New Lines Magazine

New Lines Magazine New Lines Magazine – a local magazine for the world. Essays run daily online and quarterly in print.

Between 2011 and 2024, an estimated 100,000 to 180,000 people were forcibly disappeared inside Syria, swallowed by a pri...
12/18/2025

Between 2011 and 2024, an estimated 100,000 to 180,000 people were forcibly disappeared inside Syria, swallowed by a prison system designed to erase them from public life and memory.

When the Assad regime collapsed last December, the doors of its prisons were flung open to release tens of thousands of political prisoners long presumed dead. A year later, three former detainees — one rebuilding his family, one turning his trauma into film and one determined to forget everything — trace the uneven road of life after captivity.

Read the full story at the link in our bio.

✍️ Paloma de Dinechin
📸 Alexandra Henry

Around Christmastime in 1984, Band Aid, a supergroup that included pop stars like U2’s Bono, Boy George, Sting, members ...
12/16/2025

Around Christmastime in 1984, Band Aid, a supergroup that included pop stars like U2’s Bono, Boy George, Sting, members of Duran Duran and George Michael, topped the U.K. charts and raised millions for what the BBC, earlier that fall, had called “the closest thing to hell on earth” — the famine ravaging Ethiopia. Band Aid’s promotional campaign bore the slogan: “Feed the World. Buy this record.”

But as writes, “The song’s portrayal of Africa as a land of perpetual scarcity — ‘where nothing ever grows,’ as Boy George sang — was far from reality.”

Now, 40 years after “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was released, Ethiopia’s prime minister has declared the country self-sufficient in wheat, and even ready to export. But in Oromia, Ethiopia’s prime agricultural region, farmers tell another story — of shrinking plots, costly reforms and a risky plan for collective farming.

“For these communities, the government’s cluster program and impressive macroeconomic figures remain little more than a hollow refrain, one that does nothing to ease their daily struggle.”

Read the full story at the link in our bio.

✍️
📸

The tiny village of Zabbougha in Lebanon’s mountainous North Metn district has witnessed wars, famine and generations of...
12/12/2025

The tiny village of Zabbougha in Lebanon’s mountainous North Metn district has witnessed wars, famine and generations of loss. At the heart of that village stands a single family house that has seen it all.

In today’s first person photo essay, Michael Karam traces the story of the home, built in the 18th century by his fifth great-grandfather, Mufrij Karam. Over the years, it sheltered starving children during the World War I famine and survived decades of upheaval and exile, including the migration of family members to Brazil and beyond, the death of relatives in a failed 1949 coup and shelling during the civil war. Throughout it all, the house remained a testament to the resilience of Zabbougha and the enduring spirit of a mountain village shaped by both tragedy and endurance.

✍️ Michael Karam
📸 Courtesy of Michael Karam

High on Mongolia’s steppe, herders like Namchin Batkhuu comb the world’s finest cashmere from their goats, a labor that ...
12/10/2025

High on Mongolia’s steppe, herders like Namchin Batkhuu comb the world’s finest cashmere from their goats, a labor that sustains entire families, yet now unfolds in a collapsing landscape.

In a generation, the global demand for luxury cashmere has pushed herders to expand their herds and strip grasslands to a critical point. “Twenty-five years ago, the grass reached my knees. Today, it barely covers my fingers,” says cooperative leader Oyun Tsevelmaa. “We’ve lost biodiversity and many plants essential for our animals. Before 1990, Soviet cooperatives and herders jointly managed the pastures. Now everyone acts independently, and no one is held accountable for misuse.” Today, nearly 76% of Mongolia’s pastures show signs of desertification.

As pastures that once fed horses, yaks and sheep are thinning, and the steppe is drying out from overgrazing, can organizations claiming to supply “responsible” and “sustainable” cashmere make an impact?

✍️ Aïda Delpuech, Sara Manisera, Daniela Sala
📸

A cluster of abandoned military barracks outside Tartus, Syria, has become an unlikely experiment in communal survival a...
12/09/2025

A cluster of abandoned military barracks outside Tartus, Syria, has become an unlikely experiment in communal survival and coexistence. Led by veteran Marxist organizer Suleiman “Kastro” Dakdouk, the Solidarity Fields co-op helps displaced families produce food, earn an income and live side by side across sectarian lines. 

“We are filling the gaps left by the former regime,” Kastro tells .danon. “The new government has left government buildings and public lands empty, which we must take advantage of. … I am against giving people money — to preserve people’s dignity, they must produce.” 

✍️ + 📸 Natacha Danon

12/08/2025

What connects the recent National Guard shootings in Washington, DC, with the covert raids Lynzy Billing uncovered in Afghanistan? And how do the power networks behind the Epstein story continue to shape American politics?
This week, and join to break down the systems, secrecy and consequences behind their latest investigations.

To listen to more: https://linktr.ee/theledepodcast

🎙️Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai featuring Murtaza Hussain and Lynzy Billing
🎧Produced by Finbar Anderson

Leaked CCTV footage that appears to show soldiers sexually assaulting a Palestinian detainee has set off a political fir...
12/03/2025

Leaked CCTV footage that appears to show soldiers sexually assaulting a Palestinian detainee has set off a political firestorm across Israel. The footage, released after a stalled investigation by the country’s military advocate general (MAG), Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, has forced a national reckoninging over power, impunity and the limits of military justice. Right-wing groups quickly mobilized to defend the soldiers and attack the prosecutor, casting her as a traitor who is sabotaging the army from within. Meanwhile, liberal Israelis see her as a guardian of democracy, elevating her as one of the rare public figures willing to uphold ethical principles even at personal cost. Her subsequent arrest, public vilification and reported su***de attempts have only deepened the national spectacle.

As Ori Goldberg writes, the entire episode has become less about justice for the assaulted detainee and more about competing visions of what Israel imagines itself to be. “For both sides, the issue is not what the soldiers did to the Palestinian prisoner, but how and whether the law was applied.” 

“The right enshrines Israel’s genocidal campaign as strategically and morally necessary. The liberals are eager to suppress and reject accusations of genocide that would be placed at their own doorstep. Israelis — right, centrist and liberal — are interested only in winning their own wars against each other; each group wants its version of Israeli character and identity to triumph. In the war on everything and everyone else, particularly the Palestinians, Israelis are united in futile, righteous, passive and aggressive indignation.”

✍️ Ori Goldberg

📸 Matan Golan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

In the Netherlands, Blackface season begins each year in mid-November, when St. Nicholas traditionally arrives from Spai...
12/02/2025

In the Netherlands, Blackface season begins each year in mid-November, when St. Nicholas traditionally arrives from Spain — so the story goes — on a steamboat packed with presents for well-behaved children. For decades, the white saint was accompanied by “Black Pete,” or “Zwarte Piet” in Dutch: white performers in blackface, wearing Afro wigs and oversize red lips, behaving clownishly as they assisted the saint.

Years of persistent protest, public debate, and negotiations with local organizing committees and mayors have nearly eradicated the Dutch blackface tradition. But, as writes, its remaining supporters increasingly see it as a right-wing cause, positioning Black Pete as a symbolic front in their campaign against immigration, anti-racist movements and a perceived erosion of Dutch culture.

✍️ Fréderike Geerdink

📸 Pierre Crom/Getty Images

12/01/2025

Mark Galeotti is quick to reassure New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai that he’s not an “organized crime fanboy.”

“I’m fascinated by it, but on the whole these are ghastly people — especially from the ones I’ve met,” he tells Al Yafai on The Lede.
Galeotti’s fascination led to his new book, “Homo Criminalis: How Crime Organizes the World.” The book is a sweeping history of how crime has been central to, and indeed continues to shape, the building of human society.

🎙️Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai featuring Mark Galeotti
🎧Produced by Finbar Anderson

Please join and Nighthawk for a panel discussion with reporters and editors about the dramatic changes inU.S. immigrat...
12/01/2025

Please join and Nighthawk for a panel discussion with reporters and editors about the dramatic changes in
U.S. immigration policy under the second Trump administration and the evolving realities for Chicago's immigrant communities.

aydacamlo covers environmental justice and immigrant communities for Borderless Magazine. is Borderless Magazine's newsletter writer and reporter. ._ is the deputy editor at Borderless Magazine. Danny Postel (moderator) is Politics Editor of New Lines Magazine.

This event is part of the new series Juxtapositions: Conversations on Art, Ideas and Global Cross-Currents, a co-production of New Lines Magazine and Nighthawk. It's free of charge and open to the public, but register to secure a spot — seating is limited.

Reserve a spot: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/evolving-realities-for-chicagos-immigrant-communities-tickets-1972821170227?aff=oddtdtcreator

The powerful are seeking total control over humanity’s greatest equalizer — death. It is just this kind of grandiosity t...
12/01/2025

The powerful are seeking total control over humanity’s greatest equalizer — death. It is just this kind of grandiosity that Franciscan monks were trying to tackle when they built their Chapel of Bones at Evora, Portugal. Coming out of the midday sun, walking through the shaded cloisters where the monks had their cells and slept, the grim nature of the interior becomes apparent. The chapel is richly decorated with human remains geometrically arranged on columns and walls. Its interior decor of skulls and bones creates a ghastly play of light and shade that is intended to convey the unsettling message of life’s transience.

✍️Joanne Drayton
📸David Silverman/Getty Images

Address

Washington D.C., DC

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when New Lines Magazine posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to New Lines Magazine:

Shortcuts

Share

Category

Introducing Newlines

Newlines Magazine, published by the Center for Global Policy, is a forum for the best ideas and writing about the Middle East and beyond.

We specialize in long-form essays, including reportage, arguments, and memoirs, which bring together politics, culture, and history.

The Middle East is central to our focus, with an emphasis on voices that have an intimate relationship with the region. But we aim to include work from or about other parts of the world. Our only requirement is thoughtfulness and good prose.

With Newlines, we aspire to create a platform for original writing and thinking about a complex and often misunderstood and caricatured region. We consider the popular Arab uprisings of 2011 and their turbulent aftermath to be pivotal points of modern history.