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Baharestan and the Persian New Year

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The Persian New Year, called Nowruz (“New Day”), is the first day of spring—Thursday March 20, 2017, in the United States. It is calculated to the second, according to the moment that the sun crosses the equator. This non-Islamic holiday, which is shared by many countries, including Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan, is based on the seasons and agricultural tradition, going back 3,000 years to Zoroastrian rituals.

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Object of Desire

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In “The Little Typewriter,” Kracauer offers a cautionary tale against commodity fetishization with humor, while also conjuring an uncomfortable metaphor to do with the purchase of women and the use of their bodies for pleasure. The reader is left to wonder: is the story an exercise in making an object woman, or thinly describing a woman as object?

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Stories We Tell Of Ourselves: The Enneagram, Eliot, Emerson, and Trump

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This idea of narratives is key: in a sense, the Enneagram is just an organized and abstracted system of characters that already exist, in specific forms, in literature. And just like literature, it can give us ways to understand and mobilize our own stories and transformations; indeed, we can think of literature as a place where philosophies of personality are put into play.

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How to Hold Multiple Truths to be Self-Evident: Late Thoughts After the Women’s March

On January 22, I drove back from Washington, D.C. The day before, I’d been one of the 500,000 that filled out Independence Avenue, one of the specks in those awe-inspiring aerial shots that plastered the news. I’d been cold and hungry and dehydrated and I had not felt any of that discomfort until I sat down for dinner later that night and nearly wept at the sensation of sinking into a seat.

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Spaces on the Edge: An Interview with Emmalea Russo

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“Virginia Woolf’s amazing essay ‘On Being Ill’—where she interrogates literature’s lack of focus on illness, the collective obsession with the drama of romance over the drama of often inseparable physical and mental ailments—has been a jumping off point. So, I’m writing though some of my own experiences via Woolf and also some other artists and writers.”

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Seven with Farassati and Afkhami

Why an Iranian TV Show Hates Iranian Movies

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Farassati also argues that these films tend to be dark in their subject matter and thus provide a bad image of Iran for the West. They reinforce negative beliefs about Iran, which in certain ways can be true. But of course he also knows that many major award-winning films from all over the world have been critical of their own societies and governments. This is what artists do.

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On “The Bird-while”: An Interview with Keith Taylor

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“As much as I try to stay open to wherever the poem is going, I know my concerns come with me to the page. Environmental concerns, political concerns, as well as literary concerns. I hope my poems can find an audience, even one outside of the usual readership of poetry — although that doesn’t really shape the composition of poems.”

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