A Truly Free Press — Emer ging From the Arab Spring

For decades, oligarchs and tyrants have controlled the media of the Middle East. Now, a growing band of independents is breaking free.

The newspaper where Lina Attalah was working went under at the worst possible time. It was April 2013, and Egypt was at a crossroads. Attalah feared that the brewing unrest against Mohammad Morsi — Egypt’s first freely elected president and a leader in the Muslim Brotherhood — would be poorly reported. So she rallied former colleagues to establish a new, independent outlet. They called it Mada Masr — the first word means “range” or “span” in Arabic, and the second “Egypt.”

On June 30 that year, the website launched to cover the mass protests against Morsi, whom Egyptians were angry with for trying to force through an Islamist constitution by presidential decree and for the chaos in the streets and a slumping economy. Three days later, on July 3, a military coup deposed Morsi and opened the door for Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi’s authoritarian rule. Egypt was now deeply divided, but Mada Masr continued reporting with balance. “At the time, many media outlets had taken steps back in terms of reporting accurately and with integrity,” says Attalah, now 36. “I thought Mada Masr was going to serve as an important record of the history of the country.”

Six years later, Attalah is the chief editor of Egypt’s only independent media outlet, with 124,000 followers on Twitter and 241,000 on Facebook. But Mada Masr isn’t alone. It’s among a growing number of independent Arabic digital outlets that are emerging as fresh sources of news in a region where tyrants and oligarchs have for decades controlled the media.

The Philadelphia Phillies think Nick Pivetta is their future on the mound.

When Nick Pivetta was in high school in British Columbia, throwing 89 miles per hour with an elbow-damaging sidearm delivery, he looked nothing like a future big league pitcher. He didn’t look good enough even for junior college baseball, where he struggled through 54 innings as a freshman.

But now the 6-foot-5 right-hander is holding down a spot in the rotation for the contending Philadelphia Phillies. It’s a rotation built for October, with former Cy Young Award winner Jake Arrieta and ace Aaron Nola. “I got lucky,” he says, and the demure Pivetta means it.

It was more than that, of course. Pivetta started working out more efficiently, he says, and his body changed and his fastball started to gain juice at New Mexico Junior College. The Canadian was drafted in the fourth round by the Washington Nationals in 2013 and was traded to Philadelphia for closer Jonathan Papelbon in 2015. Pivetta gained more on that fastball in the minor leagues.

The 32-year-old Japanese woman asked a pointed question for the workplace: Why wear heels?

There’s a kernel of contrarianism that fuels some of the best social movements. Movements that, if history is any judge, have traditionally begun when one, or some, people get to “enough,” or maybe “too much,” and put their feet down. In the instance of Japan’s Yumi Ishikawa, 32, that moment came, almost literally, with an online meditation on the business case for requiring Japanese women to wear high-heeled shoes, footwear that helps little with professional jobs that don’t involve “entertainment.”

“This is a problem that many women believed was a personal issue because [wearing high heels] is generally seen as good etiquette,” said Ishikawa, an actress, part-time worker and writer, at a news conference Monday in Tokyo. She spoke just after she had submitted a labor ministry petition with 18,856 signatures, women mostly, signed on to ban dress codes that require women to wear high heels at work.