Take a look inside our eagerly awaited third print edition of New Lines. Discover captivating stories from around the world in this issue: From Oregon’s drug experiment to a Kuwait English class with James Joyce’s portrait, each essay offers a unique and compelling narrative. We bring you personal journeys, like uncovering royal Indigenous Māori roots and shedding light on the struggles of Gambians under brutal rule. With deliberate storytelling and a global-local approach, we invite you to join us on this remarkable journey.
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Oregon has long stood at the forefront of the national effort to roll back the war on drugs. A groundbreaking new drug decriminalization law has received mixed reviews. Some have blamed it for spikes in crime, drug use and homelessness. Others have compared it to the Portuguese experiment that helped bring an HIV epidemic under control.
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The National Institute of Mental Health definition of psychosis speaks of “loss of contact with reality.” That is what is happening. Masses of people, whether unable or unwilling to recognize reality, are substituting nightmarish fantasies generated within their movements, making these into a political force moving millions.
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It has been half a decade since Yahya Jammeh’s brutal regime crumbled under the weight of his people’s will and international pressure, but, for victims of his abuses, the search for justice remains a frustrating and unfulfilled quest.
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In the months since the attack, survivors and witnesses have relayed their experiences to journalists and investigators working for justice. Their testimonies, told here for the first time, offer evidence of a war crime. They demonstrate both the cruelty of the perpetrators and the incredible strength of the survivors, who also fought to save the lives of others.
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The enduring legacy of the Lenin bust is a story about present-day Italy and the country’s long history of activism — the kind that shaped a small town’s identity for over a century and continues to do so — but also about far-right sentiments carving out ever-larger spaces in national politics.
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With Indian crime dramas becoming a popular global export, it is important to turn to Hindi pulp fiction, often dismissed as backward and unmodern while English-language novels command the right to be defined as cosmopolitan.
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Having a whakapapa for Māori is more than having a family tree. The names of tīpuna (ancestors), the events, the places, the mountains and rivers locate and anchor Māori on the timeline of their heritage. This is the miracle of whakapapa: when ancestors whisper secrets to their mokopuna (grandchildren).
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When a line makes its way from a 1919 poem by Kahlil Gibran to a 1965 melody sung by Fairuz to a calligraphic piece by the Dubai-based artist Majid al-Yousef, who set the words down in the diwani script that goes back half a millennium — this is "Arabness."
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To reject political systems on account of their Western origin is to retreat into essentialism of a culture, whether “Arab,” “Islamic,” “African” or other, claiming that there is something specific to the people that requires them to live in a society different from others. Could world museums be a tool in overcoming such essentialism, helping break down rigid borders, both identity-based and geographical?
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What can Euro-American modernism mean to an undergraduate student of literature in Kuwait today? My students are much more focused on claiming identity than appreciating the power of not belonging. What this desire to identify forecloses, however, is contingency, openness, transformation — the possibility that things might be differently arranged.
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If Saghieh is branded today by fans and detractors alike as the dean, or grand old man, of Arab liberalism, he certainly did not begin his intellectual journey in that vein. It was only after 30 years of espousing every stripe of radicalism that he met with an insurmountable crisis of faith and “recovered,” as he puts it half-jokingly, from the “fever” of political extremism that would otherwise have killed him.
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