US air strikes: A blip or start of a new phase of Syrian war?

Communications officer with the UN's World Food Programme Marwa Awad reports for The Nation on what she saw on a recent trip to Eastern Ghouta, Syria, just before the city of Douma fell into government hands. "'Please, won’t you take me and my daughter out? We are going to die here,'" a woman told Awad as she delivered food aid. "'What is the point of food and drink if after it we will die?'"

For The Walrus, Joseph Rosen spent a year talking to men on the right in an attempt to find his "political doppelgängers" and understand where Donald Trump's support comes from, even in Canada. "Yes, some people are fuelled by hate, but the values that others act on are often not that different from my own," he writes. "Some are against economic disparity; others want to repair a sense of community."

In The New Yorker, Dexter Filkins delves into what's driving Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country's most influential figure. Is MBS trying to modernize Saudi Arabia and rid it of extremism? Or is he simply consolidating his power? And how does his relationship with the Trump White House explain recent events in the Middle East? 

Over more than a year, The New York Times' Rukmini Callimachi made five trips to Iraq, recovering more than 15,000 pages of documents left behind by Islamic State militants as their hold on territory gave way. "The world knows the Islamic State for its brutality," Callimachi writes, "but the militants did not rule by the sword alone. They wielded power through two complementary tools: brutality and bureaucracy."