In the aftermath of the Gaza ceasefire, Shawn sits down with Electronic Intifada’s Nora Barrows-Friedman to trace how independent journalism, student organizing, and a globalized Intifada broke the Zionist narrative monopoly (14:30), exposed the failures of international law and liberal institutions (20:15), and forced Palestine from the margins into the center of global political consciousness (31:17). From the Second Intifada to today’s campus uprisings (44:15), this episode examines why media neutrality is a myth, why repression is the system’s only response left, and what revolutionary patience looks like in a long struggle against empire (48:44).

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As the year comes to a close, Hani and Shaheer set the stage for the upcoming Hyphenated Histories series by highlighting what might have been lost in the chaos of 2025: how Pakistan, despite chronic instability and innumerable contradictions, continues to “fail upward” into workable relationships across rival global blocs, in stark contrast to the results garnered by India. From the enduring hyphenation of India–Pakistan as inseparable political identities (01:17) to the question of why China succeeded where India stalled (03:22), the duo start dissecting how modern South Asian statehood emerged less from organic civic cohesion than from imposed administrative frameworks struggling to govern deeply heterogeneous societies (06:39).

The conversation moves through Hindutva’s ideological overlap with Zionism (08:24) and Nehru’s strategic miscalculations on Tibet as the inflection point that militarized the Himalayas and set the nuclear logic of the subcontinent in motion (12:23), before turning outward to how India–Pakistan collapses into a single identity abroad (17:20). The episode closes with a sober assessment of the contemporary H-1B backlash as a form of soft deportation, revealing not cultural incompatibility, but a declining U.S. political economy increasingly hostile to the very labor it once depended on (29:01).

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A conversation that begins with the quiet disappearance of “outside” childhood turns into Hani and Shaheer tracing how screens, and specifically the iPad, became the decisive generational rupture reshaping attention, leisure, and social space. What starts as a critique of stagnant video games and microtransactions (03:48) expands into a broader diagnosis of legalized gambling’s capture of sports culture (04:50), before breaking down the financialization of teams themselves, discussing how private equity, real estate leverage, and asset-stripping logic redefine modern sports ownership and fandom alike (06:07).

From Saudi Arabia’s sportswashing project (09:53) and MBS's soft-power repositioning (22:36) juxtaposed to Germany's role after Nord Stream (24:15), to the Saudi-Pakistan hedge as a case study in regional power management (28:53), the episode situates sports not as escapism, but as a revealing surface of contemporary political economy, where culture, capital, and geopolitics increasingly collapse into the same machine.

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