Welcome to the Twin Wisdoms podcasts. Listen to audio companions to our essays — thoughtful commentary and readings on diaspora, politics, and civilisation.
Podcast
At the Threshold of Surrender
Image credit: Source: Unsplash On Disillusionment and the Refusal to Close the Door This piece is the product of my reflections on a voice message from a friend, a friend undergoing cancer treatment. But it captures something of what we…
Podcast
Every Additional Week of Conflict Benefits Iran Strategically
Image credit: Majid Asgaripour / WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS Why an Immediate Ceasefire Is the Only Viable Option The most plausible trajectory of the US-Israel war with Iran is not rapid victory but a grinding stalemate with…
Podcast
Why the Case for Ceasefire Stands
UN Secretary-General António Guterres receives the Ataturk International Peace Prize from President Erdogan of Türkiye in Ankara. Responding to Critics with Analysis, Not Ideology The critics demand evidence, baselines, cost accounting, enforcement mechanisms. Fair enough. Here are the direct answers…
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The Depth Illusion: How Philosophical Scaffolding Disguises the Banality of War Apologism
Image credit: Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash A Diagnostic Framework for Identifying Logical Fallacies in the Rhetoric of Humanitarian Intervention For S. S. and M. M. who steered the direction of this essay into a more constructive…
Podcast
The Elegy They Earned
On the Destruction of Humanities in Iran — First by the Republic, Now by Those Who Claim to Oppose It One of the defining legacies of Ali Khamenei — the second supreme leader of the Islamic Republic — was his…
Podcast
The Pen Against the Bomb
Hacking War with the Only Weapon We Have Left For S. S. who planted the seed of this essay in my mind. The Ominous Timing of War It is ominous—and it should unsettle every thinking person—that both times Iran came…
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The Aryan Ghost: What the War on Iran Should Teach the Arab World
The Slogan That Should Alarm Everyone There is a slogan circulating with increasing confidence among a visible segment of the Iranian monarchist diaspora — chanted at rallies, printed on banners, amplified across social media with the fervour of a creed:…
Podcast
Civilisational Katharsis or Resurgence of Fascism
It is now pretty established that the most dominant voice on the social media belongs to an increasingly visible faction of the supports of monarchy restoration. They most prominent quality is vulgarity in language, speech, behaviour and actions. These are…
Podcast
Self-Amputation as Liberation
Something broke in Iran after 2009 — not in the corridors of power, where repression merely recalibrated, but in the interior of a society that had maintained a fragile compact with the state. The Green Movement did not fail because…
Podcast
Civilisation and Its Arsonists
A Nawruz Reflection on War, Hypocrisy, and the Promise of Renewal Before I begin, allow me to share a simple thought—one expressed beautifully by the poet Pablo Neruda: you may cut all the flowers, but you cannot stop the spring…
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The Iran We Still Refuse to See: A Response to The Economist
This essay is a response to The Economist article, “Why Ali Khamenei May Have Welcomed the Nature of His Death,” published on 3 March 2026. This analysis of Khamenei’s death as a masterwork of martyrdom theatre is seductive in its…
Podcast
Homo Exsul Furens
The Raging Exile: On the Behavioural Pathology of Victim-Perpetrators A necessary preface. This essay targets no race, no ethnicity, no nation, no faith. It identifies a behavioural pattern — observable, documentable, recurring — displayed by a specific segment of political…
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The Pathology of Political Metaphor
On the Cancer of Calling Others Cancer A certain rot has taken hold of political discourse—one that begins the moment we cease to see our adversaries as human beings and begin to see them as diseases. The metaphor of cancer,…
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The Skewed Lens of “The Right Side of History”
On the Weaponisation of Historical Morality and the Erasure of Conscience There is a phrase that circulates through political rhetoric with the confidence of an axiom and the substance of a mirage: stand on the right side of history. It…
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The Paradox of Expectations
A Regime That Does Not Cooperate With Its Own DownfallAn Israeli journalist recently made ironic commentary on President Trump’s war strategy, capturing in a single tweet what might be called the most revealing paradox of our time. But this is…
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When the Dead Are Counted Twice: Inflated Atrocities and the Manufacture of Indifference
There is a particular cruelty in inflating the number of the dead. It does not honour the victims — it instrumentalises them. And when the inflation is eventually corrected, it does not restore credibility — it destroys it, along with…
Podcast
When Silence Cannot Be Mistaken for Consent: A Defense of Diaspora Voice
A thoughtful critic argues that my essay commits a fundamental inversion by shifting moral scrutiny away from the conditions producing violence in Iran and toward diaspora Iranians who speak about that violence. The critique contends that diaspora members are not…
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The Burning Building and the Monitoring Room: Iran, Diaspora, and the Moral Architecture of War
The fracture at the heart of the Iranian crisis is not, at its deepest level, a disagreement about strategy, ideology, or even the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic. It is something far more elemental and far more difficult to resolve:…
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Speculators in Suffering: The Moral Bankruptcy of Diaspora War Advocacy
There is a peculiar species of political actor that emerges from every fractured nation—those who, having escaped the inferno, appoint themselves firefighters from across the ocean and prescribe gasoline as the cure. They populate the comment sections, the conference panels,…
Podcast
While You Celebrate
A VOICE FROM THE FIRE: What the Diaspora Doesn’t Want to Hear “They killed 168 children in a school. They hit the school twice. TWICE.” These aren’t statistics from a news ticker. These are the words of a man whose…