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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
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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
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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
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The Abdication of Critical Thinking: Why Scholars Abandon Rigour in Politics
Podcast A paradox haunts contemporary intellectual life, one that demands we examine ourselves with uncomfortable honesty. Here stands a senior scholar in the humanities—trained in textual analysis, ethics, even mysticism—whose political views are so flawed, so deeply troubling, that we find ourselves asking: where did the critical thinking go? And more disturbingly: how did these… — read more
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Voice to What End?
Podcast The placard is simple, humane, and emotionally irresistible: “Be their voice.” At first glance, who could object? If people are censored, jailed, beaten, or killed, should they not be heard? Of course they should. But politics begins precisely where sentiment ends. The real question is not whether Iranians should be heard. The real question… — read more
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The House Slave at the Microphone
Podcast Credit: © ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy Live News On the Comprador Character in the Iranian Diaspora and the Collapse of Borrowed Salvation A Character Type, Not a Person Every imperial project produces its own native chorus—voices from the colonised world who sing the coloniser’s hymn in an accent the metropole finds authentic and… — read more
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Why Reza Pahlavi Still Matters
Podcast Supporters of Iran’s last crown prince, now key opposition figure, Reza Pahlavi hold a banner reading “He is coming – Make Iran Great Again” and depicting a portrait of Reza Pahlavi during a march for Iran in Paris on March 7, 2026, amid the ongoing war in the Middle East. (Photo by Lou BENOIST… — read more
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The Burning Building and the Monitoring Room: Iran, Diaspora, and the Moral Architecture of War
PodcastThe 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: a collision between two entirely different lived realities that have, over decades of displacement and… — read more
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Speculators in Suffering: The Moral Bankruptcy of Diaspora War Advocacy
PodcastThere 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, the corridors of foreign capitals, advocating with remarkable enthusiasm for missiles to rain down on… — read more
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Trading in Pain: Inside–Outside Iran and the Emotional Market of Politics
PodcastThe fracture between Iranians living under the Islamic Republic and those in the diaspora is not, at its core, a political disagreement. It is something much older, cruder, and far more difficult to resolve: a collision between two entirely different lived realities that have, over decades, produced two incompatible languages, two irreconcilable hierarchies of suffering,… — read more
