The Lede

Tunisia’s New Autocrat — with Mohamed-Dhia Hammami and Lydia Wilson

Tunisia was the cradle of the Arab Spring, and had been hailed as its biggest success story. But President Kais Saied’s new constitution, narrowly approved in a controversial referendum last July, has changed that. “Kais Saied has unchecked power,” Mohamed-Dhia Hammami tells New Lines Magazine's Lydia Wilson in The Lede. “Even under Ben Ali, we used to have some sort of balances and checks. There are some people who even compare his power to the North Korean leader’s.” Saied ran for president as a political outsider in 2019, vowing to tackle ‘moral and financial corruption’. The country’s continuing economic crisis left many Tunisians disenchanted with the status quo, and Saied’s populist platform won him the election. Even as he suspended parliament and began ruling by decree in 2021, he continued to attract support. But, Hammami says, his latest move may have been a step too far. “Saied is having serious problems consolidating his power.” Produced by Joshua Martin

One Year After the Fall of Kabul — with Fazelminallah Qazizai, Nazila Jamshidi & Chris Sands

One year after the fall of Kabul, this special anniversary episode of The Lede looks back on the momentous events of Aug. 15, 2021, and explores how Afghanistan has fared in the aftermath. New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai talks to Afghanistan correspondent Fazelminallah Qazizai, who was in Kabul the day it fell, about what the first year of Taliban rule has looked like from the ground. He also speaks to human rights specialist Nazila Jamshidi about how the millions of Afghans in the diaspora have been affected. Finally, Rasha Elass catches up with Chris Sands, the magazine’s South Asia editor, about ISIS’s plan to weaken the Taliban and plunge Afghanistan back into war. Produced by Joshua Martin

When Reality Is a Lie — with Lea Ypi and Faisal Al Yafai

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 being taught a new language,” she tells New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede. “Almost overnight, you’re told that all of these names that you had for things are now different—you have different names and different categories and different ways of making sense of the world.” They talk about how to see the gap between ideology and reality, where people look for certainty in uncertain times and what it actually means to be free. Produced by Joshua Martin & Christin El Kholy

Love, Lust and Literature — with Selma Dabbagh and Lydia Wilson

Selma Dabbagh is a British-Palestinian writer and the editor of the 2021 anthology “We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers.” Through poetry and short stories, novel excerpts and letters, the collection pulls from more than 1,000 years of Arab women’s writing — from pre-Islamic poetry to contemporary fiction. “There seemed to be something so modern and pithy and frank and refreshing about their voices,” Dabbagh tells New Lines Magazine's Lydia Wilson in the first episode of the magazine’s new podcast, “The Lede.” “My interest was really in looking at how these voices had changed over time.” They talk about the difficulty of writing about love and intimacy, Orientalism and the male gaze, as well as why Arab women writers are expected to be “political.” Produced by Joshua Martin & Christin El Kholy

The Rise of the House of Osman — with Marc David Baer and Faisal Al Yafai

The Ottoman sultans reigned for more than 600 years. In that time, they conquered almost all of what we consider to be the Middle East today, as well as North Africa, parts of East Africa and Southeastern Europe. But over the course of the 19th century, their power waned, and the beleaguered empire finally collapsed after a bitter defeat in World War I. Their fall created the Middle East as we know it today: It opened the region to European colonialism, invigorated nationalism and ended the spiritual leadership of the caliphate. But one cannot understand why the empire’s fall was so consequential — why an Ottomanless Middle East was such a big deal — without understanding how the Ottomans made their mark in the first place. Professor Marc David Baer is a historian at the London School of Economics and the author of “The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs.” For this third installment of our series on the empire’s fall, he joins New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai to explore the Ottoman world that was lost, for better or for worse, 100 years ago. Produced by Joshua Martin

License to Laugh — with Maz Jobrani and Anthony Elghossain

Maz Jobrani is a comedian, actor and writer who lives in Los Angeles. In this podcast, he joinsNew Lines Magazine's Anthony Elghossain for a conversation on comedy and life. He talks about how he got started in comedy, what it was like playing terrorists on TV and how he broke out of the box as a comic observer on issues great and small—from the geopolitics of the so-called War on Terror to the Lebanese sense of militant hospitality. Produced by Joshua Martin

A Poet’s Take on Language, the Sea and Abortion — with Zeina Hashem Beck and Rasha Elass

Lebanese poet Zeina Hashem Beck has been publishing poetry in Arabic and English for over a decade. Her latest collection of bilingual poems, titled “O,” was published at the beginning of July. In this episode she joins New Lines Magazine's Rasha Elass to share her thoughts on what inspires her bilingual verses and how they intertwine over themes of language, country and womanhood. They talk about abortion, leaving Lebanon and why she can’t live without the sea. Produced by Joshua Martin

Turning Russian Oligarchs into London Aristocrats — with Oliver Bullough and Faisal Al Yafai

Since Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year, there has been a renewed interest in the wealth and influence of Russian oligarchs in the U.K. Moscow’s elites have bought mansions in London’s ultra-exclusive neighborhoods and send their children to British private schools. But Russians are not the only ones taking advantage of Britain’s willingness to turn a blind eye to overseas corruption. Investigative journalist Oliver Bullough is the author of “Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals.” In this podcast, he talks to New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai about how London has grown into the world’s kleptocracy capital — by providing the world’s wealthiest not only a place to hide their stolen money but also to spend it with no questions asked. Produced by Joshua Martin & Christine El Kholy

Retranslating the Poetry of Ibn Arabi — with Yasmine Seale, Robin Moger and Lydia Wilson

Ibn Arabi was a 12th-century philosopher, poet and “one of the great spiritual teachers of the Muslim world.” Both his philosophical works and his poetry have been translated countless times, most recently by Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger in their highly experimental 2022 collection “Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi.” In this podcast, the two join New Lines Magazine's Lydia Wilson to talk about the subtle yet significant differences between English and Arabic poetry, how they developed their innovative approach to co-translation and how that approach reflected the themes and ideas already present in Ibn Arabi’s original text. Produced by Joshua Martin

Imperial Folly After the Ottomans — with James Barr and Faisal Al Yafai

The First World War put an end to 600 years of Ottoman rule. Buoyed by promises of self-determination on the part of the victorious powers, the region’s peoples prepared for a future free of imperial rule. They were to be bitterly disappointed. European rhetoric about self-rule had never been sincerely intended to apply to non-Europeans — which was made brutally clear by Britain and France as they divided the post-Ottoman Middle East between themselves in the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement. “It was a secret deal to carve up the Levantine part of the Ottoman Empire between France and Britain,” explains historian James Barr, author of “A Line in the Sand and Lords of the Desert.” “There was a diagonal line drawn, in Sykes’ infamous words, from the ‘E’ in Acre to the last ‘K’ in Kirkuk.” In this follow-up to our episode with Eugene Rogan on the Ottoman collapse, Barr joins New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai to talk about how European colonial powers attempted to take their place, why the region seems to be so attractive to foreign imperial powers and why their efforts to control it are almost always doomed. Produced by Joshua Martin