Welcome to the Twin Wisdoms podcasts. Listen to audio companions to our essays — thoughtful commentary and readings on diaspora, politics, and civilisation.
Podcast
Remigration Includes You
On the Iranians cheering Europe’s far right, the word sitting in its manifesto, and the people that word names Iranians demonstrating outside the Alte Oper, Frankfurt, 17 February 2024. One placard reads ‘Die AfD ist keine Alternative für Deutschland –…
Podcast
Nobody Argues From Nowhere
The charge turns up again and again: a scholar is not independent, because his faith enters his work. Behind it sits an old and appealing idea, that a mind stripped of its beliefs would simply see the truth laid bare.…
Podcast
Far From the Mast
On the mast at Kuhestak, the map that put Tehran under a blast radius, and the test Iran International will not take A telecommunications mast stood near the shoreline at Kuhestak, in Sirik county, on the Hormozgan coast. On the…
Podcast
Borrowed Eyes
On the two machines that manufacture Iran, the eighteen years that keep me from checking, and what Yaser Mirdamadi found when he went back. Fourth in the Narrating Iran series, drawn from Yaser Mirdamadi’s account of his return and argued…
Podcast
No Licence for Slander
On the difference between criticism and abuse, and what the Iranian diaspora has done with it It sounds like an obvious thing to say, and it is not. Telling criticism apart from cynicism takes training. It takes education. It takes…
Podcast
A List Is Not a Law
On the hundred names compiled in Tehran, the accusation waiting at the other end of the flight, and the guarantee neither side is offering On Thursday morning Mohsen Namjoo put out a video saying that by the time anyone watched…
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…