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New Lines Magazine •

The Butterfly Effect of Mexico’s Cartel Violence

Some 60 miles northwest of Mexico City, way up in the rugged mountains of Michoacan, are dense oyamel forests. Scientifically, the oyamel tree, a type of conifer, is called Abies religiosa, meaning “sacred fir.” It earned this holy connotation because its branches look similar to hands folded in prayer, and the association deepened because locals use those boughs to decorate churches at Christmastime. To get to Michoacan’s sacred forests, I first came to Angangueo, an old mining town of red-tile...
ZNetwork •

Called to Arms: The Foreign Nationals of the IDF

Of the Israeli military’s vast arsenal – MK-82 bombs, UAVs, Merkava tanks, Tavor assault rifles and an unspoken cache of nuclear warheads somewhere in the desert – diversity may be one of Israel’s lesser known weapons. 
Israel is a very small country with thunderous military might. Each Israeli citizen over 18 is required to serve in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), whereas others join voluntarily – from places like China, Honduras, Thailand, France, South Africa and, of course, the United State...
New Lines Magazine •

How a Sufi Saint’s Coffee Recipe Took Senegal by Storm

You could sample every concoction on the Starbucks menu. You could drink your way around the world’s coffee capitals: Addis Ababa, Rome, Seoul and Istanbul. You could buy a fancy espresso machine, learn to brew Vietnamese coffee or even experiment with a French press at home. And still, after all that, cafe Touba would taste like nothing you’ve ever had.It’s a potent, spicy beverage sold on seemingly every street corner in Senegal. Local vendors tend to kettles, boiling water over charcoal fires...
WIRED •

He Built the Definitive Epstein Database—and It Consumed His Life

In February, a user named EricKeller2 posted on Reddit. “I mapped every connection in the Epstein files,” he wrote. He had built a website and database of more than 1.5 million files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case. A giant interactive network graph showed the connections between 1,000-plus people in Epstein’s social world—through flight manifests, email exchanges, and other documents that connect them. The post included a link to the site: Epsteinexposed.com.That post got 5.5 million views....
History •

This war-torn village is fighting to keep Christ’s language alive

And Maaloula’s long history of interfaith peace between Christian and Muslim residents has been strained too. After the 2013 battle in Maaloula, the village’s Muslims were barred from returning home by Assad’s forces. Now their Christian neighbors, a religious minority in Syria who make up the majority of the village, fear for their safety in light of rising sectarian violence and a new government composed of the former rebels,which assumed power quickly in 2024.Local linguists have translated t...
New Lines Magazine •

How the Tiger Became an Indian National Symbol

In an open-top jeep, we rumbled into the forest at an ungodly hour of the morning. Bundled in layers and watching as the jeep’s headlights carved into the mist ahead, I was given the same advice Bill Clinton was given when he went looking for Bengal tigers in India more than 20 years earlier. “We’ve warned them [the Americans] that it’s not like British colonial times,” an official at Ranthambore National Park, located in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, had told the BBC after Clinton’s visi...
Foreign Policy •

The Uncomfortable Truth About Climate AI

In recent years, new technology has transformed the tools available to mitigate the effects of climate change. Specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly become a widespread instrument in the climate fight—even as it consumes exceptional amounts of energy and water itself. Today, militaries and nonstate actors, including the United Nations, are leveraging AI to foretell climate-related disasters, optimize energy use, and monitor ecological degradation.Over the last two decades, clima...
New Lines Magazine •

The MAGA Battle Over the Epstein Files

The White House is haunted — not by the ghosts of Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln, but by the scandal-infested legacy of billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Once described by Donald Trump as a man who “never dies,” Epstein’s shadow now looms over the presidency, even from beyond the grave. And it’s thrown the Trump administration into deep disarray.There’s a clear reason for that. It’s a PR nightmare for anyone to have the kind of intimate, decades-long ties to the likes of Epstein —...
New Lines Magazine •

Superman Was Always a Social Justice Warrior

Superman fought the Nazis in 1941. He squared off against the Ku Klux Klan in 1946. And, in 2025, Superman seemingly took aim at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. To have a beloved fictional character like Superman confront real-world villains invariably ruffles feathers. It did then and it does now. The latest film incarnation, “Superman,” released earlier this month, was branded “Superwoke” by Fox, for what it saw as “pro-immigrant” themes. A former adviser to President Donald Trump,...
New Lines Magazine •

Syria’s Druze Grapple with Israel and Militancy

When Zaher raised the Syrian flag in Antarctica last December, he was not yet aware that, some 8,000 miles away, a revolution was culminating in his native Syria.Zaher recalls that upon learning that President Bashar al-Assad had fled to Russia and the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) rebel group had stormed into Damascus, he felt cautiously hopeful, sailing among the icebergs.“Of course, I was happy for my people, because Assad’s terror was over,” he told me from his kitchen in Denver, Colorado, in M...
Dame Magazine •

Syria’s New Government Might Be a Lot Like the Old Threat | Dame Magazine

This article was made possible because of the generous support of DAME members.  We urgently need your help to keep publishing.  Please join us for as little as $1.00 a month or make a one-time gift in any amount! Inside a dimly lit, smoke-filled bar in Damascus, a Syrian woman sitting to my left told me she was frightened.
“Of what?” I asked.
“Of our new government. Religious extremists, you must understand, are terrifying people,” explained the woman, who spoke only on the condition of anonymi...
New Lines Magazine •

The Congo’s Dinosaur of Discord

Central Africa’s steaming rainforest canopies stretch, like a green ocean, to the horizon. Below, long, winding rivers thread through the wilderness — sometimes a silty shade of brown, other times a clear blue beneath an open sky. Forest elephants stomp through the undergrowth, hornbills circle overhead and silverback gorillas brood in the shadows. And somewhere in this primordial expanse lurks a dinosaur. Emmanuel Mambou, a fisher who lives in the interior of the Republic of Congo, says he’s se...
Adventure.com •

The scariest thing about sharks? An ocean without them

The chummed water was alive with dorsal fins. I watched, wide-eyed, as they circled the boat, heart hammering away in my chest. The Jaws theme song was playing in my head. And Jim Abernethy, a zealous conservationist and a pioneer of cageless shark diving, told me to stop wasting time and just jump in.
I muttered some expletive-laced gibberish to myself as I, clad in scuba gear, lumbered to the edge.
“Okay, go!” he yelled again.
The frenzied shiver of lemon sharks mostly ignored me, thank God. A...
Environment •

What’s behind the strange rash of ’dinosaur’ sightings in the Congo?

For centuries, locals have told stories of mokele-mbembe, a legendary creature said to lurk in the Congo Basin. But as forests vanish, sightings are on the rise—offering a glimpse into how folklore is changing with the landscape.Trees began to quake, monkeys shrieked, and birds fled skyward.Deep in the heart of Odzala-Kokoua National Park, Selah Abong’o froze, convinced she was about to encounter something out of legend: a mokele-mbembe, Congo’s mythical dinosaur.In 2003, the young Congolese con...
New Lines Magazine •

Could Vaccinating Gorillas Be Our Best Shot To Stop a Pandemic?

The “gorilla holocaust” began in October 2002. Or at least, that’s how Joseph Oyange and Selah Abong’o, a pair of Congolese naturalists, describe what happened.In the dense jungle in the Republic of Congo’s north that fall, they hacked through tangled undergrowth with machetes, swatting away mosquitoes from their sweaty faces. Two hours later, they found Meely, a young female gorilla they had encountered often since the late 1990s. But Meely, usually lively and curious, lay motionless on her bac...
Dame Magazine •

What the Western World Should Understand About South Sudan’s Water Crisis | Dame Magazine

This article was made possible because of the generous support of DAME members.  We urgently need your help to keep publishing.  Please join us for as little as $1.00 a month or make a one-time gift in any amount! Nyakuoth spent seven hours hiding in a muddy, hand-dug well after bullets started flying in South Sudan earlier this year. Cattle herders from a neighboring state, armed with AK-47s leftover from the civil war, had wandered into Nyakuoth’s community hoping to find water for their cows....
POLITICO •

‘We Don’t Want to Be a National Laughingstock’: How Lauren Boebert Blew Her Safe Seat

“I still blame Biden and the Democrats for the skyrocketing costs,” Reid explained, “but I got a weird sort of feeling when Boebert was ranting about masks because, by that point, masks were irrelevant here. What mattered was the cost of gas and food and rent. It seemed she was out of touch.”In Reid’s view, Boebert was more interested in becoming a far-right pundit and political celebrity than anything else. The pro-gun, MAGA politics that once made Boebert so attractive no longer outweighed the...
The Denver Post •

As summer temperatures soar, people living on Denver’s streets struggle to escape the heat

Axton Sharpe and Ryan Lawson sat among the unsanctioned tent camps lining the sidewalk about a block from the State Capitol on a 95-degree day earlier this month, explaining how they deal with Denver’s oppressive summer heat.
“Man, it’s awful, just awful,” Sharpe, 53, said from under the shade of his makeshift tarp roof. “You see here, we’ve got no air conditioning or nothing like that. We just hope and pray that each day won’t be as hot as the last.”
Sharpe, originally a resident of Green Bay,...