Inside a clear plastic box the size of a rabbit hutch, a 12-inch drum turns slowly on its axis. At each turn the drum is coated with polymer threads, 100 times as thin as a human hair, fired from a needle-and-syringe electrospinner, just as Spider-Man shoots his webs. It takes 20 minutes to produce an adhesive film.

What exactly that film – which mimics the feet of the wall-scaling gecko – could do, and in which industries, is still being determined. But the promise of a dry adhesive – a binding material that uses no glue and can be applied and removed as needed, like invisible thumbtacks – has sparked commercial interest in Akron Ascent Innovations (AAI), the start-up that runs this lab in a refurbished red-brick tire factory.

It’s a “universal magnet,” says Kevin White, the start-up’s chief operating officer, who has Spider-Man posters on his walls, sticking without pushpins or tape.
It’s the kind of innovation on which Akron, Ohio, wants to build its economy, one less dependent on the ups and downs of labor-intensive manufacturing that can be outsourced or automated. That it involves polymers is no coincidence. A century ago, this was “Rubber City,” the hub of tire production that supplied Detroit’s assembly lines. When US tire manufacturers moved out in the 1970s and ’80s, decimating the economy and depleting its population, much of the expertise remained.

AN HERMES/STAFF

Kevin White, chief operating officer of Akron Ascent Innovations, sits near an electrospinner as it fires polymer threads onto a drum. AAI is developing a dry adhesive in a city formerly dominated by the rubber industry.

Today Akron sits in a region that boasts a major plastics industry. But like many other Rust Belt cities, Akron has a workforce that’s increasingly involved in services such as health care, retail, and education; manufacturing continues to decline, with thousands of jobs shed since the Great Recession.

Few expect those factory jobs to return under President Trump. What they hope is that Akron can become a center of advanced manufacturing, where the United States has a comparative advantage and which rewards pioneers of new materials and applications fresh out of the lab.

With a research university, industrial infrastructure, and public-private partnerships, Akron is among several US cities poised to lead a revival in US manufacturing, says Antoine van Agtmael, an economist and coauthor of “The Smartest Places on Earth: Why Rustbelts Are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation.” His book names Akron; Albany, N.Y.; and Minneapolis as examples of “Brain Belt” cities on the rise.

He argues that the outsourcing of factory work to China, Mexico, and other emerging markets – a term he coined in 1981 – may have run its course. A new era of 3-D printing, smart devices, big data, and automation makes the US and Europe more attractive as places to develop and build new products that can be quickly brought to market.

“We are regaining our competitiveness in manufacturing irrespective of who is the US president. It’s a trend,” says Mr. van Agtmael, who runs a consultancy in Washington.

Akron has survived the death of old-fashioned manufacturing. Now it wants to hitch its fortunes to the industries of the future. “Akron is a city that has always reinvented itself,” says Sam DeShazior, the deputy mayor who oversees economic development.

Mr. DeShazior grew up on his family’s farm in Georgia. In 1919, his great-uncle Herbert was a demobilized soldier at a train station in New York, headed back to the farm after fighting in Europe, when his life took a turn.

“Firestone was there trying to get labor to come out here. Herb took [the recruiter] up on it [and] said, ‘So where’s Akron again?’ He comes here and makes more money than he ever made in his life,” says DeShazior.

Firestone later sent Herbert back to Georgia to recruit more African-Americans like himself to move north. He drove a new Ford and wore fine clothes, a walking advertisement for the weekly wages that awaited economic migrants to Akron in the 1920s.

Today DeShazior is selling a different story about Akron, one rooted in its strengths in high-tech plastics and metalwork, software start-ups, and hospitals. He pitches foreign companies looking to plant a flag in the US and drums up state funds and private capital for economic projects.

He knows that an upswing in US manufacturing won’t mean a return to the payrolls of the past. Since 2009, the recession’s nadir, manufacturing output has grown by 20 percent, but employment has risen only 5 percent. Advanced industries tend to employ fewer people in smaller facilities and prioritize education and computer skills in hiring technical staff. But the jobs they create often pay well and are less dirty and dangerous than the ones in the factories of yesteryear.

ANN HERMES/STAFF

Deputy Mayor Sam DeShazior says his great-uncle used to recruit for Firestone during Akron’s heyday.

Akron has yet to see the full gains from its economic restructuring. Its average household makes less than $35,000 a year, heroin overdoses are soaring, and the city is short of funds. Only an influx of refugees is keeping its aging population of 200,000 from shrinking further.

But developers are building downtown and tapping demand for Millennials to live and work and bike in the city, breathing life into distressed districts.

For its leadership, there’s no turning back. “We’ve been innovative for 150 years. We’re not going to stop now,” says Dan Horrigan, the city’s mayor.

A start in fire hoses

When Benjamin Franklin Goodrich founded a rubber company in Akron in 1870, his main product was fire hoses. In the 1890s, that changed to pneumatic tires for bicycles – followed by tires for automakers that by 1913 were going on more than a million cars a year. Akron became the world’s rubber capital, a title it held for much of the 20th century. (Today, it’s perhaps most famous as the hometown of National Basketball Association star LeBron James.)

The big rubber companies – including Good-rich, Goodyear, and Firestone – built vast factory complexes and housing estates for workers and their families. By 1960, the city had grown to 290,000 residents. Unionized employees working six-hour shifts earned enough to buy vacation homes and boats.

The good times didn’t last. Tiremakers that had been nimble and inventive – working together to develop synthetic rubber in 1942 after Japan stopped natural-rubber supplies from Asia – grew complacent.

In the 1970s, France’s Michelin rolled out the radial tire, a breakthrough that would become the new standard. US tiremakers just “pooh-poohed it. They said, ‘It’s a fad that will go away,’ ” says David Lieberth, a former city official and local historian.

Instead, the industry itself went away. Akron made its last passenger tire in 1982. That same year, a politician first used the phrase “Rust Belt” in a speech. “Akron, because it was so closely tied to a single industry ... was feeling a sudden and profound loss of identity. The term Rust Belt was sucked hard into that void and there it would stay,” wrote David Giffels, an author and journalist, in a 2014 collection of essays.

People left in droves. In the 1980s, says Professor Giffels, who teaches English at the University of Akron, the city was so empty that you could drive downtown on a snowy night and follow your own tire tracks home.

Akron desperately needed a new economic model. But what would it be?

The answer lay in the industry on which the city built its fortunes. Tire companies that had shut their factories kept on many of their engineers and executives. “We lost the blue-collar jobs. But the highly paid white-collar people stayed,” says Mr. Lieberth. 

Companies that had supplied tiremakers began developing synthetic materials and products for Ohio’s plastics industry. The health care and transportation industries also started to grow. But the transition was slow, and city officials had to beg for state and federal funds to rebuild the scarred downtown, where squatters took refuge in empty office buildings.

Piles of tires

DeShazior, the deputy mayor, moved to Akron in 1986, when reinvention was more talk than action. At the time, he recalls, piles of scrap tires stood in abandoned factory yards. He knew of the Rubber City’s glory years from family lore about his great-uncle Herbert, the recruiter who drove south to find laborers.

After earning a master’s in urban planning and economics, DeShazior joined the regional development board and had a hand in the revitalization of the city’s manufacturing base, including companies founded by former tire-industry employees who came out of early retirement to go it alone.

“People began to say, ‘There are things I always wanted to do but I never did because I had such security in my job. Now I’m going to try that,’ ” he says. Had the tire industry not collapsed, this entrepreneurship may never have happened. “There’s such a safety blanket that you don’t have to think outside the box.”

‘Polymer Valley’

In 1999, the University of Akron appointed Luis Proenza as its president. He would lead an ambitious $650 million, debt-funded expansion program that would transform the campus and the city, raising Akron’s profile and orienting its academics toward commercial discoveries.

At the time, the university enrolled about 18,000 students. Under Mr. Proenza, the campus grew in size and added 22 new buildings and 34 acres of green space. Other buildings were renovated to create a campus that is integrated with the city and its housing stock. 

By 2011, enrollment had swelled to 30,000. Downtown Akron was no longer a ghost town: A new convention center, baseball stadium, and museum also brought in visitors and revenue. 

Proenza’s vision went beyond a vibrant campus. He wanted the university to become an engine of regional economic development, a place where industry and government could find and support research that would lead to marketable products and services. Polymer science, in his view, was the perfect place to start looking.

“What was unique about Akron was this strong underpinning of academic and research capacity to make this expansion from rubber,” says Proenza.

Much of this research takes place in the Goodyear Polymer Center, a 146,000-square-foot glass and steel tower that is the tallest on campus. Built in 1991, it houses the College of Polymer Science and Polymer Engineering, top-ranked in the country, with hundreds of graduate students from around the world.

This is where AAI began, in the lab of a professor who was experimenting with polymer nanothreads. Matthew Becker, associate dean for research, joined the faculty in 2009. He has since founded two start-ups to develop biodegradable materials for reconstructive surgery, including one bone-repair material that will be part of a trial conducted by the US military this year.

His research is supported by federal grants and private companies, and he trains graduate students from seven countries. “I’m in the right ecosystem here,” he says.

Most research and development in the US is done by companies. But the private sector has long relied on scientific research at public institutions – such as government labs, universities, and military facilities – to unearth new technologies, from the internet to microchips to GPS.

After 2008, many US corporations cut their R&D budgets, says Barry Rosenbaum, a chemical engineer who spent 25 years working at Exxon. That left a void that needed to be filled.

“Industries were cutting back, and funding agencies for universities were encouraging universities to focus more of their attention on bringing their research to industry,” he says.

Proenza recruited Mr. Rosenbaum and other retired executives as unpaid advisers to the University of Akron Research Foundation (UARF), a nonprofit he set up in 2001. The aim was to link more closely the ideas hatched on campus with the needs of industry, and to promote entrepreneurship by faculty and students so that start-ups like AAI could emerge from research labs. (Rosenbaum is chief executive officer of AAI.)

“It’s not about doing research and throwing it over the wall. It’s about changing the way we do research projects,” says Eric Amis, dean of the polymer college.

Instead of waiting for companies to read academic papers on new discoveries, UARF promotes the university’s breakthroughs and finds companies to partner on projects. Akron also works with nearby Kent State University and Case Western Reserve University, with Northeast Ohio now sometimes referred to as “Polymer Valley.”

“If we can apply the inherent expertise that universities have to solve our industrial and community problems, it creates economic development and jobs for our students and value for our university,” says Rosenbaum.

Some start-ups move downtown into the Akron Global Business Accelerator, the old tire factory where AAI spins its webs. Since 2010, tech-heavy companies based there, including foreign-invested start-ups, have created a combined 791 jobs and have secured $165 million in investment, according to its chief executive officer, Anthony Margida. GOJO Industries, the maker of Purell hand sanitizer, is across the street: It employs about 600 people in a former Goodrich building.

Handcrafted tires

Even the tire business is expanding again, though not in mass manufacturing. Bridgestone opened a $100 million research center in Akron in 2012, and other tiremakers have added research labs in Northeast Ohio.

Goodyear rebuilt its corporate headquarters in an airy seven-story complex with an innovation center grafted onto its old red-brick plant, where it still makes highly engineered tires for race cars.

Every year Goodyear produces more than 100,000 tires for NASCAR teams, all made by hand. It’s a labor-intensive process, more artisanal than industrial, with a $2,000 price tag for a set of tires that will be raced only once. Nearly 300 workers assemble the tires on three floors of the 845,000-square-foot building.

On a recent afternoon, a Goodyear technician lays black composite strips on a turning spindle, building a NASCAR tire. Each strip was cut to specifications and monitored by sensor chips, yet the careful layering is that of a pastry chef preparing a mille-feuille slice.

Once the technician is satisfied, the tire is inflated and sent downstairs to be cured, finished, and sent to the racetrack.

Speed bumps

Proenza stepped down as the University of Akron’s president in 2014. By then, funding for research projects had grown dramatically and dozens of start-ups were mining the results. But the breakneck expansion also hit speed bumps: Enrollment was down to 26,000, a $62 million football stadium hadn’t attracted the promised crowds, and a much-hyped bioinnovation center flopped.

With its current enrollment of 23,000, the university faces a $30 million deficit this year. It pays about $38 million a year in interest on the bonds issued for the campus expansion program, says Dan Minnich, a spokesman for the university.

Proenza defends the buildup of debt and putting the stadium on campus. Still, he concedes that the timing was bad.

The Austen BioInnovation Institute, a joint venture between the university and local hospitals, got shortchanged by funders, including the state government, says Proenza.

A broader criticism of the approach is that it tilts publicly funded education toward a form of corporate welfare in which faculty and students become adjuncts to private capital.

On some campuses, the sponsorship of labs blurs the lines between academic and corporate research, says Douglas Oplinger, newly retired managing editor of the Akron Beacon Journal. “Ohio has turned universities into research facilities for industry where students who pay tuition are doing the work,” he says.

And yet Goodyear, unlike its competitors, never left Akron. “One of the reasons we decided to stay here was the University of Akron and their researchers,” says David Zanzig, director of global materials science.

In 2014, when the company announced plans to build a factory employing about 1,000 people to produce premium tires, Akron vied publicly with South Carolina’s Chester County to be its location. Goodyear chose neither. Instead, it is building a factory in Mexico.

Had Goodyear added a new plant in the US, it would have been an outlier: Factories of such size, while dominant in the public imagination, are no longer the norm. Only 15 percent of manufacturing workers, or just over 1 percent of the US labor force, punch clocks in factories with 1,000 or more employees. The majority of factories have fewer than 100 workers.

Start-ups like AAI, which has five full-time employees, hold out the promise of rapid growth that rewards investors and encourages more entrepreneurship. It fits Akron’s self-image as a bootstrap city of inventors taking what writer Giffels calls “the hard way on purpose.” But it may never match the employment levels and job security of the old assembly lines.

“If you define manufacturing as you need someone to pull a lever, those days are gone,” says Mr. Becker of the University of Akron.

ANN HERMES/STAFF

Demolition proceeds on an old Goodrich building next to the Akron Global Business Accelerator, whose tech-heavy companies have created 791 jobs.

‘What happened to Uncle Herb?’

After DeShazior moved to Akron, he grew curious about his great-uncle’s past in the glory days of tiremaking. “I’ve heard the stories from parents and grandparents. I said, ‘What happened to Uncle Herb?’ ”

Eventually he tracked down his great-uncle’s medical records and found that he had been diagnosed before his death with lung cancer, probably from the carbon black used to make tires. “That was so common, so common,” he says.

It’s a story he sometimes tells when people in Akron wax nostalgic for the tire-industry jobs that were lost here, glossing over the acrid smoke that shrouded the city’s east side and the health risks inside the factories that ran day and night.

“If you want that particular environment to come back, I don’t know you’d be able to get that back,” he says.

Damir Sagolj/ Reuters

A vendor is pictured in a shop in a newly constructed residential complex after its opening ceremony in Ryomyong street in Pyongyang, North Korea, in mid-April.

When Rüdiger Frank visited a shopping center in the North Korean capital in February, he was amazed to find not one, but at least 10 different kinds of toothpaste for sale. Customers could buy whitening toothpaste, children’s toothpaste, and toothpaste made with “nanotechnology” that sold for 30,000 won, about $33.

“We need to understand that North Korea is in the middle of a consumerist transformation,” Professor Frank, the head of East Asian studies at the University of Vienna, wrote about his trip on 38 North, a website on North Korea news. For decades, North Korean leaders viewed too much variety in consumer products as wasteful and, even worse, capitalistic. “Today, 10 types of toothpaste? Fine, if customers buy and a profit can be made,” Frank wrote. “This is the new thinking in North Korea these days. Competition is everywhere.”

Like many things about North Korea, the exact causes of new economic trends are something of a mystery. Obtaining official data is virtually impossible. But analysts who closely follow the country’s economy say it has shown signs of growing prosperity – a major goal of its leader, Kim Jong-un, to secure his grip on power. But there's a catch: Every step toward economic reform risks looking like a step away from core principles of a centrally planned, socialist state.

Of course, North Korea’s economy is far from booming, and poverty among the country’s 25 million people remains widespread. Two in 5 North Koreans are undernourished, and more than 70 percent of the population relies on food aid, according to a United Nations report published in March. A sudden shortage of gasoline this month has sparked price hikes and raised fears of an economic slowdown. 

But the economic growth North Korea has achieved – however incremental – underscores that Mr. Kim’s ambitions extend beyond developing a nuclear warhead capable of reaching the US mainland.

The escalation of rhetoric over the North’s weapons program has rattled the world, which roundly condemned an April 29 test missile launch, though the test failed. The North has also said it will continue to test its nuclear weapons, which it has done five times before, including twice in 2016.

Still, establishing a nuclear deterrent is only half of Kim’s “byungjin” strategy, or “simultaneous progress.” Economic development is the other half – and the one that’s arguably more ambitious.

Andrei Lankov, a historian of North Korea at Kookmin University in Seoul, says Kim is eager to improve the economy by pushing it away from a state-dominated system. The young leader is gradually dismantling a Soviet-style command economy in favor of promoting private business and entrepreneurship, Professor Lankov says, much as China did starting in the late 1970s.

That already-risky move is further complicated by the history of North Korea's private markets. As widespread famine took hold in the 1990s – a disaster estimated to have killed between several hundred thousand and 1 million North Koreans – families turned to informal, illegal bartering as the state-controlled food rationing system thinned.

Today, Lankov estimates the private sector accounts for 30 to 50 percent of North Korea's gross domestic product. By allowing it to grow, Kim hopes to reduce the risk of a popular uprising sparked by economic stagnation – the risk of which could increase as North Koreans catch more glimpses of dramatically better-off lifestyles across the border. The challenge he now faces is figuring out how to pursue deeper market reforms while maintaining at least the appearance of state control.

“If he admits it, it will be bad for stability. That would mean admitting the system created by his grandfather is not perfect,” Lankov says, referring to Kim Il-sung, the founding leader of North Korea. But pursuing reforms “is exactly what he’s doing, and the policy is working.” 

The economic changes are evident on the streets of Pyongyang. Traffic on the capital’s wide avenues has gotten heavier in recent years as car ownership and taxi services have increased, according to recent news reports. Electric bicycles have become more ubiquitous, too, another sign of rising affluence among the emerging middle class.

Lankov says one of the biggest changes has occurred in agriculture, where family farms have taken the place of many state-owned farms and led to an increase in food production. Yet some analysts are skeptical of how successful and widespread such reforms have been. Others question whether many of Kim’s economic policies qualify as reforms at all. Marcus Noland, an expert on the North Korean economy at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, says the leader has relaxed restraints on domestic economic activity rather than remove them.

“I would say Kim has not actually done reforms,” Dr. Noland says. “What he’s done is stop enforcing the law and effectively decriminalize a lot of economic activity.”

For example, while it remains illegal to open a private business, the law is seldom enforced. Noland says well-connected entrepreneurs can buy the status of a state-owned company for the right price. Such practices started in the 1990s under the late Kim Jong-il, but Noland says they have picked up under his son.

“Unlike his father and grandfather, Kim Jong-un appears to be comfortable with bling,” Noland says. “He appears to be comfortable with a degree of social division based on access to money and wealth.”

It is uncertain if Kim’s acceptance of a widespread illicit economy could lead to formal policy changes. Although it remains difficult to predict, Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein, an associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and co-editor of the blog North Korean Economy Watch, says the leadership appears to be heading in that direction.

“The overarching trend, especially since Kim Jong-un came to power, is one towards the formalization of market mechanisms,” he says. “Overall the government is in much more control over something that used to be antithetical to the socialist system.”

In what is perhaps a sign of North Korea’s shifting economic principles, a recent article in a newspaper published by Kim Il-sung University, the country’s top school, stressed the importance of increasing corporate profits.

“Net profits gained by individual corporations are fundamental to the establishment of a powerful economy,” the article said, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency. But the article was careful not to suggest an end to the state-controlled economy, adding that “in our country's socialist system, corporations' independent management activities are to be carried out under the guidance of the party right down the line.”

Fred Weir

People listen to a Bible reading in a Jehovah's Witnesses Kingdom Hall in northwest Moscow.

It's a quiet Tuesday evening at Moscow's largest Kingdom Hall, a gathering point for Jehovah's Witnesses, and it's a hive of activity. In one room a few dozen people are engaged in Bible-reading; in another they are singing hymns.

There is no outward sign of awareness that Russia's Supreme Court has just banned the Jehovah's Witnesses as an "extremist" group on a par with terrorist organizations like ISIS and Al Qaeda – nor that carrying out these very activities may soon be grounds for criminal charges and prison.

It's a legal decision that looks portentous on many levels. It is the first major post-Soviet instance in which Russia has moved to outlaw an entire religion, deploying "extremism" laws against a group that poses no threat whatsoever of violence, racism, or hate speech.

Some see the hand of the powerful Russian Orthodox Church behind the decision. Others suggest it's part of a more general wave of "majoritarian" social conservatism that's enforcing a gradual homogenization on the entire society. Civil rights experts worry the move could presage a wider crackdown on "non-traditional" religious faiths, generally viewed as alien to Russia, that took root around the country in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse a generation ago.

But even among Russian Orthodox themselves, there is concern that the absolute ban of an entire sect goes too far. The faith has existed in Russia for more than a century, and is practically the only such group to have survived the long Soviet winter by developing underground networks that successfully defied the secret police of Stalin and Brezhnev eras.

"Banning [the Jehovah's Witnesses] from the legal space, excluding it from social life completely is an idea that didn't work even in Stalin's times," says Father Vsevolod Chaplin, a former spokesman for the Orthodox Church. "We should be wiser in this case."

The 'Yarovaya Law'

The Supreme Court ban, which is one short appeal away from being handed to police to enforce, will mandate seizure of all the group's property and open its 175,000 Russian members to criminal charges if they persist in publicly expressing their beliefs and carrying out their active missionary work.

The court verdict has been several years in the making, highlighting the way Russian authorities in the age of Vladimir Putin move slowly and methodically through the courts, rather than employing Soviet-style repression, to obtain the results they want.

In the more than two decades since Russia passed a law limiting the legal rights of faiths that are not one of the country's four "traditional" religions – Orthodoxy, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism – the Jehovah's Witnesses have faced dozens of local bans, seen their literature prohibited as "extremist," and several of their activists jailed.

But the new ruling comes under a new law signed by Mr. Putin last July. Known as the "Yarovaya Law" after its main author Irina Yarovaya of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, the law authorized sweeping new powers for security services to crack down on all kinds of extremist activity.

One little-noticed section of the law mandates much tougher restrictions on the activities of small religious denominations, particularly their ability to proselytize. The Jehovah's Witnesses, who see missionary work as a basic command from God, were on a collision course with the Russian state even before the latest court decision.

"I am instructed to go out and tell people what I have read in the Bible, and I will do that regardless of what decisions the government takes," says Yury Terteryan, a sports journalist and Jehovah's Witness. "How can you stop people from sharing good news?"

Some analysts see this verdict as part of a full-blown comeback for Soviet-style forced conformity. "The totalitarian features of the present regime are becoming more evident," says Yevgeny Ikhlov, an expert with the public Movement for Human Rights in Moscow. "It is a feature of such regimes that they try to impose a single ideology. The Jehovah's Witnesses have been persecuted by totalitarian regimes from Hitler's to Stalin's, and it looks like they'll have to go underground again."

Others suggest that, as with laws limiting public LGBT expression, the crackdown is not likely to affect most Russians and, indeed, few are likely to even notice it. The vast majority of Russians self-identify as Orthodox Christians, even if only a small percentage actively practice the faith.

Ultimately, it's not clear exactly why the Russian state has targeted the Jehovah's Witnesses for punishment which, if fully carried out, could increase Russia's burgeoning prison population by 175,000.

"The supreme court case dealt mainly with technical issues, like their promulgation of 'extremist' literature and violation of previously-mandated restrictions," says Maria Kravchenko, an expert with the Sova Center in Moscow, which tracks extremist movements in Russia. Ms. Kravchenko's specialty is "abuse of the extremism laws," and she says her work load has been piling up lately.

"Perhaps it's because of their pacifism, that they reject military service, and encourage believers to leave their families. There are a lot of institutions in Russia that have reasons to be angered by them. I think the interests of the Orthodox Church is only one aspect of this, it's part of something much larger," she says.

Thrown to the lions?

Most "non-traditional" faiths have experienced difficulties trying to establish themselves in post-Soviet Russia. Even the powerful Roman Catholic Church, which has about 800,000 members in Russia, has found itself under pressure, often from zealous local Orthodox communities. But recent rapprochement between the Vatican and the Orthodox Church has probably eliminated any threat that Catholics might be targeted under the Yarovaya law.

The Church of Scientology – which is controversial everywhere – was shut down by the Supreme Court last year, for "non-compliance" with laws regulating religious organizations. The Orthodox Church hailed that decision, publicly denouncing Scientology as an "affront to human freedom."

Many other groups have experienced chronic problems, including Hindus, whose holy book the Bhagavad Gita was nearly banned as "extremist" by a local court five years ago. Baptists and other smaller evangelical Christian groups, who often do not register with authorities, report constant harassment from police and local Orthodox communities.

Most of those who, like the Jehovah's Witnesses, make proselytizing a core activity, worry that they will be targeted more systematically, and treated as criminals, under the new Yarovaya law.

For the Jehovah's Witnesses themselves, persecution is all too familiar. Indeed, they fondly liken themselves to early Christians being hunted down by the Romans. Which is not to say that they welcome it.

"I don't wish to be thrown to the lions," says Yevgeny Kandaurov, an elder of the congregation in Moscow. "That's not what I choose. But I will stick to my faith whatever happens."

'We should be more careful about this'

Even among Orthodox officials it's not easy to find supporters of the draconian verdict against the Jehovah's Witnesses.

"I agree that aggressive missionary activity should be prohibited [as per the Yarovaya law] for all religious groups," says Father Chaplin, the former Orthodox Church spokesman. "The state has the right to say that their ideology is anti-patriotic and doesn't reflect the feelings of most Russians... In the bodies of power, and for common people as well, there are questions about whether this organization serves the country's interests, or those of international forces looking to weaken Russia."

Article 29 of Russia's Constitution prohibits any declaration of the superiority of religion. That's been cited against the Jehovah's Witnesses for proclaiming that theirs is the only true faith.

"I think we should be more careful about this," says Chaplin. "Every religion thinks it's the only true one. I am Orthodox, and I certainly believe that about my faith. If the state forbids us from saying that, it will put itself at odds with the majority of its citizens."

Andrei Kuraev, a professor at the Orthodox Church's Spiritual Academy in Moscow, warns that all freedom of conscience is under attack.

"Sure, the Jehovah's Witnesses are far from blameless. They are a totalitarian sect who control their adherents and spread bad information about other faiths," he says. "But sometimes our Orthodox preachers do the very same things. I have personally taken part in debates with the Jehovah's Witnesses, and I believe that's how things should be handled. We should have equal conditions. The state should stay out of it and not under any circumstances try to play the role of arbiter."

Aziz Taher/Reuters

Syrian refugees fill containers and bottles with water at a makeshift settlement in Bar Elias town, in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, on March 27, 2017. The stress of large families living in small dwellings increases the pressure on refugees.

Aaref fled to Lebanon from Syria five years ago to escape the war raging in his homeland. But here, he found another kind of conflict – in his home.

Life as a refugee in Lebanon is grueling. He’s under constant pressure to find enough money to pay the rent, feed his family, and take care of their medical needs.

The stress soon led to conflicts between Aaref and his wife, of the type they hadn’t experienced since they were young newlyweds learning to navigate life together.

“We fought about spending and finances. I would ask her not to spend too much money. Sometimes she would buy things that weren’t necessary,” he says. The disagreements often escalated to shouting and even violence.

“In principle, I’m against hitting the wife or the children. But because of the stress, sometimes it gets out of hand,” he admits. “Sometimes I was hitting her.”

Domestic violence was a problem in Syria before the war, as it is in most societies. A 2005 study found that 21.8 percent of women surveyed reported being subjected to some sort of violence, and 13.8 percent of the husbands surveyed admitted they beat their wives.

Yet refugees themselves, and organizations working on gender-based violence, report overwhelmingly that the rate of intimate partner violence appears to have risen sharply among Syrians who were forced to flee their homeland. Many describe it as a result of the heavy pressures refugees endure, including hurdles to obtaining legal status, financial strain, and the stress of large families living cooped up in small dwellings.

While many aid programs have long targeted women with support programs, some organizations are now putting new focus on reaching men, hoping to address the problem at the source.

“Working on gender-based violence without involving the whole community will not work. If you empower the women but the perpetrator is still thinking the same way and acting the same way, you may worsen the problem,” says Lara Chlela, manager of the International Medical Corps’ gender-based violence program in Lebanon. IMC has partnered with a local organization, Abaad, to open a center for men in Beirut to raise awareness of gender-based violence, engage men on gender equality, and provide support. It also runs two other men's centers outside the capital. 

Aaref, a 53-year-old from Deraa who asked to be identified by his first name, and whose paint-splattered clothes attest to his work as a laborer, attended new sessions for men organized by Basmeh & Zeitooneh, an organization serving Syrian refugees in Lebanon. He says the meetings helped him find ways to manage stress.

“They were good in terms of awareness and educating us, because at our age, we’re a little bit old-fashioned,” he says. “So we learned new things and got new approaches. We discussed problems and how to handle them.”

One solution the men discussed, he said, was to leave home and take a walk if a man gets so upset that he feels the urge to use violence. It’s a method he has used himself, and he says he’s better able to handle stress now. At the time of his interview, however, his wife was back in Syria to receive medical treatment they couldn’t afford in Lebanon.

Gaining men's trust

One of the main challenges for those trying to work with men on gender-based violence is approaching them in the first place, and getting them to listen, says Ms. Chlela of IMC.

“To approach a group of men saying, ‘OK, now we’re going to talk about why you beat your wives’ – no, no, no,” she says. “You start with other issues,” like talking about sports, she says. “When you gain their trust you can address any issue.”

This is something Hamoud Selman Mujadel knows well. A social worker at Basmeh & Zeitooneh, he leads the mens’ sessions, including the ones Aaref attended. They are not lectures. Instead he facilitates discussions and group activities to help the men comfortably address issues they’re dealing with, including violence.

In one exercise, Mr. Mujadel presents a scenario: A man has been working all day, he’s tired, and he comes home and finds his wife is on the phone and hasn’t prepared dinner. He asks the men what they would do. “Some say, send her back to her parents. Others say, discuss together. Others say, hit her.”

When men discuss ways to express their frustration without resorting to violence, “it gives a positive impulse and positive point, it helps other guys maybe change their minds, not to hit their wives,” he says. Were he to simply instruct them not to beat their wives, they would be less likely to listen, he says, and might even stop attending the sessions.

The aim of the sessions, he says, is to “minimize the psychological pressure on men.” That’s a major factor in violence – Mujadel says a minority of men believe it’s their right to beat their wives and children, but most resort to violence out of stress and frustration, and aren’t proud of it. Helping them find ways to manage their stress can reduce the violence.

Men are not alone in using violence. Social workers say women beating their children is a problem as well. It’s often a cycle of violence, with women who are exposed to beatings passing them on to their children, they say.

“This is how we know, often, that the husband is beating the wife, because she’s beating the kids and we follow up” and find the wife is also being abused, says Manar Karout, a social worker at a center in Beirut’s Ain al Remmenah neighborhood run by the Amel Association.

Even the request for help is a success

When she finds such cases, she tries to talk privately with the men. They often blame their children, saying they can’t handle the noise or the annoyance of being cooped up in small apartments or tents, when they were used to larger homes and busier lives back in Syria.

“I realized recently that they’re aware, they admit this is wrong, and they blame it on the social pressure on them,” she says. “Women can also be demanding, wanting money they don’t have. We put them together, to discuss money and get finances in order, to try to solve the reasons this is happening.” She says such sessions are often helpful.

In one Beirut neighborhood, a small, nondescript apartment with green doors houses Abaad’s Men’s Center, where men can come to receive counseling. Most don’t come because of a problem with violence, but for other issues, like depression.

Yet violence and aggression – whether they realize it or not – is common, says Gisele Abichahine, a pscyhotherapist who works at the center, which works with all men, whether refugees or not. One cause of violence among refugee men she has worked with is their feeling of being emasculated, as the demands of refugee life lead their wives to take on roles traditionally filled by men.

It’s usually difficult for men to admit they have a problem and need help, she says, so simply coming to the center is a big step. It’s a rare place where they can discuss feelings that might be taboo elsewhere.

“All the men I worked with, they’ve all been told you can’t cry, you’re a boy,” she says. “Boys grow up suppressed. It’s forbidden for them to express frustration, sadness, fear, insecurity, stress, even happiness. All the emotions are blocked, and the only emotion that is encouraged is violence.”

In this environment, she adds, “even the fact they come here and seek help is a success for me.”

Suzan Haidamous contributed reporting.

Reporting for this story was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation's Reporting Grants for Women’s Stories Initiative. 

Jessica Mendoza/The Christian Science Monitor

Speed Weed, co-executive producer of the CW's superhero series 'Arrow,' works at his office at The Burbank Studios on April 10. Amid concerns over writers' declining incomes, Mr. Weed says that television programming has never been more creative.

The last time Speed Weed found himself jobless, it was 2011, his wife had just given birth to triplets, and he couldn't find work for almost a year.

But Mr. Weed wasn’t worried. A television writer and producer, he relied on residuals – payments made to creators and performers for subsequent screenings of their work – from two years of writing and producing for the police procedural “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.”

The show reran on NBC. So the checks kept coming – long enough for him to pick up work again, first for a USA Network miniseries in 2012 and then for the CW’s superhero series “Arrow” in 2015.

“If that happened today, I wouldn’t make it,” says Weed, now the show’s co-executive producer.

That’s because times have changed in television, he says. Over the past five years, a broader range of content platforms has given viewers free reign over what to watch and when to watch it. Studios are producing more and better programming than ever: The number of scripted shows doubled – from about 200 to more than 400 – between 2009 and 2015. Netflix alone is reportedly producing 1,000 hours of original programs in 2017. Pundits call the era “peak TV.”

From the questions "Westworld" raises about what it means to be human, to the '80s sci-fi nostalgia of "Stranger Things," to the heart-wringing twists of "This Is Us," TV has never been more fun to watch. But ironically, writers like Weed say, TV's new golden age has been anything but for the people creating it. Screenwriters can take more creative risks than when it was a six-channel, three-camera world, but the financial rewards aren't making their way to the writers rooms.

“It’s a great time to be in television,” says Ken Kristensen, who is currently working on a Marvel show for Netflix. “We just have to make sure that it’s a sustainable environment for writers.”

Most writers are celebrating this new creative freedom. But, they say, it comes at a price.

Higher-quality shows mean shorter series that take longer to write than, say, an episode of a traditional sitcom. For writers – most of whom are compensated per episode – that means a significant pay cut for work compared with a 22- to 24-episode program. Online subscription video-on-demand platforms like Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu have also meant less reliance on the model of residual compensation that kept Weed afloat during his year of unemployment.

Which is why the first Hollywood writers’ strike in a decade is looking more likely. On Monday, negotiations resumed between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Hollywood’s studio alliance. At issue: a new film and TV contract that the guild says would better reflect industry changes. If negotiations fail, the guild will seek permission from its members to hold a strike – which could cost the industry hundreds of millions of dollars – starting May 2. On Thursday, at least 100 workers walked out of a dozen reality show companies in an effort to push negotiations forward.

The negotiations speak to a cultural transformation that could, over time, shake up the television business, says Miranda Banks, an associate professor of film and media at Boston’s Emerson College and author of, “The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild.”

“There’s a disconnect that we’re going to have to figure out in the coming years between where audiences are, where compensation comes from, and where the studios make money,” she says. “The entire industry is under enormous upheaval.”

'There are ... 50 shows I'd love to write for'

On Monday night, a captive audience watched the pilot of the new Starz series “American Gods” at a screening held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The show, based on the 2001 Neil Gaiman novel, follows an ex-convict and a disguised Norse deity (played by British actors Ricky Whittle and Ian McShane) as they traverse America in a bid to convince the old gods of mythology to wage war against the new gods of media and technology.

The show’s themes center on culture, worship, faith, even immigration, as aging divinities try to survive in a consumerist new world.

Its style and approach, meanwhile, are indicative of TV’s growing reputation as the realm of the risky. In one memorable scene, the goddess Bilquis, played by Yetide Badaki, dispatches an unwary victim in a gasp-inducing manner. In another, a facehugger robot transforms into a virtual reality mask that allows Mr. Whittle’s character, Shadow Moon, to converse with one of the gods of technology in an improbable, fantastic limousine.

“There are no creative no-go zones anymore,” says Weed, the CW producer. “If you’re good at your storytelling, you can do anything you want. There are probably 50 shows I would love to write for right now.”

Innovation, however, isn’t the only trend “American Gods” adapts. The show’s first season is eight episodes long – a new normal among scripted series as networks aim to produce a wider variety of programs to cater to more niche audiences.

Streaming and video on demand platforms have also allowed shows to rely less on episode counts for syndication. For decades, getting a show to 80 to 100 episodes was crucial to increase profits for a series – more episodes meant a greater chance of airing as a daily staple on cable networks and local TV stations.

“Studios can now begin monetizing shows almost immediately,” writes Joe Adalian for Vulture. “Now, it’s not uncommon for a new show to be ‘syndicated’ to Netflix within weeks of wrapping its freshman year.”

For writers, most of whom rely on a per-episode fee to bolster their base salary, the new model has meant major pay cuts, the WGA says. The guild estimates that between 2013 and 2016, compensation among writer-producers at all levels dropped between 8 and 26 percent.

That’s largely because the fee per episode no longer runs parallel to the time spent creating a show, says Jason Mittell, a professor of film and media culture at Middlebury College in Vermont.

“They’re spending three months planning out the season, parsing things out, slowly developing the story in a drawn-out process,” he says. “That leads to a really great show. But it ends up they don’t get paid as much overall because they’re working on fewer episodes.”

All this comes at a time when the entertainment industry, and television in particular, is more profitable than ever – the six media companies employing most of the guild’s members made about $51 billion in operating profits in 2016, the WGA reports.

“We need to rectify this unacceptable situation where writer incomes are declining and the shows they are creating are making companies rich,” says Neal Sacharow, the guild’s communications director.

How likely is a strike?

Just hours before fans settled in to watch “American Gods,” negotiators for the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers sat down to discuss the terms of a new contract. Ahead of the talks, the guild called for a strike authorization vote by its 12,000 members. A vote to authorize would give the guild permission to use a strike as leverage to cut a deal by May 1.

Strike or not, however, industry experts say it’s a crucial moment in television and entertainment – one worth watching, so to speak. The last strike, which started in 2007, lasted for 100 days and cost the industry an estimated $2 billion, according to the Milken Institute.

Historically, strikes have taken place at times when shifts in technology have led to changes in audience behavior, which in turn lead to calls for restructuring compensation models, says Professor Banks at Emerson. This time is no different.

“Everybody has to reimagine where the money comes from within this industry,” she says. “Everyone is trying to see where things are now, but also predict the future. And that's where negotiations get tricky.”

For writers, it’s about getting what they say is their fair share of the pie.

“Stability has never been part of this game, and it’s the life of being an artist. You’re hustling all the time,” says Mr. Kristensen. But compensation needs to be equivalent to the work, he says, and a writer needs to be able to make enough to get through the inevitable lean years.

“A writer can always write, but you can’t always support yourself, have a mortgage, support your children,” says Christine Boylan, who has written and produced for shows including “Once Upon A Time” and “Castle,” both on ABC. “If we make a deal so that everyone finds profit, that would be great.”

Financial concerns aside, writers tend to view the current era with excited optimism.

“Writers have felt for a long time from agents that you can’t do something because nobody's ever done it before. Now there’s a sense that people want to see things that have never been done before,” Weed says. “That’s fantastic.”

AP Photo/file

A girl looks at Facebook on her computer in Palo Alto, Calif.

A new survey by Harvard University finds more than two-thirds of young Americans disapprove of President Trump’s use of Twitter. The implication is that Millennials prefer news from the White House to be filtered through other sources, not a president’s social media platform. The poll fits nicely with other data that suggests plugged-in news consumers are starting to take more care in how they navigate all the retweets, likes, and shares of the digital age.

Most Americans rely on social media to check daily headlines. Yet as distrust has risen toward all media, people may be starting to beef up their media literacy skills. Such a trend is badly needed. During the 2016 presidential campaign, nearly a quarter of web content shared by Twitter users in the politically critical state of Michigan was fake news, according to the University of Oxford. And a survey conducted for BuzzFeed News found 44 percent of Facebook users rarely or never trust news from the media giant.

Young people who are digital natives are indeed becoming more adept at separating fact from fiction in cyberspace. A Knight Foundation focus-group survey of young people between ages 14 and 24 found they use “distributed trust” to verify stories. They cross-check sources and prefer news from different perspectives – especially those that are open about any bias.

“Many young people assume a great deal of personal responsibility for educating themselves and actively seeking out opposing viewpoints,” the survey concluded.

Such active research can have another effect. A 2014 survey conducted in Australia, Britain, and the United States by the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that young people’s reliance on social media led to greater political engagement. 

Social media allows users to experience news events more intimately and immediately while also permitting them to re-share news as a projection of their values and interests. This forces users to be more conscious of their role in passing along information. A survey by Barna research group found the top reason given by Americans for the fake news phenomenon is “reader error,” more so than made-up stories or factual mistakes in reporting. About a third say the problem of fake news lies in “misinterpretation or exaggeration of actual news” via social media.

In other words, the choice to share news on social media may be the heart of the issue. “This indicates there is a real personal responsibility in counteracting this problem,” says Roxanne Stone, editor in chief at Barna Group,

“To be a good steward of our social media platforms includes a responsibility to do our research: to fact-check a story before sharing it, to double-check a news source to make sure it’s a credible one, to attempt to widen our circles and our reading outside our own echo chambers and biases,” she adds.

So when young people are critical of an over-tweeting president, they reveal a mental discipline in thinking skills – and in their choices on when to share on social media.