The Fire These Times

This is a conversation with Nadim El Kak . He’s a researcher at the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies with a background in sociology and political science. I wanted to have Nadim on after reading his Twitter thread on the second wave of the Lebanon protests, which you can find here . Is Lebanon undergoing a second wave of protests? And how do they differ from the October 2019 ones? You can follow...

Molly Crabapple and I have been chatting about this topic for a long time so this was a really fun episode to do. Although it was (roughly) my MA thesis in 2016, Molly has a much more personal connection to the Jewish Labor Bund and Bundism as her great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort, was a Bundist. She wrote a moving piece about this for the New York Review of Books which you can read here . She's now...

This is a conversation with Dr Fadi Bardawil, Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University and the author of the book " Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation ". I wanted to have this conversation with Dr Bardawil because his study of the 1960s 'Arab New Left', and especially the 'Lebanese New Left' of that period, evoked curious com...

I spoke with Berlin-based British writer, poet, broadcaster and musician Musa Okwonga, who also co-hosts the popular football podcast Stadio . Musa frequently writes for The Bylines Times and for The Guardian , among others. Musa was a guest of my previous podcast, Hummus For Thought, and I wanted to have him on here to hear his reflections of these past several weeks now under social distancing....

This is a conversation with Julia Choucair Vizoso, an independent scholar trained as a political scientist as well as an editor and translator at The Public Source , a Beirut-based independent media organization which describes itself as such: "dedicated to reporting on socioeconomic and environmental crises afflicting Lebanon since the onset of neoliberal governance in th...

This is a conversation with Kareem Shaheen, former Beirut- and Istanbul-based The Guardian correspondent for Turkey and the Middle East, current analyst on the region as well as a writer for satirical Arabic news publication Al-Hudood. He is currently based in Montreal, Canada. We spoke about the importance of journalism given the lack of justice and accountability in Syria, the Middle East and be...

This is a conversation with Lebanese journalist Timour Azhari of Al  Jazeera (previously The Daily Star) about the legacy of the October 17  uprising six months since it began. We spoke about the current state of  Lebanese politics, the government’s response to the Covid-19 crisis, the  country’s most vulnerable groups and what protesters might be expected  to face once th...

This is a conversation with Sabrîna Azad. She's a writer who published a moving piece for Mangal Media entitled ' From Halabja to Ghouta ' in which she looked at how deniers of Assad's war crimes in Syria were evoking painful memories for survivors of Saddam Hussein's genocidal campaigns against Kurds. She spoke about the legacy of the Halabja massacre, part of the Anfal genocide of the late 80s,...

This is a repost of an episode I did with Dr Andrew Arsan, British-Lebanese scholar and author of the book Lebanon: A Country in Fragments , and which was originally released on the Hummus For Thought podcast. I'm releasing it here as an introduction to a series of upcoming episodes on Lebanon that will deal with the October 17th Uprising and its meanings. The Uprising will serve as a framework th...

I spoke with Banchi Yimer , founder of Egna Legna who define themselves as “community-based feminist activists working on  migrant domestic workers’ issues and general women’s issues in Lebanon and Ethiopia.” She spoke to me about the Kafala System, the impacts of the economic crisis and the coronavirus pandemic on migrant domestic workers in Lebanon as well as her ongoing trauma after workin...

In this episode, I spoke with one of the authors of the Crimethinc piece of the same name about the ‘logic of the guillotine’, how it is used in  online left-wing meme culture, why it is problematic and why we need to have a better logic than that of the guillotine if we truly believe in liberatory politics.  Here are some extracts from the introduction to the piece. “On April 6, 1871, armed parti...

What does it mean to have, to demand, the right to narrate? Usually  associated with Edward Said and the Palestinian experience, this concept  ultimately speaks to a widespread feeling among those who are racialized, those who are gendered, those who are displaced. It reflects  a more generalised need to reclaim something that feels stolen. In this episode, I sat down with Laura Vidal , a Paris-ba...

We go back to the summer of 2018 when I sat down with Sami, a Beirut-based Ethiopian activist with, Mesewat , a solidarity network that supports migrant workers in Lebanon and the Middle East, and Ali, an activist with the Anti-Racism Movement . It was recorded at one of the Migrant Community Centers in Beirut. There is a meme that was posted  on Instagram on International Women’s Day depicting a...

JP from Lausan Collective on how Hong Kong's protests can offer an alternative to the "point-scoring self image-oriented practice" that is so common in the West. Lausan proposes numerous fascinating analyses of Hong Kong's ongoing situation. There you'll find such articles as: When a disease is racialized by Edward Hon-Sing Wong This is not ‘restoration’ by Tony Revolutionizi...