Bargaining by Fire
Podcast The funeral has ended, the firing has resumed, and the next fortnight will decide whether the June understanding can be rebuilt. It can, and it probably will be. Ayatollah Khamenei was buried in Mashhad today, at the close of a six-day procession through Tehran, Qom, Najaf and Karbala that his state mounted, at great… — read more
The Flag in the Stands: On the Monarchist Abuse of the Lion and Sun
PodcastThe Lion and Sun has been systematically claimed by Iran’s monarchist restoration movement, which deploys it as a pre-Islamic or anti-Islamic identity marker — a visual shorthand for the proposition that authentic Iranian identity is secular and fundamentally in tension with Shi’i Islam. This is not an interpretation of history; it is a confiscation of… — read more
A Proxy for Thought
Podcast The word arrives early and does its work quickly. In almost every account of the latest exchange of fire between Iran and Israel, “proxy” appears within the first breath — Iran’s proxy forces, its proxy militias, its proxy war waged through others while its own people go neglected. The word is meant to settle… — read more
Not by the Back Door
Podcast Pluralism, universalism, and the difference that both relativism and perennialism would erase When I argued recently that pluralism is not relativism, a reader replied with a smile: “Unless you bring in universalism through the back door.” The objection is sharp, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a defensive one. If pluralism… — read more
Pluralism Is Not Relativism
Podcast Sada Cumber is right that Magnifica Humanitas is “a strategic signal,” and right again that “societies cannot be secured by capability alone.” Where I want to press him is on the post-fact ground he names so well. He warns that AI-generated disinformation “attacks the social fabric,” that it “corrodes trust, fractures shared reality.” True.… — read more
Trading in Pain, After the Ceasefire
Podcast 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… — read more
Whose Infrastructure, Whose Celebration?
Podcast On Reza Pahlavi’s Odesa narrative and the laundering of a war’s human cost In Odesa last week — at a forum convened on the principle that bombing a nation’s grid, ports and apartment blocks is a crime against that nation — Reza Pahlavi reportedly told his hosts that the Iranian people celebrated when “the… — 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
