The Lede

Anna Lekas Miller is a journalist covering borders and migration as well as the author of the upcoming book “Love Across Borders: Passports, Papers, and Romance in a Divided World.” She had been reporting from Istanbul at the height of the Syrian Civil War when she met the Syrian journalist who would one day become her husband. The two quickly fell in love. But after he was deported by the Turkish...

Martin Heidegger was one of the 20th century’s most influential philosophers. His ideas continue to have a profound effect on modern thinkers and are taught in philosophy classes the world over. He was also a Nazi.   “There's a popularized version of his theories that’s extremely widespread today among far-right intellectuals,” says Richard Wolin, an intellectual historian and the author of the bo...

Linda Kinstler, an academic and journalist, only discovered the truth about her grandfather a few years ago.    “Both of my parents were born in Riga, Latvia, during the Soviet Union,” she tells New Lines’ Amie Ferris-Rotman. “But they came from very different backgrounds.”   Her mother came from an old Jewish family in Ukraine. During World War II, many of her family members were gunned down at B...

Samuel Moyn was working as an intern at the Clinton White House as the United States intervened in Bosnia and Kosovo.   “I was in my 20s. It was after 1989. And it seemed as if we’d lived through the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama told us,” he explains to New Lines Magazine’s Faisal Al Yafai. Post-Cold War triumphalism was at its apex, and in those heady days, it seemed that there was nothing...

Noor Ghazi was 13 years old when the U.S. and its allies declared war on Iraq.    “We gathered at my grandparents; house, because it was far away from any strategic location that might be targeted by the coalition,” she tells New Lines magazine’s Rasha Al Aqeedi, who also lived through the war. “I was listening to the clock ticking. It sounded very slow, like it was just dragging itself out to sto...

In recent decades, one subgenre of science fiction has emerged as the de facto vision of the future: cyberpunk. Fed up with the overly utopian visions of the future cultivated by events like the moon landing and served up in popular culture like The Jetsons and Star Trek, cyberpunk sought to complicate this with a “high tech, low life” countervision rooted in a dystopian lens.  “Early cyberpunk wr...

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...

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 Nigeri...

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...