A Symphony of Resistance

The Eighth Amendment. What is cruel and unusual punishment? Who gets to define and decide the amendment's boundaries? And how did the Constitution's authors imagine it might change? In this hour, the shifting definition of cruel and unusual punishment. This episode was originally ...  Show more

Call it standing ovation inflation: these days, it feels like it's mandatory to stand and clap for live performances. Has our please clap era gone too far? That's what one Throughline listener wanted to know. So we traced the winding road from Shakespeare’s epilogues to Broadway ...  Show more

Protests erupted across the Arab world in 2011, people wanted change, an end to tyranny and dictatorship. But in Syria the unrest, and its put down by the authorities, led to civil war, years of violence and the survival of the Assad regime. One eye witness to events was Rami Jar ...  Show more

Note: This is a visual-heavy episode. You can watch the lecture here.

The Arab Spring began in December 2010 when Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi’s desperate protest against corruption sparked uprisings th ...

In the early months of 2011 a wave of social unrest swept across the Arab world as people protested against repressive and authoritarian regimes, economic stagnation, unemployment and corruption. It began with reaction to the self-immolation of a young market trader in Tunisia ...

In our latest episode of Babel, Jon Alterman was joined by Issandr El Amrani, regional director for the Middle East/North Africa region at the Open Society Foundation. Issandr talked to Jon about how political trends across the Middle East have unfolded in the ten years since the ...  Show more