Welcome to the Twin Wisdoms podcasts. Listen to audio companions to our essays — thoughtful commentary and readings on diaspora, politics, and civilisation.
A Thumb on the Fret
On 21 September my colleague Rehana Virani filmed me at the Institute playing two short pieces on the setār, the Persian lute whose name means ‘three strings’. The first is Murgh-i Saḥar, the ‘Bird of Dawn’. The tune is by…
Podcast
Three Days at the Rostrum
Pezeshkian, Netanyahu and King Abdullah answering Washington at the eighty-first General Assembly, held to a single measure On Tuesday 22 September the President of the United States stood at the rostrum of the General Assembly and put a question to…
Podcast
A Verdict Without a Court
On a call to arrest Iran’s president in New York, and the law it will not apply beyond him On 22 September, as delegations gathered for the General Assembly, Masih Alinejad posted an open challenge to the mayor of New…
Podcast
If You Are a Solid Rock
On Saturday, 19 September, supporters of the restoration of monarchy held a large gathering at Meridian Hall in Toronto, billed as ‘Cyrus the Great II’, to hear Reza Pahlavi; its organisers had announced a crowd of more than three thousand.…
Podcast
Podcast
Calm Down
This morning I sent a friend a short video. No note, no comment, nothing. In it Navīd Wahrāmān, a Pakistani writer, asks whether the Iranian diaspora’s hatred of Islam is justified. Pakistan had Zia-ul-Haq making prayer compulsory in government offices,…
Podcast
Thirty Days
We use the same platforms. Beyond that we have almost nothing in common, and the difference is not one of opinion. When I write about Iranian politics I am writing from somewhere. I have read the material and taught…
Podcast
The Angels Were Right
Artificial intelligence, the objection to creation, and what a myth can and cannot settle Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, c. 1511, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican City. Photograph: Burkhard Mücke, 18 October 2017, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The objection arrives…
Podcast
The Widening Circle
Ask an Iranian exile why a mosque in Hamburg should be closed and you may be told about Evin prison. The chain feels unbreakable from the inside. The state that jailed my cousin calls itself Islamic; Islam is therefore the…
Podcast
A Ladder Is Not a Home
On the declaration of qiyāma at Alamūt, the doctors who stopped seeing, and the one gift we cannot afford to hand over Across four endoscopy centres, a piece of software was switched on. It watched the live feed of a…
Podcast
Compliance Is Not Innocence
On the two ways an institution abuses its own rules, and why following the process is not the same as being right. Nobody installs a handrail before somebody falls. That is the first thing to understand about an institution’s rules.…
Podcast
The Chain Above the Chair
On what Imam Ali asked of a governor, the rules an institution writes and then steps around, and why a charitable intention repairs nothing. An institution that will not keep the rules it wrote for itself is not being flexible.…
Podcast
The Word on the Placard
On Assal Rad’s Don’t Say Palestine, the memo that told reporters which words to avoid, and the test the book does not set for itself On 11 November 2023, on the march from Hyde Park to the American embassy, a…
Podcast
Riding on the Shoulders of the Machine
AI, ego, and the question the warnings skip For some months I have been turning over a hope. People routinely outgunned before bureaucratic systems – who lose for want of the right form of words rather than the right case…
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…