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The Widening Circle
Podcast 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 thing that jailed my cousin; anything Islamic anywhere is therefore the enemy. Each step… — read more
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Remigration Includes You
Podcast 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 – AFD Wählen ist so 1933’; the Persian placards call for the end of the… — read more
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No Licence for Slander
Podcast 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 a degree of self-discipline that nobody is born with and few of us are… — read more
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A List Is Not a Law
Podcast 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 it he would either be in the air or already on the ground in… — read more
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The Middle Nobody Counts
Podcast 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 to me. The exchange has run in Naqd-i Iqtiṣād-i Siyāsī since Urdībihisht 1403, begun… — read more
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Somebody Else’s 1945
PodcastOn 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 from footage broadcast by Iran’s IRINN state television, made available via AFPTV. Credit: AFP /… — read more
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The Table and the Ledger
Podcast 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. Sada Cumber has the right image for this moment, and I want to take… — read more
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Trading in Pain, After the Ceasefire
Podcast Revisiting the Moral Market Where I Started In March, before the ceasefire, I argued that the gap between Iranians inside the country and those abroad isn’t really a political disagreement. It’s a clash of two lives that don’t translate into each other. What I called the “moral market” was the result: a place where… — 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
