🎧 This episode dives into Workers on the Road to January, a fierce, moving account of the strikes that shook Mahalla and set the stage for Egypt’s 2011 uprising. Through the voices of Wedad, Amal, Wael, Kamal, and thousands of workers who refused humiliation, the book reveals the true architects of dissent: people fighting on factory floors, chanting in cold dawn air, demanding dignity in a system designed to starve them. It’s a story of courage, weariness, betrayal, and unbreakable resolve—a reminder that revolutions don’t begin in headlines, but in the hands of those who keep a nation alive.

🎧 A close look at Gangs and Counter-Gangs, Frank Kitson’s 1960 account of Britain’s war against the Mau Mau and the origins of the “pseudo-gang” doctrine. The episode traces how tactics first tested in Kenya—and shaped by Kitson’s years on British Army training grounds in postwar Germany—became a template for modern counterinsurgency and the way states, including Egypt, confront dissent today.

🎧 This episode dives into Jeff Schuhrke’s No Neutrals There, a haunting excavation of the American labor movement’s long entanglement with Zionism and empire. It traces a century of choices that tied union officialdom to colonial power while silencing the voices of workers who tried to stand with Palestine. Moving from the docks of Haifa to the ruins of Gaza, the episode reflects on forgotten acts of solidarity, the bureaucratic hunger for respectability, and the moral test facing a new generation of workers today. It is a quiet meditation on betrayal, memory, and the possibility of a different future if labor chooses courage over comfort.

🎧 A look at a security establishment that once appeared monolithic, now showing signs of strain. As Egypt enters a parliamentary moment marked by quiet rivalries, back-room power plays, and a fractured electoral scene, the old guarantees of unity no longer hold. I walk the listener through how the system was built, how it kept itself together for decades, and why it is wobbling today. When competing centers of power stop pretending to agree, the rest of the country feels the tremors.

🎧 This episode takes a close, unguarded look at Phoebe Greenwood’s Vulture, a novel that dismantles the myths surrounding war reporting with a precision only an insider could wield. Rather than glorifying the correspondent’s life, Greenwood lingers in its moral fog: the fixers who risk everything for someone else’s byline, the reporters who drift between cynicism and self-deception, and the heavy, unspoken complicity that hangs over every “objective” dispatch. What emerges is a story not about Gaza alone, but about the people who come to witness it, the industry built on their gaze, and the quiet wreckage left behind when the cameras are off. Greenwood reveals these truths with restraint, melancholy, and an honesty that cuts deeper than most nonfiction ever allows.

🎧 Washington’s postwar plan for Gaza promises stability but delivers control. Behind the talk of reconstruction lies a blueprint for managed subjugation, with an international force to police the ruins, banks to dictate the rebuilding, and Cairo positioned as both enforcer and beneficiary.

🎧 The army’s retreat from North Darfur’s capital marks the total collapse of state control—and the rise of a genocidal order backed by regional powers. I look at what’s unfolding on the ground, and how the UAE’s mercenary foreign policy and Egypt’s militarized diplomacy helped turn Sudan’s revolution into rubble. This isn’t just about one city’s destruction—it’s about the regional counter-revolution that made it inevitable.

🎧 This episode unpacks how the regime has turned elections into an instrument of control—from new “medical screenings” used to disqualify opposition candidates, to court rulings weaponized against critics, to the staggering cost of merely getting on the ballot. What looks like a vote is, in fact, a calibration of power. I explore how these filters—legal, financial, and biological—set the stage for a parliament designed not to represent, but to ratify Sisi’s rule through 2030 and beyond.