Hosted by Erin Brown
Featuring Lisa Goldman, Surbhi Gupta and Kareem Shaheen
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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For this year’s Christmas special episode, we ask a team of New Lines editors to highlight some of their favorite stories from 2025 and reflect on the power of culture to bring people together.
Europe Editor Lisa Goldman picks an essay by Rida Abu Rass, a Palestinian citizen of Israel from Jaffa, who, on his first visit back after Oct. 7, 2023, wonders whether there is still an Arab-Jewish future for his native country. “It’s a very complex, humanistic and insightful analysis of contemporary Israeli society,” says Goldman. “I don’t want at all to present this as some kind of romantic idea of peace, love and kumbaya, but I think it sheds some light on the complexity of lived reality, of how people live their lives within a situation that looks quite binary from the outside.”
“You really saw the power of culture and music bringing people together.”
Marking a momentous year for Syria, Middle East Editor Kareem Shaheen shares a story by Syrian journalist Kamal Shahin, who profiled a helicopter pilot who carried out barrel bombing raids for the government of Bashar al-Assad. “What they were convincing themselves that they were doing was that they were bombing the bad guys — they were bombing the terrorists and therefore protecting Syrians and protecting the country from their evil,” says Shaheen. The story shows how “ordinary people can be driven to justify acts of insane violence and acts of depravity and still see themselves as human.”
After India and Pakistan traded blows in May, barely averting a full-scale war, South Asia Editor Surbhi Gupta attended a concert by Indian singer Karan Aujla. Reflecting on the experience, Gupta says she was struck by having members of both communities in the audience. “We may not agree on politics, but there were Indians and Pakistanis from the larger Punjabi diaspora all in one space,” Gupta says. “You really saw the power of culture and music bringing people together.”
North Africa Editor Erin Brown remembers visiting an exhibition of Fra Angelico paintings in Florence with a friend, a scholar of early music. At the San Marco Museum, they came across a 15th-century songbook written in neumes, a form of early music notation, which her friend was able to sing — “much to the delight” of other visitors. “I thought, what an amazing thing about culture and the power of writing that somebody from 500 years ago put what they were thinking and feeling down on a piece of vellum. And 500 years later, this soul from a different time and place could interpret it and create something that sounded beautiful.”
Further reading:
A Palestinian Citizen of Israel Reflects on Life in the Shadow of Genocide in Gaza – by Rida Abu Rass
Confessions of a Syrian Barrel Bomber – by Kamal Shahin
When a Dutch Drug Kingpin Needed a New Base, Sierra Leone Welcomed Him With Open Arms – by Oliver Dunn and Josef Skrdlik
The South Asian Vote May Be Split for Zohran Mamdani in New York City – by Yashica Dutt