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, commander of the notorious paramilitary known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The relationship betwe...
Apr 28, 2023•46 min•Ep. 38
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 Ferris-Rotman. “It's a mythological narrative of death and rebirth of utopias created through sacrifice...
Apr 21, 2023•38 min•Ep. 37
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 authorities, they were forced to navigate a kafkaesque international system of borders, papers and ...
Apr 13, 2023•34 min•Ep. 36
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 book “Heidegger in Ruins.” That’s no accident, he tells New Lines magazine’s Danny Postel. It was a stra...
Apr 06, 2023•45 min•Ep. 35
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 Babyn Yar, alongside hundreds of thousands of others, by Waffen SS and Wehrmacht forces. It was one of the...
Mar 30, 2023•35 min•Ep. 34
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 left to stop the United States from spreading democracy and human rights around the world. “And that ...
Mar 24, 2023•51 min•Ep. 33
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 stop this war from happening.” But her family couldn’t avoid the presence of the foreign troops forever. A...
Mar 17, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Season 3Ep. 10
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 writers like William Gibson wanted to change that they wanted to change how we viewed the future, becau...
Mar 09, 2023•32 min•Ep. 32
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 cabal and that Donald Trump was fighting a secret war to defeat them. Gabriel Gatehouse, an award-winn...
Mar 02, 2023•51 min•Ep. 31
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 rin...
Feb 24, 2023•43 min•Ep. 30
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 centuri...
Feb 16, 2023•34 min•Ep. 29
“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-langu...
Feb 09, 2023•28 min•Ep. 28
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 e...
Feb 02, 2023•51 min•Ep. 27
“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 b...
Jan 26, 2023•50 min•Season 3Ep. 3
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 ...
Jan 20, 2023•44 min•Ep. 26
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,” ...
Jan 12, 2023•46 min•Ep. 25
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 exten...
Jan 06, 2023•33 min•Ep. 24
[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 bei...
Dec 29, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 23
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.
Dec 23, 2022•37 min•Ep. 22
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 corrupt...
Dec 15, 2022•30 min•Ep. 21
“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 c...
Dec 08, 2022•48 min•Season 2Ep. 20
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 ...
Dec 01, 2022•45 min•Ep. 3
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, c...
Nov 25, 2022•51 min•Ep. 2
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 Magazine's Lydia Wilson. For merchants, it was important to know which cities pro...
Nov 17, 2022•27 min•Season 1Ep. 1
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 last time we had a midterm election that went this well for the party in the White House was 2002, in ...
Nov 10, 2022•40 min•Season 1Ep. 1
“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 ki...
Nov 03, 2022•35 min•Season 1Ep. 1
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. They have no moral code. They are opportunistic. They will be whatever the public needs them to be...
Oct 27, 2022•36 min•Season 1Ep. 1
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 discov...
Oct 20, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 1
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 w...
Oct 13, 2022•44 min•Season 1Ep. 1
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 Magazine's Amie Ferris-Rotman. “It was easy for Russians to push it off to the edge of their minds...
Oct 07, 2022•49 min•Season 1Ep. 1
