July 26, 2016—Following a sudden health crisis, Egyptian director and filmmaker Mohamed Khan died this morning at age 73. He changed the face of Egyptian cinema in the 1980s with the expansion of neo-realism. Khan was born in Cairo in 1942 and studied at the London International Film School.

Mara Revkin, PhD candidate in Political Science at Yale University, unveils the legal structure, recruitment, and media management of the infamous yet understudied so-called Islamic State (ISIS). As part of her research, she has conducted interviews with defectors and individuals who have escaped ISIS occupied territory. She has also interacted with active members. In the podcast, Revkin explains the legal structures of ISIS and why it is appealing to followers.

July 21, 2016—Syrian activists estimate that U.S. airstrikes on Tuesday morning left at least 73 Syrian civilians dead.

July 19, 2016—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) awarded one of its four 2016 International Press Freedom Awards to freelance photojournalist Mahmoud Abou Zeid “Shawkan” yesterday. The other recipients are journalists from India, Turkey, and El Salvador who have also faced “threats, legal action, and imprisonment” in the course of their work.

July 18, 2016—Amidst a leaked exams crisis, Libya's Ministry of Education is seeking to block social media sites for the duration of the secondary school exams.

July 16, 2016—A local court denied the request for a stay of execution for novelist Ahmed Naji today. Naji is currently serving a two-year prison sentence.

July 16, 2016—Despite restricted access to social media sites, Turkey’s attempted military coup exploded across Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube late last night.

June 27, 2016—Lebanese broadcast journalist and TV host Liliane Daoud was arrested today, mere hours after she ended her contract with Egyptian television channel ONTV.

I am writing a book that will be called Confronting Terrorism. It examines the evolution of terrorism that culminates, for now, in the Islamic State’s ability to hold and “govern” substantial amounts of territory. This requires me to immerse myself in both the literature of terrorism and to view, from a distance, the nasty realities of this topic. I do not pretend to be as intimately involved as are the people who must live under terrorism’s darkest shadows every day. But I think a lot about how terrorism’s presence changes our world...

The rise of the Islamic State group (which will be referred to as ISIS), from the perspective of those in the Middle East drawn to it, rather than Europe where the French scholar Olivier Roy has proposed the idea of the “Islamization of radicalism,” can be discussed within the framework of a number of deeper phenomena in Arab societies since the mid-twentieth century.