The Lede

The city of Damascus is one of the oldest in the world. Syria’s ancient capital has been continuously inhabited for perhaps 12,000 years and seen countless plagues, viruses and epidemics sweep through its streets. But, says Dr. Benan Grams, a social historian of disease and medicine at the University of New Orleans, the cholera epidemics of the 19th and early 20th centuries stand out among the wor...

Yascha Mounk thinks the left is making a big mistake.   “Over the last decades a genuinely new political tradition has started to coalesce in universities around the world,” the political scientist and commentator tells New Lines magazine’s Faisal Al Yafai, ”and then come to have significant influence on our culture and politics.”   Uncomfortable with the direction this new generation of progressi...

Iran was set ablaze last year after Mahsa Amini was taken into custody and beaten to death by the country’s morality police in Tehran for wearing “improper hijab.” The killing of the 22-year-old struck a deep chord among Iranians, inspiring protests in more than 100 cities throughout the country, marking the largest uprising Iran had seen since the 1979 revolution. Government reprisals were severe...

The abaya is a loose, flowing robe worn by women across the Middle East, Northern Africa and South Asia. Though it is favored by many observant Muslims for its modesty, it is not considered religiously mandated attire and has no special spiritual significance. Nevertheless, French Education Minister Gabriel Attal announced at the end of August that the abaya would be banned from public schools on...

“Somalia has been in one form of civil war or another for about 30 years,” James Barnett tells New Lines magazine’s Joshua Martin on the first episode of The Lede’s fourth season. “You have this dynamic where the government in Mogadishu doesn't have much direct power or presence in most of the rest of the country.”   The result, explains Barnett, who traveled there in June to report for New Lines,...

Known best by his alias “the QAnon Shaman,” the shirtless man depicted in photos with a horned fur hat and an American flag painted on his face became one of the most iconic images from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S.Capitol. His real name is Jake Angeli, and he believed in the conspiracy theory known as QAnon — that the U.S. government was controlled by a global child-trafficking Satanist ca...

“I have a line in my book where I say marriage is the only intended outcome of growing up in India,” Mansi Choksi tells New Lines magazine’s Surbhi Gupta. “Like, that's how it feels for a lot of us.”   Choksi, author of the “The Newlyweds” and co-host of the latest season of NPR’s “Rough Translation” podcast, has spent many years untangling the fraught politics of marriage in the country. “On a fa...

Thomas Mapfumo has been making music for more than 60 years. A popular and influential Zimbabwean protest musician, Mapfumo is known as the “Lion of Zimbabwe” and has been a persistent opponent of dictatorship since the days of white-minority rule. Days before Zimbabwe’s second election since the fall of longtime dictator Robert Mugabe, Mapfumo remains cynical about the prospects for political pro...

On May 26, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023 into law. The legislation imposed even steeper sanctions on LGBTQ Ugandans than previous laws had, outlawing the promotion of homosexuality and punishing same-sex activity with life imprisonment and even the death penalty in so-called “aggravated” cases. The law had plenty of backing within the Ugandan establish...

In July, U.S. President Joe Biden made the controversial decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine. Though neither the United States, Ukraine nor Russia is party to the 2008 convention outlawing them, it has been ratified by hundreds of other nations because of how dangerous the weapons remain long after the fighting stops.   “If they fail to detonate on impact, they'll lay there dormant,” Sera Ko...

At age 14, Mai Al-Nakib stole a book off her older sister’s shelf. That book was James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” a famously challenging modernist novel that her sister had been assigned at college.    “It wasn't an easy read, no doubt,” Al-Nakib tells New Lines’ Lydia Wilson. “But it spoke to me. It really resonated.”    Now an award-winning novelist, she credits Joyce as a...

Geopolitics is often conceived of as a realm of pure realpolitik, where ideology takes a back seat to the ruthless and unsentimental pursuit of strategic interests. But all politics involves storytelling, and geopolitics is no exception. Nation-states deploy narratives to legitimize themselves on the world stage, to shore up domestic support and to unite their allies around a common cause. But, sa...

Then-French Prime Minister Manuel Valls once remarked that “the Republic makes no distinction among its children.”     Valls was not just speaking in platitudes: The French Republic officially does not recognize racial or religious divides, to the point that the government refuses to collect data regarding race or religion .    “They don't even recognize that as a category or as a box you can chec...

“The way to understand India today and in the future is that this is a confident and growing nation that believes that its time has come,” says Ravi Agrawal, editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine and host of the podcast FP Live. “It isn't going to kowtow to a U.S.-led vision or a West-led vision. In fact, India is going to go its own way.”   Still, in June, President Joe Biden rolled out the...

It came from the bowels of the internet. In the early 2000s, countless disaffected young men flocked to online subcultures like the alt-right, the manosphere and the red pill movement to vent their frustrations with feminism, LGBTQ rights and racial diversity. With so much rage and resentment at the modern world simmering away online, fed by conspiracies and steadily growing more extreme, it was o...

Last week, a delegation of African leaders from South Africa, Republic of Congo, Egypt, Senegal, Uganda and Zambia traveled to both Kyiv and Moscow to try to negotiate a peace deal for the war in Ukraine. The deal was unsuccessful, with both Russia and Ukraine rejecting the prospect of a ceasefire. But the attempt nevertheless raised questions about the role of African nations on the world stage —...

This episode originally aired May 27, 2022, and takes listeners behind the scenes of a groundbreaking New Lines investigation by genocide researchers Uğur Ümit Üngör and Annsar Shahhoud. This week, that investigation won the prestigious Chair's Award at the 2023 Drum Awards for Online Media, and so we’re rebroadcasting it for those who might have missed it when it first aired.    When Amjad Yousse...

Back in the early 2010s, then-Prime Minister of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan presented himself as a peacemaker in the long war between Kurdish rebels and the state.   “He talked about what a tragedy it was that Turkish and Kurdish mothers were both reading the same Islamic prayers over the bodies of their fallen sons,” says Nicholas Danforth, a nonresident fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for Euro...

Nobody can predict the future, and warfare is particularly unpredictable. Nonetheless, the stakes involved are too high not to try. Attempts to understand what tomorrow’s wars might look like, and what futuristic weapons will be used to fight them, have long captured the imaginations of military planners, science fiction authors and the general public alike. But, says Mike Martin, a former British...

Five weeks after intense fighting broke out between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Nisrin Elamin and Khalid Mustafa Medani joined New Lines magazine’s Kwangu Liwewe and Danny Postel for a deep dive into the origins of Sudan’s nascent civil war. The army is led by Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, while the RSF answers to Gen. Mohamed Hamdan “He...

It was Christmas Eve when a longtime colleague contacted composer Tarik O’Regan to tell him that the U.K.’s new king wanted him to write a piece for his upcoming coronation. “I thought he was actually winding me up slightly,” he tells New Lines magazine’s Lydia Wilson.    O’Regan had met Charles III more than 15 years ago, at a performance at Lincoln Cathedral, and he had clearly made an impressio...

In August 2020, a catastrophic port explosion tore through the Lebanese capital of Beirut,  leaving more than 200 dead, thousands injured and 300,000 without homes. In a city renowned for its history, Beirutis take particular pride in their city’s almost unparalleled heritage — something that unites them across the country’s deep religious and social divisions.    Fearing that they might lose the...

“I didn't feel I had a torn identity at all, I felt a part of the fabric of this nation. I felt very Michigan,” says Heather Raffo, an Iraqi-American playwright, filmmaker and actress. But then, she tells New Lines magazine’s Rasha Al Aqeedi, the outbreak of the Gulf War in the early 1990s forced her to grapple with what it meant to have her identity split between two nations at war. “And it was r...

After widespread protests led to the overthrow of Omar al-Bashir in 2019, Sudan seemed to be on track toward civilian rule. But in 2021, a coup ended the country’s brief respite from military dictatorship. Since then, power has been concentrated in the hands of two men — Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the de facto leader of the country, and the ambitious Gen.  Mohamad Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, co...

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, Vladimir Putin’s government has intensified its efforts to secure the hearts and minds of its citizens — and, most of all, its young people.    “History and the myths of the past have been very carefully constructed by the state,” Dr. Ian Garner, a historian and analyst of Russian war propaganda, tells New Lines Magazine’s Amie...