Welcome to the Twin Wisdoms podcasts. Listen to audio companions to our essays — thoughtful commentary and readings on diaspora, politics, and civilisation.
Podcast
Two Kinds of Certainty
On the seventy-third anniversary of the 1953 coup, a reflection on the arrogance that ended Mohammad Mossadegh’s government, and the different arrogance that must not be allowed to replace it. Seventy-three years ago today, tanks reached the prime minister’s residence…
Podcast
Breaking the Mirror
A Verse, and a Warning Nizami Ganjavi wrote, in the Makhzan al-Asrar eight centuries ago, that when the mirror has shown your reflection true, you should break yourself, for breaking the mirror is the mistake.[1] Dariush Eghbali opened the note…
Podcast
Neither Rogue Nor Obedient
Two positions on artificial intelligence, and the question both leave standing In Brief The alarm has hold of something the reassurance waves away. Artificial intelligence is an invention rather than a discovery, and the opacity is real. That is a…
Podcast
The Middle Nobody Counts
On Radio Farda’s Pārāgrāf-i Avval, the Madani–Bayat correspondence, and the part of Iran that no one has counted Radio Farda’s programme Pārāgrāf-i Avval, presented by Muhammad Zarghami, put the correspondence between Saeed Madani and Asef Bayat to Jalal Idjadi and…
Podcast
Islam or Muslims?
Image: folio from a manuscript of the Quran, Aga Khan Museum, Toronto An argument is circulating, and it deserves a straight answer. It runs like this. A Muslim intellectual, pressed about the crimes of the Islamic Republic, replies that there…
Podcast
Who Holds the Rope
On capital punishment in Iran, the argument the opposition will not make, and the one the Muslim tradition already supplies An iron scaffold went up in Alikhani Square in Isfahan on Monday night. People gathered. There were scuffles with the…
Podcast
The Rock and the Library
Date: 13/09/2003 | Photo: Mohammad Mahmoudi |Copyright: © ACHB On the inscription of Alamut, and the inheritance the citation does and does not name The item took a few minutes. On Sunday, in Busan, the World Heritage Committee inscribed…
Podcast
Three Thousand Five Hundred
On 25 July 2026, Morad Vaisi published a number. Vaisi is senior Iran analyst at Iran International and host of its flagship politics programme. Since January he has been collecting the names of the dead and reading them aloud, live,…
Podcast
The Love of the Microphone
On Masih Alinejad’s theatre of grief, the platforms that reward it, and the war she now says she never wanted. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the Partido Popular, greets Masih Alinejad before the ‘Mujeres libres’ session at the Congreso de…
Podcast
Somebody Else’s 1945
On the Nazi analogy, the Iranians who reach for it from abroad, and the state that made it plausible Aftermath of overnight US strikes on a bridge in Bandar Khamir county, near the Strait of Hormuz, 17 July 2026. Screengrab…
Podcast
Nobody Wants to Go to War
On a corridor interview of 21 July 2026, and the verb that carries a war A journalist puts one question to three United States senators: the President has formally told Congress that the war with Iran has resumed. What do…
Podcast
The Table and the Ledger
On Sada Cumber’s ‘Iran at the Crossroads’ (National Security Institute), and what would tell us the turn is real A crossroads implies a traveller. Somebody walked to get there, at a price, and somebody now has to choose a road.…
Podcast
The Ledger of Ali Khamenei
Ali Khamenei held the office of Supreme Leader for thirty-six years. He inherited a republic that was bruised, broke, and at war, and he left behind a state whose legitimacy had been hollowed from within – by his own hand,…
Podcast
Nobody Is Free to Stay
The programme opens in Istanbul, at a reading of the Shahnameh. Fifty thousand couplets, a thousand years old, recited aloud by Iranians far from home. Within two minutes the frame is set: this, we are told, is where Iranians go…
Podcast
The Grief You Can Afford
On Reza Pahlavi’s sudden mourning for the conscripts of Bampour, and the children of Minab he was willing to call a price This week you asked Iran’s soldiers not to die for the Islamic Republic. You mourned the conscripts killed…
Podcast
Bargaining by Fire
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…
Podcast
The Flag in the Stands: On the Monarchist Abuse of the Lion and Sun
The 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…
Podcast
A Proxy for Thought
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…
Podcast
Not by the Back Door
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…
Podcast
Pluralism Is Not Relativism
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…