Trading in Pain, After the Ceasefire
Revisiting the Moral Market Where I Started In March, before the ceasefire, I argued that the gap between Iranians inside the country and those abroad isn’t really a political disagreement. It’s a clash of two lives that don’t translate into each other. What I called the “moral market” was the result: a place where pain… — read more
Tools Don’t Flatter
Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical and the Regulation of AI’s Makers Presenting his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, Pope Leo XIV called for artificial intelligence to be “disarmed” — a word, he conceded, that was strong, but deliberately chosen to awaken consciences and to release the… — read more
Dead Air: A Throne on Subscription
Podcast Manoto, Foreign Money, and the Constituency That Was Never There When Manoto television ceased satellite broadcasting on 31 January 2024, the event was widely read as a financial failure, and the channel’s subsequent history did little to dislodge that reading. A diminished online operation followed; then, in February 2026, even live programming was… — read more
Built from Scratch
Podcast On the Equation That Turns a Nation Into Acceptable Rubble Do we distinguish between Iran and the Islamic Republic? Are they one and the same? It sounds like a pedant’s quarrel, a hotspot for social media. It is not. And you may be surprised which side of it you find yourself on. Begin… — read more
The Abdication of Critical Thinking: Why Scholars Abandon Rigour in Politics
Podcast A paradox haunts contemporary intellectual life, one that demands we examine ourselves with uncomfortable honesty. Here stands a senior scholar in the humanities—trained in textual analysis, ethics, even mysticism—whose political views are so flawed, so deeply troubling, that we find ourselves asking: where did the critical thinking go? And more disturbingly: how did these… — read more
The Architecture of Cruelty
Podcast SAVAK, State Torture, and the Dangerous Nostalgia of Forgetting In cities across the West—Los Angeles, London, Munich, Regensburg—a strange phenomenon has taken root. At demonstrations ostensibly calling for a free Iran, young men and women don SAVAK T-shirts, wave the emblem of the Shah’s secret police, and chant slogans glorifying a security apparatus that… — read more
The Thesis Without a Scaffold
Podcast A Critique of the Iran Ledger’s “Sanctions as Market Control” I have spent the better part of a decade building an analytical framework that demands one thing above all else: that claims earn their keep. Every concept I deploy—the emergency mind, the occupation myth, the algorithmic militia—is coined, defined, stress-tested against counter-examples, and offered… — read more
When Language Fails: Vulgarity, Silence and the Unfinished Conversation
Podcast I was there—present online—when Dr. Fatemeh Sadeghi and Hossein Hamdieh, speaking from London and Tehran respectively during Iran’s internet blackout, began discussing something that has haunted me for months. An interrogator assigned to question young protesters arrested during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising had confessed his bewilderment. He could not understand what they were… — read more
Signal Through the Blackout
Podcast In a recent ninety-minute conversation with Sobhan Yahyaei for the Farsi Panorama podcast — the inaugural episode of a season titled Life in a Time of War — I tried to think aloud about the trilateral confrontation involving Iran, the United States and Israel, the predicament of the Iranian diaspora, and the cultural sediment… — read more
Finding Light in the Darkness
Podcast The following is the full text of my talk delivered at the 13th Annual Iftar at Alyth Synagogue in North London on 8th March. It was offered in the moments before Jewish, Christian, and Muslim guests broke bread together at Iftar — an occasion made particularly poignant by a broader climate in which conflict… — read more
