz is a fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. and the author of “How to Lose the Information War.” Natalia Antonova is a journalist, an expert in online security and the former editor of the investigations website Bellingcat.
In this extensive podcast with New Lines Magazines’ Faisal Al Yafai, they discuss how Russia has weaponized disinformation, from the Middle East to America; how open-source intelligence has become a vital tool for journalists; the perils of being a woman online in the 21st century; why social media companies like Facebook are part of the problem; and why fighting disinformation is a lot like “Games of Thrones.”
In this podcast, Farkhondeh Akbari and Andrew Watkins join New Lines for a conversation on Afghanistan. They share their sentiments about the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, assessments on decades of American intervention and recent withdrawal, and reflect on the past, present and future.
David Kaye served as the U.N. special rapporteur for freedom of opinion and expression. In this podcast with New Lines’ Kareem Shaheen, he discusses justice and accountability for crimes in the Middle East; why justice is so essential for neighbors to keep living together; and why the phrase, “the walls have ears” is so common in the Middle East.
In a special podcast on the fall of Kabul and its aftermath, New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai speaks to three reporters who were on the ground in Afghanistan before, during and after the takeover by the Taliban. Emran Feroz, Fazelminallah Qazizai and Shelly Kittleson discuss reporting from around the country, firsthand testimony of what it felt like to see the Taliban walk unopposed into a city they were exiled from 20 years ago — and what the Taliban might do in the next weeks and months.
Isam Uraiqat created AlHudood, a satirical news site often compared to The Onion, to highlight some of the absurdities of the modern Middle East.
In this podcast with New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai, Isam goes through some of his favorite — and most controversial — headlines; talks about censorship in the Middle East and whether there are any topics he would not poke fun at; and discusses the serious side of satire in an era of fake news.
Luna Safwan is an independent journalist based in Beirut and the host of the “Beyond Politics” podcast. Anthony Elghossain is a lawyer and contributing editor at New Lines, also based in Beirut.
In this podcast with New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai, as the first anniversary of the deadly explosion in Beirut’s port approaches, they discuss what it felt like a year ago before and after the blast; the challenges of reporting on a city that is both a global story and also home – and why living in Beirut sometimes feels like waiting for life to restart.
Rime Allaf is a Syrian-born writer and political analyst. In a wide-ranging conversation with New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai, she recalls living through the end of the Hafez al-Assad era and traces the Bashar years from the initial optimism of Syrians, through the end of the Lebanon occupation and the Iraq War, to the start of the Syrian revolution.
Arash Azizi is the author of “Shadow Commander: Soleimani, US & Iran's Global Ambitions” and the author of an essay for New Lines Magazine on Iran’s new president.
In this podcast with New Lines’ Rasha Elass and Cameron Khansarinia, policy director at the National Union for Democracy in Iran, based in Washington DC, they explore the new president’s background, whether Iran is going through a domestic crisis and what the future of American-Iranian relations will look like.
Peter Pomerantsev is senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the author of "This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality."
In this podcast with New Lines' Faisal Al Yafai and Idrees Ahmad, he discusses “Memory Wars”, the attempt to rewrite history to fit current political objectives, why that attempt is as relevant in Ukraine and Russia as it is in Syria and the United States, where he stands on the removal of statues – and why Russia seeks to manipulate sensitive topics like race in America.
Nafees Hamid is a cognitive scientist of political violence who wrote an essay for New Lines Magazine on why people join violent groups.
In this podcast with New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai, he discusses his essay, “The Neuroscience of ‘Devoted Actors’ Within Extremist Groups”, explores similarities between jihadists who joined ISIS and the insurrectionists who stormed the US Capitol – and explains why neuroscience shows that a feeling of being excluded can change what people are willing to fight – and die – for.
Nick Foretek is the author of “The Philosopher’s Wine”, a long-read for New Lines Magazine that tells the story of several years in the life of one Syrian fighter.
In this podcast with New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai and Idrees Ahmad, he discusses how he first met the fighter in Cairo, what prompted him to tell the story, why he made certain literary decisions – and whether he thinks the fighter is a sympathetic character.
Mustafa Akyol is the author of a new book, Reopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom and Tolerance.
In this podcast with New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai, he discusses being arrested by the Malaysian religious police; why Islam needs reform; the coercive power of modern Muslim states; the revolutions of Turkey and Tunisia; and why his criticisms of Islam don’t include the role of power, colonialism and wars.
In the midst of conflict in Israel and Palestine, award-winning journalist Rula Jebreal and Lisa Goldman, cofounder of +972 magazine, are in conversation with New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai about politics, ideology and war. In this podcast, Jebreal discusses her essay for the magazine on the similarities between Israel’s right-wing political parties and the Republican Party under Donald Trump; Goldman recalls her experiences reporting on previous conflict in Gaza; and the three have a conversation about why a change in political ideology in Israel means this conflict will be different from those in the past.
The “Great Replacement” theory is behind the far right’s worst acts of terrorism, from Christchurch to El Paso. It has its roots in the Balkans, where it inspired Serb Nationalists to genocide.
In this podcast, Jasmin Mujanović and Una Hajdari join Faisal Al Yafai for a conversation about why the American far-right are so obsessed with the wars of Yugoslavia, how a cartoonish meme ended up part of a terrorist attack – and what the fantasy white, Christian society of Serb nationalists would actually be like.
Alex Skolnick, lead guitarist for Testament, wrote a popular essay for Newlines Magazine about the importance of artists speaking up at a time of political turmoil. In this conversation with NLM’s Faisal Al Yafai and Idrees Ahmad he explains why artists should speak honestly about social and political upheaval, why he doesn’t worry about losing fans who disagree with him – and why he wrote a rap song called “Trump Sucks”.