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 / […]

Podcast On a corridor interview of 21 July 2026, and the verb that carries a war A journalist puts one question to three United States senators: the President has formally told Congress that the war with Iran has resumed. What do you make of it? The exchange, filmed by Marzia Hussaini and posted to X […]

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 […]

Podcast Ali Khamenei held the office of Supreme Leader for thirty-six years. He inherited a republic that was bruised, broke, and at war, and he left behind a state whose legitimacy had been hollowed from within – by his own hand, and often against his own stated interests. The record is long enough to sort. […]

Podcast The programme opens in Istanbul, at a reading of the Shahnameh. Fifty thousand couplets, a thousand years old, recited aloud by Iranians far from home. Within two minutes the frame is set: this, we are told, is where Iranians go now, as disillusionment with Islam takes hold. ‘War, God and the Islamic Republic’, an […]

PodcastOn Reza Pahlavi’s sudden mourning for the conscripts of Bampour, and the children of Minab he was willing to call a price This week you asked Iran’s soldiers not to die for the Islamic Republic. You mourned the conscripts killed at the Bampour garrison. You told their parents to keep their sons at home. You […]

Podcast The funeral has ended, the firing has resumed, and the next fortnight will decide whether the June understanding can be rebuilt. It can, and it probably will be. Ayatollah Khamenei was buried in Mashhad today, at the close of a six-day procession through Tehran, Qom, Najaf and Karbala that his state mounted, at great […]

PodcastThe Lion and Sun has been systematically claimed by Iran’s monarchist restoration movement, which deploys it as a pre-Islamic or anti-Islamic identity marker — a visual shorthand for the proposition that authentic Iranian identity is secular and fundamentally in tension with Shi’i Islam. This is not an interpretation of history; it is a confiscation of […]

Podcast The word arrives early and does its work quickly. In almost every account of the latest exchange of fire between Iran and Israel, “proxy” appears within the first breath — Iran’s proxy forces, its proxy militias, its proxy war waged through others while its own people go neglected. The word is meant to settle […]

Podcast   Pluralism, universalism, and the difference that both relativism and perennialism would erase When I argued recently that pluralism is not relativism, a reader replied with a smile: “Unless you bring in universalism through the back door.” The objection is sharp, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a defensive one. If pluralism […]