I remember visiting New York when I was 18 and thinking about coming here for college. How badly I wanted to be “from” New York. How cool, how real, how substantial that would be.

What does it mean to be “from” any place? At what point do you own the culture like you own your native language? Your very own little shard of the broken mirror that adds up to New York. Or Irkutsk. Or Tehran?

Actually, you can’t own a culture: it owns you. And you can’t immerse yourself in a different culture without turning into a different person.

My guest today, investigative reporter Delphine Minoui, grew up in a relatively orderly, secular France. She wanted to know what it meant to be from Iran, her grandfather’s country, under the veil of the Islamic Republic. Over a decade living there, she found out. Her book I’M WRITING YOU FROM TEHRAN is the story of that investigation and how it changed her.

Surprise conversation starters in this episode:

Robert Sapolsky on religious faith in the brain 

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