When Ben Taub was just twenty-two, he travelled to the Syrian border to learn how war correspondents work. He lived in Kilis, the last Turkish town on the road to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, at a time after a civilian uprising against the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s oppressive regime had spiralled into civil war. Thousands of civilians had died, hundreds of thousands of refugees had fled, and rebels had captured swaths of the nation.

In this week’s issue, Taub writes about living in such a fraught place, his encounters with jihadis, spies, con men, and fledgling reporters trying to prove themselves, and his brush with a possible abduction attempt. It’s a story that humanizes war-zone journalism, reflecting on the moral and logistical challenges of this kind of reporting, and on the lingering emotional weight of such work. I recently reached out to Taub to talk about what he learned as a young journalist at the edge of war.

You were still in college when you took this trip to the Syrian border. What was the situation like when you arrived, and how did it change?

There was a sense among freelancers and foreign correspondents, at the time, that the rebels were open to journalists in ways that the regime never had been, and never would be. That was true, to some extent. But the rebels were not a monolith—there was a constellation of groups, with competing aims. I arrived at what I would now consider the end of the optimistic period of the early revolution. By the time I left, ISIS was kidnapping and killing people on a regular basis, and the moderate groups north of Aleppo were trying to work out whether they had the ability to wage a two-front war, against both ISIS and the regime. A year later, I had the feeling that most of the good guys were either refugees or dead.

Much of your piece revolves around your evolving relationship to a local fixer, who you eventually realize is something of a con man. What did he teach you?

There is a natural tendency to trust a local fixer. He or she is the person who knows the environment you’re walking into, where the stakes may be life or death—not just for you but for the people who help or guide you. But con men and crooks operate in the same world as fixers, and journalists can be easy marks for a story that’s too good to be true. My time in Kilis taught me the importance of doubt. It makes me slower, I think, but better at my job than I otherwise might have been.

You spend some time, in this personal history, questioning the efficacy of war reporting. How do you ask people to share their suffering when you can’t promise it will change anything?

You can’t promise , except that you’ll do your best to reflect their pain on the page. It’s very difficult. Sometimes people speak because they simply want other people to know what happened to them. I’ve taken to explicitly noting not only that I can’t promise that journalism will change anything but that it almost certainly won’t. What do you hope readers will come to understand about this kind of reporting?

I wish that the news did a better job of conveying that both the fighting and the suffering continue beyond the dispatches. Many conflict zones lack sufficient coverage and attention. That doesn’t mean the rates of killing or displacement have slowed.

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President Trump spoke at a rally last night in Youngstown, Ohio, some three weeks out from the 2026 midterms. Our reporter Antonia Hitchens was there. What was it like?

“Rallygoers walked up to the Covelli Centre past a group of protesters holding signs like ‘Trump Protects Pedophiles’ and ‘86 the Epstein Class.’ Inside the arena, a large American flag had been hung up to cover an empty seating area. Trump supporters wore Gulf of America hats and swayed to some of the classic Trump playlist tunes as they awaited the President. ‘November Rain,’ the nine-minute Guns N’ Roses song, played in its entirety, twice. Once onstage, Trump played the hits—not just the music. The crowd chanted ‘deport!’ as he riffed on that morning’s raid on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s Washington-area home, and chanted ‘U.S.A.!’ after a protester inside punctuated one of his weaves with a call of what sounded to me like ‘Fascist!’ As officers dragged the protester out, Trump offered his favorite rejoinder: ‘He’s a paid protester … he’s gotta go on a diet.’ He went on, ‘That’s a very low-class protester. What he doesn’t know is that his mother and father voted for me. And they’re angry as hell.’”

For more: Read Hitchens’s report on The Indian government detained thousands of anti-government protesters in New Delhi this weekend. Isaac Chotiner interviews an Indian activist and political scientist about the .

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A bite: Get the potato pavé at Creola, on the Upper East Side, before . A show: The brilliant choreographer Surupa Sen is dancing at the Joyce again this week. . P.S. Lena Dunham’s “Girls” is , for five all-new episodes. Time to rewatch. .