Neda Semnani

For now, Iranians don’t seem to be telegraphing the need for or hunger to dismantle their government and rebuild it from the from the ground up.

In 1979, Iranians living abroad, Neda Semnani’s parents among them, rushed back to Tehran to enjoy the fruits of the Islamic Revolution—only to find Khomeini an even more repressive leader than the Shah. Nursing a young family, Semnani’s mother gave up politics, ...

On January 25, 1983, at about nine o’clock in the evening, my father and twenty-one of his friends were led onto a snowy soccer pitch in Amol, a small town by the Caspian Sea. There, the Iranian government executed them by firing squad following a three-week trial, which was ...

The nation’s capital has been all but overtaken by blurry, doubled vision. At the Phillips Collection, one of the few museums open during the partial government shutdown, there is, starting this month, an exhibit of Vincent van Gogh’s repetitions, thirty-five repeated ...

There is something to be said for having a strong voting bloc, the power to organize, a grumpy scrappiness, and a golden opportunity. On Tuesday, a group of World War II veterans, visiting Washington as part of the Honor Flight network, were kept from visiting their memorial and ...

Are we witnessing the crystallization of the saddest cliché in the world? With one episode left in the first season of the addictive British series Broadchurch, the audience still doesn’t know who killed young Danny Latimer and time is running out for both the detectives and, ...

Over at Slate last week—a place where half-thought memes go to die almost hourly, it seems—Hanna Rosin declared the end of the patriarchy. On paper, of course, I (and countless other ardent feminists like me) should be out in front of the wake for this sturdiest of ...

Leaving a great abstraction untouched is the practice of an investigator who’s already chosen sides, or so suggests Baffler senior editor Chris Lehmann in his review of New Yorker staff writer George Packer’s latest book, The Unwinding. The review, published Thursday at ...