Procopius tells us that al-Mundhir III, the king of the Lakhmids, justified his continued attacks against the Ghassanids by saying that since “Arabs were not mentioned in the Eternal Peace of 532” between Sasanian Iran and Rome, he does not see himself obliged to abide by its terms.

me, walking into the British museum

the answer to an awful war and the crappy deal we got to end it is not, well we reject it and go back to war. this is how Dems get stuck holding the we are for endless war bag.

I’m in @foreignpolicy.com taking a big swing (but not a hot take): Trump’s defeat in Iran is a bigger US defeat in strategic terms than the US loss in Vietnam foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/16/i...

HOLY SHIT

My take on what it means to watch the World Cup, as an Iranian and an American 🇮🇷🇺🇸

‎"Why do I care? Perhaps my inability to name a reason, under the weight of all these years of animosity, anguish, and disappointment, perhaps in the absence of words lies the only meaningful answer. What is there left to be said?" (link below) ‎⁦‪#TeamMelli ‬⁩ ‎⁧‫#تیم_ملی‬⁩

In which I struggle with the discovery by "the West" that Iranian men can be...beautiful. (link below) "And yet, weren’t handsome men better than the usual fare, the hordes of scary Iranians chanting slogans and climbing embassy walls? Why not embrace the ground that had been given?" #TeamMelli

Dylan, on life in your 80’s, is incredible. @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/o...

‎"Why do I care? Perhaps my inability to name a reason, under the weight of all these years of animosity, anguish, and disappointment, perhaps in the absence of words lies the only meaningful answer. What is there left to be said?" (link below) ‎⁦‪#TeamMelli ‬⁩ ‎⁧‫#تیم_ملی‬⁩

“We got the same thing Obama did, but we blew some shit up first.”

It’s funny because when kids ride dirt bikes in the city it’s taken as proof we need a totalitarian police state.

Guillotines

eating in mexico as a european has gotta be like hearing music for the first time

My recent op-ed for the @latimes.com

“Why’s it taking so long to take down the name when they put it up so fast?” yeah, undoing every single thing he’s done is gonna be exactly like that, get used to it

All we want is healthcare.

Jokes aside: horrifying but also entirely expected how much MAGA is making California into one of their main staging areas for the upcoming planned assault as we get closer to this year’s Election Day in November. Hoping to have more reporting on this soon but until then: I think it’ll get bad!

Fuck Trump. Fuck Stephen Miller. Fuck FIFA.

Photographer for the Iraqi national team is deported after spending 13 hours detained by ICE. oglobo.globo.com/esportes/cop...

Raman passes Pratt in the LA Mayor tally

View adjunctification as a stage on the way to AI automation and then, regardless of what your work is, imagine free market fetishism’s anticipation and acceleration of your obsolescence, too.

They’re packaging it like this so it looks like a shallow trend, but Gen Z has gone through two financial crises, a pandemic, rising fascism, active shooter drills since they were toddlers, and are now being told by the oligarchy they’re to be replaced by robots. Socialism is the logical conclusion.

Trump, who has threatened to commit genocide in Iran, says the U.S. military wants to "wipe everybody out" in a country of 93 million people. He thinks our soldiers are as depraved as he is. He's wrong.

It’s appalling that more people do not use this (correct) language to describe February 28, 2026. Pearl Harbor style sneak attack is exactly what it was.

here's what i wrote

Working on Iran means nothing changes and no one learns

I know many other people have similar experience, but: *22 years ago* I reported on big Pentagon-style war game that led to this sequence: 1) US (for some reason) bombs Iran 2) Iran closes Strait of Hormuz 3) Iran attacks US and allied bases in region 4) ???? www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

"Walter was too good a reporter not to take into account all the people he talked to on that trip," Laurence, now 78 and living in England, told me by email — meaning both the spin from the generals and the reality of the bitter fighting he'd glimpsed in Hue.

Speaker Mike Johnson is the most incompetent, feckless, pathetic speaker in American history. He has neutered an important institution and badly damaged our democracy. He will be remembered as a sniveling coward and an enabler of the worst president ever. *That* is an objective fact.

Hot take: democracy reforms are downstream of the diseased information environment and none of them will work until it is healed.

I'm already seeing a lot of analyses of the Los Angeles early numbers are though those are close to final. Again, analyze away, but do take recent history into account for hints of how the count will still evolve!

His entire life he's ruined things but always had someone bail him out. He has no idea how to get out of this

Hormuz open next week is the new infrastructure week

For those of you not living in California, who don't understand what we're going through.

Missed this part of the absurd new proposed government funding rules. I’m sure Middle East Studies and Title VI will be just fine.

they’re shooting crowd control munitions at crowds that include multiple members of congress, the governor, and a sitting united states senator. they fired pepper balls at the senator. they cannot and will not be reigned in by democracy, whatever’s left of it.

I put a couple of dishes in the dishwasher so my household chores are “95% done” The remaining 5% of chores are putting up a new fence and planting a new garden and painting all of the upstairs bedrooms

Yeah, this is the stuff.

❤️✊🏽 An entire childhood

Another reminder: if there exists *any* class of people who don't have due process rights, then *nobody* actually has due process rights because the government can always just say you're in that class.

Vinicunca, the mountain of the seven colors, Peru 🇵🇪

I gotta say, I think maybe it’s time for us to be concerned about these time travelers who keep getting killed around the White House

Imagine missing your own son’s wedding so you could go surrender to Iran

Every summer I repost this article on how to spot drowning. Please read it and pass on. In the last few years I’ve had SIX messages from people who saved a kid’s life after clicking on the link from my feed. slate.com/technology/2...

Funny how the all the people ransacking the Capitol on January 6 were liberals, plants, and ANTIFA—until there was money to be made from it.