“In my 20 years of covering war, I came to this realization that at the core of almost every single decision that is made — whether it’s by an individual or by a government or by a soldier — is emotion,” says veteran international correspondent Arwa Damon. And in a conflict as steeped in trauma as the current war in Gaza, she tells New Lines magazine’s Faisal Al Yafai, the intensity of emotion clouds judgements, hardens attitudes and distorts decision-making, with devastating consequences. “Fear...
Nov 24, 2023•46 min•Ep. 67
The war in Sudan, between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) controlled by Mohamad Hamdan Dagalo and the Sudanese Armed Forces led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, has killed thousands of civilians and displaced millions. The two men were formerly partners, leading Sudan’s military junta before Dagalo’s ambitions created a rift between them that has torn the country in two. But for the people of Darfur, a predominantly Black African region in Sudan’s arid west, the catastrophe has been partic...
Nov 17, 2023•36 min•Ep. 66
“On the 7th of October I was on my way to a day out in the north of England with my family when I opened a news feed and found out that things are kicking off between Israel and Gaza,” Sharone Lifschitz tells New Lines magazine’s Joshua Martin. “My parents live about a mile from Gaza. I called my mom, and she didn't answer.” By the evening, it had become clear that her parents were among the hostages kidnapped by Hamas. Her mother, Yochaved Lifschitz, was freed 16 days after the attacks, and ima...
Nov 10, 2023•48 min•Ep. 65
On Aug. 4, 2020, Dalal Mawad was preparing to feed her cat when hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate, left forgotten at Beirut’s busy port, exploded. The blast ripped through the Lebanese capital, killing hundreds and injuring thousands. It was one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions in human history, the result not of war but of corruption. Yet, to date, no one has been held accountable. In the aftermath, Mawad began work on her recently published book about the port blast, “All She Los...
Nov 03, 2023•46 min•Ep. 64
In retaliation for the brutal Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, Israel has been bombarding Gaza for three weeks now, displacing more than 1 million Palestinians and killing thousands of civilians. Israeli forces have made localized raids into the area but have not yet launched the full ground invasion that officials say is planned. “The military plans can be drawn now. Will they be able to implement them? That's a big question mark,” says Gilbert Achcar, professor of development studies and international...
Oct 27, 2023•24 min•Ep. 63
On Oct. 6, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel were locked in a delicate diplomatic dance. A tentative normalization process between Israel and Saudi Arabia was ongoing, while in March, a Chinese-brokered rapprochement began to thaw the Saudi relationship with their common rival Iran. Meanwhile, Iran continued to expand its network of proxies throughout the region as Israel sought to contain the move through diplomatic and clandestine action. But the events of the next day and beyond have changed ever...
Oct 20, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 62
After a surprise attack by Hamas killed nearly 1,000 Israeli civilians, the Middle East stands on the brink of being engulfed by war. Israel’s retaliation has been no less devastating as the IDF laid siege to Gaza, killing more than 1,000 Palestinian civilians so far in a bombing campaign of unprecedented ferocity. A ground invasion seems imminent, and the fighting threatens to spill over into a catastrophic regional war. To understand the genesis of this crisis, New Lines magazine’s Danny Poste...
Oct 13, 2023•57 min•Ep. 61
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 worst. “The disease is endemic to the Ganges Valley in India, but it did not have its international jou...
Oct 06, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 60
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 progressives has taken, Mounk sought to understand them. His new book, “The Identity Trap,” presents a history of...
Sep 29, 2023•44 min•Ep. 59
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, with hundreds if not thousands of protesters arrested and tortured and several of them executed. “...
Sep 22, 2023•52 min•Ep. 58
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 the basis that they violated France’s longstanding principle of “laicite.” “Laicite is a form of sec...
Sep 15, 2023•49 min•Ep. 57
“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, is that large swaths of the country are actually controlled by local independent and autonomous gover...
Sep 08, 2023•52 min•Season 4Ep. 1
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...
Sep 01, 2023•53 min•Ep. 56
“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 family level, it's almost as if it's seen as a marker of success. Finding the right match for your son o...
Aug 25, 2023•41 min•Ep. 55
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 progress. “These guys are used to rigging the election,” he tells New Lines magazine’s Kwangu Liwewe. “...
Aug 18, 2023•24 min•Ep. 54
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 establishment, with only two members of Parliament dissenting. But it also had powerful backing from abroad. “...
Aug 11, 2023•24 min•Ep. 53
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 Koulabdara tells New Lines magazine’s Danny Postel. “They have no self destruct mechanism, so they'll be...
Aug 04, 2023•45 min•Ep. 52
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 major influence on her as a budding writer. “I was beginning to have a sense that writing was the thing I ...
Jul 28, 2023•32 min•Ep. 51
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, says Faisal Devji, a professor of history at the University of Oxford, geopolitical storytelling is ab...
Jul 20, 2023•42 min•Ep. 50
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 check on a form,” says sociologist Jean Beaman, an associate professor at University of California, Santa Barba...
Jul 14, 2023•42 min•Ep. 49
“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 red carpet for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in what was only the third formal state visit of hi...
Jul 07, 2023•40 min•Ep. 48
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 only a matter of time until it bubbled over and spilled out into the wider world. Today, many of thos...
Jun 30, 2023•56 min•Ep. 47
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 — and drew increased scrutiny of their policies toward the conflict. “My view is that African countri...
Jun 23, 2023•36 min•Ep. 46
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 Youssef met “Anna,” a young Alawite Syrian who was studying abroad, the military man was skeptical at first. ...
Jun 16, 2023•38 min•Ep. 45
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 European Foreign Policy and the author of “The Remaking of Republican Turkey: Memory and Modernity Since t...
Jun 09, 2023•41 min•Ep. 44
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 Army officer, “technology is often someone we focus on, but it's actually a bit of an addition.” As...
Jun 02, 2023•26 min•Ep. 43
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 “Hemedti” Dagalo. After seizing power in a 2021 military coup , the two men had ruled Sudan together fo...
May 26, 2023•48 min•Ep. 42
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 impression on the then-Prince of Wales. The king’s detailed interest in his work surprised him, given the 74-yea...
May 19, 2023•48 min•Ep. 41
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 physical past forever if they didn’t act, a massive volunteer effort began to protect, restore and prese...
May 11, 2023•30 min•Ep. 40
“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 really what has come to define me as an artist.” Raffo finished her award-winning play, “The Nine Par...
May 04, 2023•53 min•Ep. 39
