In the summer of 1971, The New York Times published a set of secret documents spanning forty-seven volumes, which Americans came to call the Pentagon Papers. These documents revealed that the government which had sent its sons into the Vietnamese jungles was not merely managing a war, but also managing a narrative about that war—and
At the end of the Second World War in 1945, following the surrender of Germany and Japan, we were living in a ground-floor apartment on Hammouda Street, just a few meters from the southwestern outer wall of Abdeen Palace. This was due to the lack of available accommodation in my grandfather’s building at 24 Mostafa Kamel Street in
In 2002, Steven Spielberg directed a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, based on a true story that seemed closer to fiction. The protagonist, Frank Abagnale Jr., a teenager not yet nineteen, succeeded in impersonating a pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer, amassing millions while evading the pursuit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation across three
By the grace and will of God, I have approached the middle of my eighth decade of life. I often recall moments, scenes, and people who brought me happiness, and I record some of them here.
I remember the first apple my eyes ever saw—it was large, with a bright, glossy red color. I was three years old at the time, in 1945. I was
“What is Iran today?” With this deceptively simple question, the late President Anwar Sadat offered one of the earliest and most prescient readings of post-revolutionary Iran—not as a state that merely changed its political system, but as one that entered a fundamentally different trajectory.
President Anwar
