The Lede

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 i...

“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...

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 t...

“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 t...

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 ass...

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 represen...

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 we...

[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...

For this special Christmas episode of “The Lede,” New Lines magazine’s Ola 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 ha...

“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 Fi...

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 befor...

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 precisel...

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 Cambridg...

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 Magazine's Lydia Wilson to try to make sense of the results. “The la...

“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...

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 Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai. “They're ruthless...

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 o...

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...

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 Line...

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 mon...

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 f...

Producer and screenwriter Hayat Aljowaily joins New Lines Magazine's 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...

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 dissolutio...

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 an...