December 22, 2014

This issue examined Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei through the lens of his transformation from an admirer of Western literature to a strict enforcer of Islamic revolutionary ideology, in an investigation by Ali Alfoneh and Reuel Marc Gerecht. The magazine also extensively covered the Rolling Stone/University of Virginia campus sexual assault reporting scandal, with James W. Ceaser and Philip Terzian analyzing how the media and academic institutions abandoned critical thinking and journalistic skepticism in the face of politically correct narratives. Additional coverage included Vladimir Putin's Novorossiya ambitions in Ukraine, the constitutional challenges to Obamacare's subsidies in King v. Burwell, and rising populist movements across Europe against immigration and EU integration.