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The fourth season of HBO’s “Industry” has been a gruesome one for the show’s fan favorites (spoilers ahead!), with one character, Rishi, breaking both his ankles after a coke-fuelled jump off a balcony, and another, Eric, exiling himself from public life after a corporate sting catches him on tape with a sex worker who turned out to be underage. But neither man suffers as stomach-lurching a fall as Yasmin does on Sunday’s outstanding finale episode, in which she ends her marriage to the silver-spooned Henry and embarks on a horrifying reinvention. Midway through the finale, we get the first glimpse of Yasmin’s newfound calling. In a dark-panelled meeting room, she sits with Henry’s uncle, Alexander, a conservative tabloid publisher whose scandal sheets once targeted Yasmin herself, and Stefanowicz, a far-right politician who represents a base that Alexander describes as “young, murderous, undersexed men.” To Yasmin’s surprise, Stefanowicz expresses disapproval of her divorce; he considers it “an affront to God.” But for the audience the scariest revelation in the conversation isn’t his dogmatism. Rather, it’s that the least principled of the three is actually Yasmin, whose climb back into the upper class after her father’s mismanagement of the family fortune has been accompanied by her recurring exasperation that others still hold any scruples at all.

Yasmin’s remaining scenes play out like a horror movie. She invites Harper, her eternal frenemy since their first days at Pierpoint, to a party in Paris for Stefanowicz’s supporters, where Harper gradually realizes that she’s been seated next to literal Nazis who mistake her for one of their own. Then young women stroll in, some in shiny pink and gold frocks that emphasize how out of place they are in the dimly lit hotel suite. Yasmin herself wears a minimalist black dress—a chicer variation on the sort often seen on Ghislaine Maxwell. (The series hasn’t been subtle in detailing Yasmin’s parallels to the former Jeffrey Epstein associate—both have shady media-mogul fathers who named yachts after their daughters and died in strange circumstances amid financial ruin.) Asked by Harper to explain her abrupt turn as a madam for the wealthy and deplorable, Yasmin gives a villain’s speech, a rationalization that boils down to “Why not?” The world is harsh and men are animals, so it stands to reason that she would take advantage of the state of affairs. She’s profiting from the women she recruited for the event—including Molly, who until recently worked at Henry’s estate for minimum wage—but she’s giving them opportunities, too. In a bid to convince Harper of the supposed unremarkableness of the increasing creepiness around them, Yasmin shows Harper a video of Eric, their former boss, receiving oral sex from a minor and tells her, falsely, that he engaged in such services knowingly. It’s the exact clip that Eric, a father of two, who arguably came to love Harper even more than his actual daughters, had hoped she would never see when he fled their partnership earlier in the season.

Yasmin’s latest moral descent cements her fate as “Industry” ’s greatest and most compelling tragedy; she is the character to whom the worst things have happened, and the one who took from her traumas the most cynical lessons possible. “We both know that this world will own you if you don’t harden up,” she tells Harper at the Stefanowicz gathering, spinning her degeneracy as a mark of maturity. But Harper spent the fourth season finding a socially constructive outlet for her cold-bloodedness—shorting unethical companies—and even the hapless Henry, who was the final C.E.O. of the fintech startup Tender before its demise, decided to face the humiliation of his latest public failure rather than flee the country. Henry’s and Harper’s final scenes this year show them with loved ones—him with his oligarchic protectors; her with her glib but emotionally grounded lover, Kwabena. But Yasmin, in her final scene, is alone once more, suffering a panic attack while compulsively replaying a voice mail from her deceased father.

“Industry,” which was created by Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, began, in part, as an exploration of the difficulties of reforming poisonous systems. The first season exhibits a skepticism toward optics-focussed D.E.I. initiatives, and the third season casts doubt on the banking business’s attempts to whitewash its practices through E.S.G. (environmental, social, and governance) investing. The young people ushered into the system—like Harper, who’s sexually harassed by a client early in the show—quickly figure out that there’s more to be gained by going along with the workings of an institution than by challenging them. But Yasmin has been fascinating to watch because of her willingness to embrace the rot. She’s governed by a particular combination of entitlement and eschewed responsibility—a product, one assumes, of her childhood, during which she enjoyed every imaginable material privilege but, thanks to her volatile father, rarely a sense of stability or control. As an adult, she has no regard for what the world looks like, as long she’s on top. She has never bothered casting a ballot, despite a brief career as a politician’s wife, and her philosophy toward the media, over which she now exerts a modicum of influence through her dealings with Alexander, is “Who cares, as long as people are clicking?” The rise of the Reform Party in the fourth season’s backdrop isn’t just the show’s bid for relevance; it poses the question of who, other than the relatively few dedicated fascists in the U.K., would thrive amid their ascent. The answer is people like Yasmin, who’s so devoid of actual values that she characterizes this frightening new era as a simple pendulum swing from the left to the right, “achieving nothing but perpetual campaigning.”

On a different show, such self-serving nihilism might render a character irredeemably repellent. But Yasmin remains enthralling because she relentlessly pursues power over others, even when it forecloses on her own opportunities for happiness and connection. In the third season, she chooses the wealthy and connected Henry, who confesses that he may be too selfish to love her, over her on-off fling Robert, who opens his home to her when her father, Charles, locks her out of his. Her alliance with Stefanowicz and his ilk means ignoring the obvious fact that they most likely consider her part of the hordes of outsiders invading Europe (she’s a British-raised woman with Israeli and Libyan roots), leading to what they denounce as the “erosion of our culture.” Yasmin’s desperate wish to become untouchably powerful like Harper, whom she calls “a breathing example of how I can be more” in last week’s episode, ironically drives her into even more insecurity. Her decision to team up with Hayley, an assistant at Tender, in the scheme to secretly videotape johns as future blackmail material, after it had been done to her and Henry, is another instance in which Yasmin adopts the tools used to hurt her to injure others. But it’s a particularly shortsighted move, since she can’t trust that Hayley won’t one day blackmail her as well.

Yasmin’s closing scene echoes that of the previous season, when, as a newlywed in Henry’s ancestral manor, she is given devastating news about her father by Alondra, his former employee and lover: on his boat, the Lady Yasmin, Charles and his friends preyed on girls as young as twelve. Alondra expresses sympathy in the case that Yasmin was sexually assaulted by Charles, too, leading to an outsized reaction on Yasmin’s part that suggests Alondra was right to suspect such a transgression. In the latest finale, in another baronially decorated room—Yasmin’s hotel suite in Paris—Molly enters, tearful about something that seems to have gone wrong at the party the night before, but hesitant to spell it out. Before Molly can confide in her, Yasmin shuts her down with a professional smile and a disingenuous ode to resilience: “She is tossed by the waves, but she does not sink.” Only after she’s left alone does Yasmin allow herself to drop to the ground while tearfully listening to her dad’s voice on repeat. Defenseless against her own memories, she seems overwhelmed by a flood of remembrances of Charles—and, perhaps, to be grappling with the inescapable fact that she’s one step closer to becoming the man who made her a monster. ♦

Early Sunday morning, on a state-controlled television station, a bearded news anchor wept as he announced that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had been “martyred,” at the age of eighty-six, on the first day of the war with the U.S. and Israel. Three times, between heaving sobs, the anchor shouted “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” before reading the news from a white piece of paper. His hand shook. The U.S. reportedly provided the intelligence on Khamenei’s movements; Israeli fighter jets conducted the precision strike. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged that Israel had destroyed “the compound of the tyrant Khamenei” which included the top political and military offices of Iranian leaders. In a Truth Social post, President Donald Trump heralded, “one of the most evil people in History is dead.” He called it “Justice” for people and countries worldwide who had been victims of “Khamenei and his gang of bloodthirsty THUGS.”

In 1987, I had a working breakfast with Khamenei, then the President of Iran, when he came to speak at the U.N., on his only trip to the U.S. or the West. With oversized glasses, a long graying beard, and a black turban, he struck me then as unworldly, naïvely arrogant about theocratic rule, and defensively furious at America for past interventions in Iran. At one point, a member of the Revolutionary Guard came over to cut up Khamenei’s breakfast meat. Khamenei had lost the use of his right arm after a small bomb hidden in a tape recorder, planted by an opposition group, went off as he was giving a sermon seven years earlier.

Khamenei was born in Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city, as the son of a mid-ranking cleric of modest means. From a young age, he was educated in seminaries, first in Iran and then in Najaf, Iraq, at the center of Shiite learning. He became a follower of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—and an opponent of the monarchy—after he returned to Iran. He was arrested six times. When I visited the Ebrat Museum, which was formerly an intelligence prison run by the Shah’s U.S.-trained secret police, SAVAK, I saw a wax figure of Khamenei in what had been his cell. After the 1979 Revolution, Khomeini, the first Supreme Leader, appointed Khamenei to lead Friday prayers, an influential position. After one President was impeached and another killed in a terrorist attack, Khamenei was elected President in 1981. In 1989, two years after we met, he was catapulted into the Islamic Republic’s top job following Khomeini’s abrupt death. Khamenei held ultimate power over political, military, judicial and economic policy for nearly four decades. It was one of the longest contemporary reigns in the world. But at the end of his life, he was secluded or hidden underground so much that Iranians nicknamed him Moushe-Ali, or Ali the Mouse.

Iran has moved quickly to start the succession process. On Sunday, a new three-man leadership council began work on the transition. “We will continue with all our strength along the path set by Imam Khomeini” who led the revolution in 1979, President Masoud Pezeshkian said, in a prerecorded message aired on state television. The council includes Pezeshkian, the judiciary chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, and Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, one of the eighty-eight members of the popularly elected Assembly of Experts, which is empowered to select the next Supreme Leader. Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, who had just days earlier held indirect talks with U.S. officials in Geneva, told Al Jazeera that a new leader would be announced in “one day or two.”

Khamenei’s death triggered a profound but bifurcated reaction inside Iran. News and videos on social media showed Iranians cheering, honking horns, and dancing in the streets of Tehran and other cities to celebrate his death—all actions unthinkable days earlier, amid the government’s ongoing and ruthless crackdown on protesters. But other pictures showed tens of thousands gathering in the capital in sorrow. They struck their hands hard against their chests—a Shiite custom known as matam, or latm—to express intense grief and solidarity. The practice dates to the seventh century, when Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and the son of the founder of Shiism, died in Karbala. Beating chests also signals ongoing belief in Shiite principles.

The disparate responses to Khamenei’s assassination reflect foundational questions about Iran’s future. Since the 1979 Revolution, Iranian political factions have argued—ferociously and sometimes fatally—about whether the Islamic Republic is foremost Islamic or primarily a republic. Is God’s law, or Sharia, as embodied in the Quran, the basis of the regime’s rule, with the Supreme Leader having the last word? Or is man’s law, as outlined in Iran’s constitution, the basis of government, with elected leaders in the Presidency and parliament shaping the country’s policy? For almost half a century, these questions have pitted so-called principlists against various groups of reformists or centrists. In 1981, Khomeini warned the quarrelling political factions to stop “biting one another like scorpions.”

The Iranian people, too, have fought over these questions. Since 2009 and more intensely since 2017, nationwide protests have sporadically challenged Islamic rule. Many Iranians want either major political reform or an end to the Velayat-e Faqih—the rule of the Islamic jurist—altogether. Tens of thousands have died along the way. The regime has been fragile and fractured for years. The late Harvard historian Crane Brinton, in his classic “The Anatomy of a Revolution,” writes that the final stage of a revolution is “convalescence,” when a society becomes so exhausted that it seeks stability. In these early days, it’s still unclear what potential convalescence might look like—or what kind of stability the people seek.

What’s left of the Iranian regime is now even more vulnerable, as many top political and military leaders have been assassinated in the first two days of war. “Khamenei’s death creates a moment of genuine uncertainty, but it does not automatically translate into immediate regime collapse,” Hamidreza Azizi, an Iranian political scientist at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, in Berlin, told me. “The Islamic Republic anticipated a day-after scenario for a long time and built overlapping institutions capable of maintaining continuity, particularly within the security and military establishment.” Khamenei’s bayt, a term used among Shiites to describe a cleric’s religious and political “house,” employed more than four thousand people; his affiliated institutions employed more than forty thousand. These are separate from the executive, legislative, parliamentary, and military branches, and from other civil-service jobs.

Iran’s military, the largest in the Middle East, is estimated to have more than six hundred thousand members on active duty. “The rapid activation of a transitional leadership structure and the continuation of military operations suggest that authority in Iran has already shifted toward collective decision-making bodies and security actors able to operate under crisis conditions,” Azizi said. “In the near term, this makes systemic survival more likely than sudden political transformation, especially while the country remains engaged in active conflict.”

Iran’s political future becomes far more complicated in the longer term, Azizi noted. Khamenei functioned “as the ultimate mediator among competing factions. Without that arbiter, succession becomes a negotiation among élites taking place under wartime pressure,” he said. One possible scenario is “consolidation around a more security-dominated leadership.” Another is “gradual erosion if prolonged conflict weakens state control,” although, Azizi continued, that “would not necessarily be a clean transition.” And the transition might not play out only in Tehran. The country has a decentralized landscape of security forces that “raises the risk that instability could produce fragmentation or localized violence rather than orderly regime change,” Azizi told me.

On Sunday, Patrick Clawson, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote that “a wide spectrum of powerful figures will soon be jockeying for control even as they try to evade military strikes. Yet supposing the regime does manage to survive and designate a new Supreme Leader, no such individual will start out with the same deference given to Khamenei.” Some of the surviving leaders, notably among the Revolutionary Guard, he said, may feel that “they should run the show, with the next Supreme Leader playing a modest role.”

For the entire Middle East, the changes wrought by this new war and the convulsions precipitated by the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, underscore the failures of Iran’s strategy to transform itself and the region. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has sought to build an alliance that would protect its interests and influence other Shiite communities. “We shall export our revolution to the whole world, until the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the whole world,” Khomeini, the first Supreme Leader, vowed. Graffiti on the former U.S. Embassy, which was stormed by students ten months after the Revolution, said, “God willing, this century will be the period of victory for the oppressed over the oppressors.”

Iran has certainly failed the oppressed within its own borders. Today, daily life in the country is rife with challenges. When I first went to Iran, in 1973, one dollar bought seventy rials. On the eve of this current war, a dollar bought 1.3 million rials. Basic food supplies are exorbitantly expensive. Water and electricity are in short supply. And, regionally, Iran’s “axis of resistance”—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Kataeb Hezbollah in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen—has been seriously weakened, though far from eliminated. A striking feature of the first days of the war is that Tehran’s allies—founded, funded, and armed by the Islamic Republic—have not intervened on behalf of their sponsor.

Almost fifty years ago, Iran’s revolutionaries introduced a militant brand of Shiite Islam as a viable medium of political opposition and governance. Their ideology spilled across countries and continents and even reached other Islamic sects, including rival Sunnis. The extremism they pushed, in its many manifestations, has been considered a top security threat around the world. The fate of Iran—and its leadership—could ripple across the world once again, too. ♦

“All I want is freedom for the people,” President Donald Trump told a journalist, early on Saturday, not long after launching a joint military operation with Israel against Iran. Trump was talking about ordinary Iranians, subjected for almost half a century to a repressive theocracy—a regime that, just weeks prior, had carried out a brutal crackdown on Iranian protesters which possibly saw tens of thousands of people killed. Much like another U.S. President whose Middle East misadventures he often denounced, Trump was already styling himself as a liberator.

If not liberated, Iranians woke up on Sunday to a stark new reality, as Iranian authorities confirmed that the sweeping round of strikes had killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with a cadre of other top officials. Khamenei, a clerical despot driven by rigid dogma and a ruthless instinct for survival, had been in power since the fall of the Soviet Union, his legacy shaped by years of geopolitical isolation, the shadow wars he waged abroad, and the uprisings he quashed at home. Trump cheered the news in a social-media post: “Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead.” In Iran, a state television anchor declared that “the leader of the great nation of Iran, the vanguard of the Islamic Ummah, his excellency Imam Khamenei drank the nectar of martyrdom and in the month of Ramadan ascended to the highest heaven.” A trio of surviving officials—President Masoud Pezeshkian; the judiciary chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei; and a jurist from the Guardian Council, Iran’s constitutional watchdog—will guide a transition.

For Trump and the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the decapitation of such a totemic figure as Khamenei marks a moment of triumph. It boosts Netanyahu’s warfighting image at home and will help Trump wave away any reminders of his own lengthy rhetorical record opposing costly regime-change wars in the Middle East. And it will further obscure hand-wringing over the apparent illegality of his intervention, which triggered an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council on Saturday and elicited a chorus of objections from congressional Democrats over the President’s misuse of war powers. After weeks of planning, the U. S. and Israel had decided to strike an Iranian regime that was already enfeebled by recent rounds of conflict, infiltrated by foreign intelligence assets, and vulnerable, more than ever, to U.S. and Israeli airpower. Fresh off the defenestration of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Trump also seemed convinced of his singular ability to dictate terms on the world stage. Trump whisperers in Washington appealed to his ego and his earlier declarations of support for Iranian dissent. “It is my strong view that history is watching every move we make,” Senator Lindsey Graham, an inveterate Iran hawk, wrote in a Fox News opinion piece, last week. “If we follow through by sending help to the protesters risking their lives, we will have a 21st Century Berlin Wall moment.”

For many Iranians, Khamenei’s exit is welcome, a symbolic end to an overly long chapter in the story of their country’s decaying revolution, and the first step toward a new political future. But it’s not a death knell for the Islamic Republic. Khamenei, an ailing octogenarian, frequently spoke of his willingness to be martyred, and regime officials have claimed that Israel already tried to target them last summer, when Israel and Iran traded strikes in what would become known as the Twelve-Day War. “This was coming, and the Iranians knew it was coming,” Vali Nasr, a professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told me. “The U.S. has to go much farther than just killing Khamenei to paralyze the Islamic Republic.”

The U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran, on Saturday, convulsed the Middle East in a spasm of interstate violence. Iran launched retaliatory missiles and drone strikes against targets in Israel, while also striking Gulf metropoles, hitting civilian infrastructure—such as airports and luxury hotels in Dubai—and targeting U.S. military facilities in Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait. (These retaliatory strikes have resulted in at least four confirmed deaths: three foreign nationals in the U.A.E., and one person in Kuwait.) At least two hundred Iranians are dead, including many children, following the destruction of a school in southern Iran. At least nine people were killed in Israel, after an Iranian missile strike on the city of Beit Shemesh. On Sunday morning, U.S. Central Command confirmed that three U.S. service members had been killed, and five had been wounded, as part of the attacks on Iran, which are ongoing, with Israel carrying out more air strikes on Tehran. Trump warned that “heavy and pinpoint bombing” could continue through the week, if necessary, though he also told The Atlantic that he was open to negotiations with Iran’s reconstituted leadership.

“One should not be dazzled by the military advantage America and Israel have displayed in the early hours of this conflict,” Emile Hokayem, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, wrote. “What matters is how the war ends—and Trump’s America is not likely to manage the long-term regional mess it is creating.”

There’s little evidence that the Trump Administration has thought through the endgame. Analysts contend that Israel can live with a fragmented, weak Iranian state, whose military assets it can destroy when it sees fit, as is the case with Israel’s periodic bombardments of Syria. But the United States and, moreover, its Gulf allies don’t want to see a total collapse of a country of more than ninety million people. “What regional states and European states are fearing, but not talking about, is an exodus of Iranians from a very unstable post-Islamic Republic Iran, and infighting around Iran’s borders that certainly can also spill over into neighboring countries like Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan,” Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House, a British think tank, told me.

There are few useful precedents to help chart the path forward. Trump may hope for a similar outcome to what followed Maduro’s extraordinary rendition from Venezuela, with the once hostile regime in Caracas reconfiguring itself, under acting President Delcy Rodríguez, into a quasi-clientelistic arrangement with Washington. But, as Vakil told me, “there are no Delcy-like figures in Iran.”

The air campaign over Iran also recalls the NATO-led intervention into Libya in 2011, which led to the ouster and killing of the long-ruling dictator Muammar Qaddafi. But, unlike in Libya, there’s no major rebellion under way inside Iran, nor even a coherent opposition and, absent mass defections from the security forces, little prospect of an armed challenge to the regime gaining significant ground on its own. And then there’s the legacy of the calamity that followed in Libya, with Qaddafi’s ouster paving the way for more than a decade of failed governance and prolonged civil strife.

Outside Iran, some of the diaspora and opposition groups have coalesced around Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah dethroned by the 1979 revolution. Pahlavi has cast himself as a figure of unity who can shepherd Iran’s political transition. But he is already a divisive character outside the country and has minimal influence within. As Ervand Abrahamian, a historian of Iran and professor emeritus at the City University of New York, noted in a recent conversation that we had, history offers few happy examples of monarchical restorations after a long revolutionary interlude. The most recent example, he suggested, could date as far back as the Bourbons being installed in Paris after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815—but that required the deployment of hundreds of thousands of Prussian, Russian, and other Allied troops to buttress the royalist return. Neither Trump nor Netanyahu nor any Middle Eastern leader would want to participate in such an occupation.

For now, with Iran’s regime backed into a shrinking corner, the potential for a destabilizing conflagration is real. “There is a danger of a regional war in which Iran attempts to destroy the positive things that have been built in the Gulf and to go after oil installations to spike the price of oil,” Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in an interview with Foreign Affairs. “Israel is better equipped to defend itself because of its military prowess and its distance from Iran, but those Gulf countries are more vulnerable.”

The scenes of chaos in expat-clogged places like Doha and Dubai represent a kind of worst-case scenario for leaders of the Gulf monarchies, who want the world to see their glittering kingdoms as oases of stability and prosperity, Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a Middle East expert at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, told me. It also complicates the Trump Administration’s own significant dealings with wealthy Arab royals, which include major rounds of investment in U.S. tech companies and some of Trump’s own family enterprises. A prolonged conflict has “consequences for U.S. credibility as a mediator, as a negotiator,” Ulrichsen said. “We saw after the Iraq invasion in 2003 how credibility takes a long time to be restored when something of this magnitude happens.”

Until the weekend, it seemed there was an off-ramp. Oman’s Foreign Minister, Badr Albusaidi, conducted a last-ditch mission to Washington, meeting with Vice-President J. D. Vance and appearing Friday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” where he said that a substantive agreement between Iran and the United States was “within our reach.” He suggested that Israeli and American fears over a potential Iranian nuclear weapon would be assuaged, that Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium could be secured, and the parties in dispute could settle terms “peacefully and permanently.”

The indirect talks staged between Trump’s envoys and Iranian counterparts now seem something of a smoke screen for what was already in motion: a concerted U.S.-Israeli plan to hit Iran, not dissimilar from the strikes in June that also happened during ongoing negotiations with Tehran. Amid the fog of war, Albusaidi recognized that the diplomatic track he had been trying to furrow as an intermediary had come to an end.

“I am dismayed. Active and serious negotiations have yet again been undermined,” Albusaidi wrote on X, on Saturday morning. “Neither the interests of the United States nor the cause of global peace are well served by this. And I pray for the innocents who will suffer. I urge the United States not to get sucked in further. This is not your war.” For Trump, having taken this course, the war is very much his own. ♦

When it comes to Las Vegas restaurants, the cultural exchange tends to flow inward, not out. At every level of dining, from cheap chain to ultra-luxe destination, the city has imported big-name brands from elsewhere—a Spago here, a Momofuku Noodle Bar there. There’s an outpost of New Orleans’s Turkey and the Wolf, and a branch of the downtown Manhattan pizzeria Scarr’s; hell, there was even a Rao’s, for a while, and it was actually pretty easy to get a table there. The city absorbs these establishments and then does what it does to everything: amplifies, simplifies, suspends in amber.

Now the Las Vegas restaurant Golden Steer, an icon of the Sin City steak-house scene, has opened in New York City. Seeing the migration run in the other direction—Vegas to the world—feels almost off-kilter, a little unnerving, though not uncompelling. If any Vegas-endemic restaurant were going to attempt the crossing, Golden Steer is the one to do it: it has the branding, and the mythology, and certainly the point of view. Opened, in 1958, as a cowboy-themed joint, the restaurant was off-Strip, freestanding, deliberately removed from the casino world it served. The city’s hotels, still rigidly racially segregated, wouldn’t allow Black performers to dine in the very venues where they headlined, but the Golden Steer, a stand-alone restaurant, did not abide by such restrictions, so it became the favored post-show spot of the Rat Pack: Sammy Davis, Jr., would hold court at booth No. 20, Dean Martin at No. 21, Frank Sinatra at No. 22. Their presence drew other celebrities: Elvis liked to order an off-menu hamburger; Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio shared a favorite table while they were married; after their divorce, Marilyn staked out a separate spot, right in front of Joe. Booth No. 11 is dedicated to Oscar Goodman, the notorious mob attorney and eventual mayor of Las Vegas, whose Golden Steer dinners with Tony (the Ant) Spilotro were dramatized in Scorsese’s “Casino.” (Goodman, ever the showman, played himself.) In the half century since its heyday, the restaurant has layered a second motif over its nominal cowboy getup: it’s a memorial to Old Las Vegas, before a veneer of family-friendliness settled over the town like a beauty filter. What it sells, today, is not steak but nostalgia—a specific, gaudy, morally complicated American moment that the rest of Vegas has largely paved over.

A restaurant like this, arriving in New York, might feel purpose-made for the touristic vacuousness of Times Square. But Golden Steer has instead opened downtown, at the weighty Art Deco address of 1 Fifth Avenue, just above Washington Square Park, and with this positioning it strives for an unexpected gravitas, a seriousness of purpose that a midtown address couldn’t have provided. The low-ceilinged, labyrinthine space (previously housing Mark Forgione’s One Fifth, and before that the much-beloved Batali pizza joint Otto) is all dark glamour, a dining room of appealingly cigar-ish masculinity. Here, as in Las Vegas, the restaurant is a museum of sorts, but it works: it’s zazzy, it’s kitschy, it’s fun. Tuxedoed servers wear playing-card pins on their lapels; a slot machine in the entryway shaped like a life-size Doc Holliday gazes at diners with uncanny intensity. Frosted-glass sconces on the walls bear bas-relief nudes in classical repose. The theatre of it all—the silly drama, the amusement—has survived the cross-country move gloriously intact.

The food, too, is much like it is in Las Vegas, though this is not as thrilling an aspect of the facsimile. There are a few truly high points, like a garlicky appetizer of shrimp de Jonghe, the butter-drenched crustaceans tender and almost shockingly enormous, or a steak tartare punched up with tart, pickly giardiniera. (Interestingly, though perhaps accidentally, both of these dishes evoke Chicago.). Roast chicken in a Marsala sauce is made with the glamorously déplacé “airline cut” of the bird: a deboned breast with the drumette of the wing still attached. I saw other tables laden with enormous lobster tails and Flintstonian tomahawk steaks, though for sheer effect none could compete with the reality-distorting mass of a loaded baked potato, which the menu confidently heralds as “Vegas’s largest,” and which I’m pretty sure could hold that title in New York as well. Less striking was the tableside Caesar salad, which, for all its care and flourish—an à-la-minute dressing made with fresh egg yolk and piquant anchovies, fresh shavings of Parmigiano—is undone by the banality of its vessel, a thick glass salad bowl with all the glamour of a restaurant-supply store. Most disappointing are the steaks themselves: Golden Steer wet-ages its meat, which softens the fibers, perhaps too much: my sixteen-ounce Shorthorn (the menu’s term for a New York strip) was as yielding as a filet mignon—disconcerting, not delightful—and, upon slicing, left a puddle of diluted jus on the plate.

In Las Vegas, a so-so steak at the Golden Steer might matter less, given the institution’s stature. But the backstory doesn’t travel quite as seamlessly as the aesthetic; walking to and from my table in the dining room, I kept hearing snatches of back-in-the-day lore being transmitted from enthusiastic servers to diners who were only half listening, focussed instead on their dirty Martinis or on the proper arrangement of their selfies. In a city of Keens, Luger, Gallaghers, and Sparks, a new steak house trading on the grit and glory of a world gone by needs to bring more to the table than an originless filet mignon or a watery slab of prime rib. And yet I really enjoyed myself at Golden Steer, and fun is an underrated quality in a restaurant. I was particularly enamored of a front bar room—named the #1 Bar, in homage to a prior tenant of the space—a spacious, glittering box with a bronze-mirrored ceiling and showgirl fringe hanging from the chandelier. It eschews the mid-century manliness of the main dining room for more of a nineteen-eighties cocaine-cowboy mood, and it’s a total trip.

Curiously, Golden Steer is not the only stalwart of the Vegas hospitality pantheon to have made a reverse crossing. Another recent arrival is Drai’s, a night club that became, in the early two-thousands, synonymous with Vegas excess of the bottle-service-at-4-A.M., the-floor-is-on-fire variety. It opened a New York outpost last year, on a gloomy bit of West Fourteenth Street just as it becomes the Meatpacking District. The upstairs room, a supper club, is smallish and cheaply finished; the food is an afterthought, the party never-starting. What makes the Las Vegas Drai’s work—mega-d.j.’s, mega-crowds, a sense of infinite debauchery—is not necessarily site specific; it’s a matter of cultivation. Its drab landing in the Big Apple only highlights the miraculousness of what Golden Steer has managed, watery meat notwithstanding. Sure, it’s a little goofy, and more than a little over the top, and maybe I spent more money than I meant to in exchange for a little less than I was hoping to get—but it’s a Las Vegas steak house, baby. Isn’t that the point? ♦

In December, 2022, President Joe Biden sent a letter to the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee full of soaring language about how the Presidential-primary calendar should reflect the Party’s highest principles. Democrats needed to make sure that “voters of color have a voice in choosing our nominee much earlier in the process,” and they had to pay attention to the country’s “overall diversity”—geographic, economic, and demographic. Too many candidates, Biden wrote, had faltered early in the small, relatively nondiverse states that voted first (traditionally, New Hampshire and Iowa), leading them to drop out. The Democrats ought to be dedicated to “removing barriers to political participation.”

Those fine sentiments aside, Biden wanted to reward South Carolina, which had changed his fortunes in the 2020 primaries, by moving it from the fourth spot on the calendar to the first. And his team discouraged the participation of any Democratic candidate not named Biden, while being far from forthright about his striking decline. To an extent, the process did what the people around the President designed it to do: nationwide, Biden got eighty-seven per cent of the primary vote. Then, six weeks after the last contest, he was forced to drop out.

Now the Party is again looking at the Presidential-primary calendar. On January 31st, the Rules and Bylaws Committee met in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to begin considering twelve states for what will be four regional “early window” primary slots: the East (the choices are Delaware or New Hampshire), the Midwest (Illinois, Iowa, Michigan), the South (Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia), and the West (Nevada, New Mexico), with room for a possible fifth at-large state. In the next few months, the states will be making presentations to the committee members, as if they were potential Olympic host cities. Minyon Moore, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton who co-chairs the committee, spoke, as Biden had, about the Party’s values. But she added that the goal this time was a schedule that yielded a candidate who could win. “I want to repeat that,” Moore said. “The strongest possible Democratic nominee for President.”

A good number of elected officials seem to think that Moore means them. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom; Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro; and, yes, former Vice-President Kamala Harris are all on the road promoting books. Last week, both Harris and Vice-President J. D. Vance, a top prospect on the Republican side (Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who might be another, has said that the nomination is Vance’s for the taking), held events in Wisconsin, a key swing state. Governor Andy Beshear, of Kentucky, has a book coming out, too. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Governor Gretchen Whitmer, of Michigan, showed up at the Munich Security Conference. Meanwhile, Senator Mark Kelly, of Arizona, a decorated Navy pilot, has been in court fighting the Pentagon’s efforts to reduce his retirement rank in retaliation for his public statement that troops don’t have to follow illegal orders—a reminder of the stakes in this contest.

Because some early states would favor certain candidates—J. B. Pritzker is the governor of Illinois; Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are Georgia senators; former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has a following in New Hampshire—the fight over the primary calendar is one of several proxies for a broader battle about the future of the Party. Democrats are still testing their responses to Trump, both stylistically and in terms of substance, and watching and evaluating one another. (At last week’s State of the Union, some Democrats who chose to attend sat in quiet protest, some heckled, and others walked out.) The midterm primaries offer a parallel set of choices: A mild-mannered seminarian or a confrontation-ready congresswoman in Texas? A seasoned governor or a populist oyster farmer in Maine?

In San Juan, such calculations ran through the committee members’ discussion. What state might showcase a candidate’s appeal to young Latino men, to union members, to gun owners? Was the local media market too expensive for grassroots candidates? Was having a red state in the mix an advantage, or might a G.O.P.-controlled legislature sabotage any attempts to move the primary date? New Mexico has the southern border; Tennessee, a committee member said, “doesn’t touch water,” and thus might keep the Party from being too “coastal.”

One danger of this exercise is that the Democrats will overlearn the lessons of 2024. For example, Biden wasn’t wrong to emphasize the importance of diversity. When the committee member André Washington asked his colleagues in San Juan how he should assess a would-be early state that was small and affordable but whose population doesn’t “look like America,” the answer was that no single state had to do it all; put together, they would form “a story that we’re telling.” But the Democrats not only have to tell a story—they have to listen to the one that the country, in all its diversity, is telling them. The Party commissioned an “autopsy” of the 2024 loss, but the D.N.C. chair, Ken Martin, has declined to release it. “Getting into the granular detail doesn’t help us,” he told the Miami Herald, raising the question of why there had been a report. Better to focus on the price of television time in northern Virginia, perhaps.

There are other risks. The San Juan meeting took place three days after the F.B.I. raided an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing records from the 2020 race. What is extraordinary about this moment is that election-security concerns extend beyond matters such as hacking to a pending Supreme Court decision that could further gut the Voting Rights Act, and even to the prospect of unlawful actions by the federal government. Some of the talk in San Juan was about safety plans. Trump is not eligible to run in 2028, but his incessant staging of crises makes elections more fragile—and the primary results less predictable. It is hard to know how any given Democratic candidate, in responding to an emergency, might help the Party find its voice.

This is a cycle, in other words, in which there is not necessarily a benefit to locking in a front-runner early on. The Democrats need to be ready for anything, including a nominee who is very different from one they expect. Devising the best possible calendar is laudable. But a victory in 2028 can’t be engineered. It will have to be hard fought. ♦

On a rainy winter afternoon in 2001, Mehdi Mahmoudian, a political dissident in Tehran, noticed a man with an amputated hand struggling to repair his car. Mahmoudian, who was in his twenties, worked in a nearby print shop. He immediately recognized the man as a former guard who had used his left hand to torture Mahmoudian in Towhid Prison two years earlier.

Mahmoudian decided to help his torturer. He invited the man into his shop, offered him tea, and recruited a co-worker to fix his car. Hours later, when the man was preparing to leave, Mahmoudian reintroduced himself as his former prisoner. Stunned, the man drove away without responding. But he returned to the print shop the next day and asked for Mahmoudian’s forgiveness. He said it was the fault of the authorities; he was just doing his job, and he regretted it.

The encounter bears striking parallels to the opening of the film “It Was Just an Accident,” which Mahmoudian co-wrote with the Iranian director Jafar Panahi. In an early scene, an auto mechanic named Vahid recognizes his former torturer by the distinctive squeak of his prosthetic leg. Vahid kidnaps the man, nicknamed Peg-Leg, in a white van, and collects a ragtag team of former detainees from across Tehran to try to certify his identity. The feature was shot over twenty-eight days, covertly, mostly within the confines of the van.

Mahmoudian and Panahi met in the notorious Evin House of Detention in 2022, while they were both serving sentences. Panahi told me that, over seven months, they became friends, and Mahmoudian even cared for him when he contracted COVID. Shortly before Panahi was released, Mahmoudian embraced him and whispered in his ear, “Don’t forget the guys in prison.”

Later, after Mahmoudian, too, was free, Panahi invited him to collaborate on a script that would draw on their collective experience in Iran’s prison system. The film encapsulates the plight of Iranians who have endured incarceration, interrogation, and torture at the hands of the Islamic Republic. But it also asks those same Iranians to empathize with their oppressors.

On January 31st, not long after his screenplay for “It Was Just an Accident” was nominated for an Oscar, Mahmoudian was arrested again. He had just signed a joint statement that blamed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, for the killings and arrests of thousands of protesters who have taken to the streets across the country. Mahmoudian was released on bail on February 17th, and spoke with me via video chat from his home in Tehran a few days ago. I reached him briefly on Saturday, hours after the U.S. and Israel started bombing Iran; he said only that he was unharmed, then his signal cut out. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You were recently released from prison, on February 17th. How are you doing? How would you describe your condition right now?

To be honest, getting released from prison in this situation does not make me happy. In the past sixteen years, I’ve spent about nine years in prison. I’ve been arrested thirteen times, and I have been released from prison many times before.

All the prison sentences that I endured in the past were for the goal of having fewer people killed on the streets. Any acts of resistance done by myself, or by others for decades before me, were in order to stop the Islamic Republic before it could cause such bloodshed, and to either make it fall or to change it from within. Getting released from prison did not have any joy this time, because thousands of people were still in prison, and thousands of families are mourning the deaths of their loved ones. If I were to summarize it in one sentence: We’re not good.

Take us back to the moment when you were arrested.

I was at home with two friends. It was 2:30 A.M. Two of us were up, and one of us was sleeping. They opened the door very quickly, and before we could realize what was going on, within two or three seconds, they put a gun to my head and my friend’s head. The friend who was sleeping also had a gun put to his head—he woke up feeling the pressure of the gun. A team entered through the window, and six other people came in through the door. This was a so-called antiterrorism team that they had sent for us. We are just three political activists who have been living together—and besides writing and speaking, we have never had any other arms.

Can we name the other two activists?

Yes, of course. Their names are Abdollah Momeni and Vida Rabbani. We’re three of the seventeen people who signed this statement—known activists who gave a warning to the government before the protests, and said, “Do not kill people.” After the massacre, we issued this statement condemning the state. These are activists who are mostly inside Iran. Some of them are outside, but they’re still connected to the inside.

How were you treated during those weeks in prison? Can you describe some of your living conditions?

I think the way we were treated is not a good assessment of anything, because they know that we are recognized figures, and our names are out in the media, so they try to project a more humane form of treatment with us. But I would like to take this opportunity to tell you how they have treated others.

Please do tell me about other prisoners. But I would just like to know about your situation first—which prison was it?

The first one was in Chalus. The next one, Sari, was a high-security one. And the last one was Nowshahr, which is a very old prison that’s in bad condition—almost destroyed.

And in the last prison, what were the quarters like? How many prisoners were in there, and who were you staying with? Were there other political prisoners?

Everyone who was accompanying us had been arrested in these recent protests. It was a cell of about twenty-five metres, and at the peak of the protests they put thirty-three of us in that one room. For the first few nights, when it was very crowded, we had to take turns sleeping, because there wasn’t enough room for everyone to sleep.

Even though the majority of prisoners were under twenty-five years of age or so, they had been beaten up and tortured so severely that, after weeks, you could still see the signs—the black spots and the wounds on their bodies.

One of them was a person whose eight-month-old baby was tortured in front of his eyes. They had threatened that they were going to hang the baby if he didn’t confess to what they wanted him to confess. For many days, this man, who was around thirty-two years old, if I remember correctly, could only talk about his baby. To anyone he saw—any prison official, any guard—he kept saying, “What fault does my eight-month-old child have? He didn’t do anything.”

The baby was in the cell as well? Or this man had seen this torture beforehand and was traumatized and relayed that?

He was arrested together with his wife and their baby. They had gone to arrest him and his wife, and because the child was alone, they had to take the child as well. He was taken to the men’s section of the prison. Later, he learned that the child was with the mother, but they had not told him that, and they kept saying to him, “If you don’t confess, we’re going to hang your baby.” He didn't know what conditions the mother or the child were in.

The other person whose story really moved us was someone who was arrested with his wife. He was beaten up in front of his wife, and his wife was beaten up in front of him—and they had also arrested the wife’s fourteen-year-old brother and beaten him up as well. They said, Either you sign the papers that we give you—it’s a confession, but we won’t tell you what’s on it—or it’s going to get worse. And the three of them ended up having to sign the pages.

Among the people in the cell, three suffered from very severe mental-health issues, and they would only be calmed down with heavy drugs. Clearly, prison was not the place for them to be. One of them was kept for thirty-five days, the other one was kept for forty days, and they were constantly drugged in order to be kept quiet. And they were kids.

You’ve been in and out of prison so many times. What was different about this time?

Before these recent protests, people who had taken to the streets had had very specific, clear humanistic and civil-rights demands. But this time, people who had taken to the streets had a linear narrative of what they wanted, and that was: We need to return to the past in order to fix things. They were much more representative of the common people, of the masses, rather than people who were politically active.

And this is what you saw reflected in the actual prison?

That’s exactly what I saw in prison. The previous times that I had gone to prison, it was mostly political activists who were getting imprisoned, and they had an idea of what the political situation was like, and they were aware of the demands of the activist groups. But this time, these were just common people without any experience in activism. The people who were in prison were braver, and their bravery was not out of knowledge but out of having nothing to lose. They had no other choice.

Were you physically harmed at all when you were arrested, or while you were in prison?

This time, or previous times?

This time.

Physically, no. I wasn’t harmed when they were arresting me; it was just a punch, and that’s not a big deal. But looking at what I have experienced before and comparing it, I have never experienced anything like what I’m going through now, after I was released, and that is hours and hours of crying every day. Basically any time I’m alone, I am crying. And this is true about all three of us—the three of us that I mentioned. We were all released, and we’re all spending our days like this.

Why is it so much more emotional this time?

The most important reason is that everything that we had predicted, and still hoped would not happen, happened all at once. Unlike the previous times, when they were beating people up in order to make them confess to something, this time they were also beating people up for the sake of beating them up, in order to destroy their dignity and humanity.

We didn’t get a chance to mourn the people who were killed in the protests—we were removed from society, so we couldn’t do collective mourning. Even after we were released, we were seeing the photos of all the people who were killed on the walls all over town.

Where were you when the demonstrations started? And what were your first thoughts, based on all of the political uprisings you’ve witnessed? Was this the broadest discontent that you’ve seen?

This was not the biggest movement. We had the reform movements in 1996 and ’97, when people went out to the polls and they voted for Mohammad Khatami for the Presidency—we had twenty-four, twenty-five million people who voted. So that was a bigger movement than what we’re seeing now.

This wasn’t the biggest in terms of the street, either. For instance, in 2009, we were able to mobilize a much larger body of people onto the streets, demonstrating peacefully. And in 2022 with the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement, we also saw people staying on the streets both in larger numbers and for a longer time. With “Women, Life, Freedom,” people took to the streets for almost six months after the initial protests.

The way this was distinct from the other times was that people very clearly demanded change—the fall of the regime.

You were among seventeen dissident lawyers, artists, and activists who signed a statement holding the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, responsible for the bloody crackdown against protesters in January. How did that come about?

This statement began with a very clear goal, and that was developing an opposition inside Iran. The people who issued this statement have collectively been in prison for eighty years, and there are people among us who have had up to four members of their family killed by the Islamic Republic. The people who issued this statement have had decades of political-resistance experience, and, based on experience, they knew what violence was awaiting us when Reza Pahlavi’s call to protest came. This does not mean at all that he did not have the right to call people—he did.

The first statement we issued in this round of protests was a statement saying to the state, to the Islamic Republic, to not commit atrocities, based on what we could predict, and we said that it is the right of people to issue statements and it is the right of people to protest, and therefore we just wanted to warn the state before it committed bloodshed for those two days.

The second statement that we issued was after the massacre, and what we wanted to do was break the government’s false narrative that people who were protesting were terrorists. We wanted to correct that misinformation, and say that the first person who was responsible for all the massacres was Ali Khamenei.

You also named Khamenei this in an interview with the BBC. What was the reaction when you did that? Some people would’ve seen that as a death wish.

This was not the first time I have named Khamenei, and said that he’s responsible. When he decided to stop the import of COVID vaccines made by the U.S. and the U.K. into Iran, I also called him personally responsible for the deaths of many. This time, what was different for me was that the number of people killed was so large that me talking about the truth, and it being a death wish, did not really matter. I wasn’t thinking about it at all.

Us demanding that Ali Khamenei should be put aside from power was not the personal vengeance of people who were taken to prison collectively for eighty years, or whose family members were killed by him and by his orders. It was a way to put a stop to crimes against humanity, committed by the regime in a systematic, institutionalized way.

You’re the co-writer of the film “It Was Just an Accident,” which was nominated for an Oscar right before you were arrested. What was it like to return to prison, having just achieved international recognition for a film that takes aim at the very government that is arresting you?

The news of the Academy nominations came exactly on the days that people were on the streets, and the internet was cut off in Tehran. I cannot say that the news did not make me happy, because it did—it was perhaps the biggest news of my life. Many people don’t experience something like that. But I couldn’t express my happiness, because so many people were getting killed.

What Mr. Panahi tried to show in this film is that we have a pluralist society and nation, and it is not violent, even with its enemies. Any help that I tried to give was in order to make that narrative heard better throughout the world. But then the day that this film got to the peak of its accolades and recognition in the world was exactly the peak of the massacres happening in Iran.

Why do you believe Panahi invited you to collaborate on this film?

First of all, I had had the experience of coming face to face with my torturers, and second, the experience that I’d had in prison helped me be able to help with this project. Because of my good networking skills, I’ve been in touch with many prisoners.

The biggest place where I helped with the film was writing the dialogue, and also the sequence with the tree—the penultimate sequence.

I want to talk about that sequence. But first, could you tell me about meeting your torturer?

I was arrested for the first time when I was twenty years old—which was about twenty-seven years ago. For three days, they handcuffed my hands behind my body. I was on the floor, and they would put water and food on me from above. I had to go to the bathroom right there, in my pants, while lying down, for all of those days, and that caused a lot of problems and damage to my kidneys. I was still dealing with my kidney injuries about two or three years after that incident. And I was sitting in my office one day, and my torturer had to come to my office with his family, and I recognized him because his arm was chopped off.

What did you do?

It’s very similar to the story in the film. His car had broken down, and one of the people who worked for me fixed his car, and I hosted him. But then at the last minute before he left, I told him, “I’m one of those people that you tortured.”

And what did he say?

That second, he left out of fear. But then the next day, he came back and he apologized, and he said, “Well, it was my job, and I had to do it because it’s my job.”

I just want to stress that the idea of the film belongs to Mr. Panahi, because this is a common experience shared by many prisoners. I know at least ten other people who have run into their interrogators and torturers. All the characters you see in the film are based on real characters in the world, in Iran. And anything that they narrate, in terms of their tortures, is something that has happened in reality.

How did you and Panahi first meet each other?

Of course, I knew Mr. Panahi before, through his work, but this mutual getting to know each other happened when we were in prison. I had mentioned that I was writing stories based on what I was seeing from the other prisoners. And when I got released about two years ago—one of the times that I got released—Mr. Panahi got released a few months before me, and he contacted me and said that he had a script, and he gave me the honor of working with him on the dialogue.

Panahi has said some pretty remarkable things about you that he observed while you were in prison together—he has called you a “rare ethical witness” to other prisoners. He told me that you were calm, kind, and felt a sense of responsibility for others, especially new arrivals.

He’s very kind, but anything I have done was the absolute minimum that I consider my responsibility toward other humans. I live in a society that believes that people’s value comes from what they believe in—but I follow the school of thought that just believes that humans have value for the sake of being human beings.

Where do you think this sense of responsibility and empathy comes from? Does it have to do with being imprisoned over and over and over again?

Yes, I want to say that one of the positive points about going to prison so many times is exactly that. When I was twenty-two years old, I went through a mock execution. But of course, mock executions are not known as “mock” to the person who experiences them. They performed an execution by putting a noose around our necks and putting us on stools and taking us to a dark room while blindfolded, and they kept us on these stools with the noose around our necks for at least half an hour—for half an hour to an hour. And then they pulled the stools out from under our feet and we fell down because the nooses were loose.

When you’re put in that position, you will understand the value of being a human. We were about twelve people standing next to one another, and in that hour we weren’t thinking about what ethnicity we’re from, the color of our skin, what ideology we believe in. It was none of that. It was just twelve human beings. [He starts to cry.] I’m sorry that the interview became this gloomy.

Please! So many people have spoken about how you don’t have any prejudice in prison. No matter who comes through the door, you receive them with empathy. That is your reputation. Understanding the origin of that openness is important. Thank you for sharing.

Thank you.

I’d like to talk about the Twelve-Day War. I know that you were imprisoned when Israeli missiles struck Evin Prison. You’ve written that, amid the chaos, you managed to help some of the prison guards, the interrogators, who were stuck under the rubble. Why did you choose to do that?

I did not rescue interrogators. I rescued human beings—people who were caught under the rubble or in a fire. In order for me and my friends to save them, we were not asking them what they did for a living.

O.K., but did you recognize them as people who worked at the prison? I know they’re all humans first.

One section of the prison that was destroyed was the clinic. That’s what was close to us—and by going to the clinic, we would see those doctors and anyone else who worked there. So yes, of course, we recognized them. Another part that got destroyed was a ward known as 209, which is held by the intelligence forces of the regime. Everyone knows who works there, and we were saving those people as well.

What do you mean when you say you were saving those people? Can you describe that a little more clearly? That cell was damaged, you were free, you knew that there were people in there who were injured—and what did you do?

One part that got damaged near us was the administrative section of 209, and so my friends and I took three or four people out of the rubble in the administrative section. Another part that was also damaged was where they held the prisoners of 209. The gates had been locked, and it had trapped both the prisoners and the prison guards who worked there, and so we broke the locks and we opened the gates, and we were able to pull the prisoners and the prison guards out. But the painful part is, about an hour and a half after that, when they got full control again, the very person that I helped come out of the prison put a gun to my head and forced me into prison again.

While we were saving them—the interrogators or the prison officials—we were very well aware that as soon as they got control back, they were going to suppress us and put us back into the wards with a gun to our heads.

I asked about this anecdote because it reminds me of something that Shiva says in “It Was Just an Accident,” while she and the others are debating what to do with Peg-Leg. Shiva says, “It’s not because they resorted to violence that we should, too.”

What we talk about when we talk about nonviolence—it’s not out of fear, or out of the lack of ability to be violent, but in order to prove that we are human. It is what we think is best, and it is what we think is necessary for the future of the country. We also wanted to say in the film that the way the family of the interrogator was getting treated, out of kindness and responsibility, had much better results than if we were to treat him the way he treated us.

I was told that you played a crucial role in saving one of the most important and climactic scenes in the film—a sequence where the former prisoners tie their torturer to a tree and force him to confess. What were you channelling to help these actors make this scene as believable as it was?

I don’t know if we can call it saving the film—the main thing was done by Mr. Panahi himself. But he called me and said, “I have a few takes of that sequence, and it’s not coming together.” And he asked me to go on the set. What I did was to remind the three actors about who the characters were and what has happened to them, and I explained what would come out of all those events and happenings.

Can you be a little more specific?

For instance, to Shiva, I said, You are playing the role of a character based on a political prisoner whose name is Fariba Pajooh, and these are the things that have happened to her. Fariba is now in the United States. And when I told the actor what had happened to this person, she cried. When she was in front of the camera acting, it was as if Fariba herself was yelling at the interrogator.

For Vahid, I described the people who were combined in that one character that he was playing. I spoke about the specific pains that he went through until he got to that point.

Could you describe how you create these composites? What are you drawing from?

Mr. Panahi is the one who created those characters. I just helped with writing the dialogue.

Then tell me about a particular piece of dialogue that you wrote that came from life.

Almost everything that’s said about the interrogator are direct experiences of the prisoners that I have met and dealt with. For instance, when Shiva says “with that dirty mouth of yours, you’d whisper in my ear,” this is something that Fariba had experienced when she got out of jail after ten years. Her father died shortly after—but her dying father apparently was whispering something in her ear from behind her, and Fariba turned around and slapped him, unintentionally, because it brought back the sensation and the sounds that she had experienced with her interrogator in prison.

The character of the bride, Golrokh, has a line about how the interrogator “spread the rumor that I had collaborated with them,” even though she never betrayed anyone. This is also the experience of a journalist about whom they spread the rumor that she was the person who gave information about all of her friends. For many years, people were under that impression about her—and then she committed suicide.

So all of the characters are composites of people you’ve met, either in prison or in your activism.

Yes, they are composites in the sense that they narrate the stories of what has happened to a number of people. One character might have different stories, different narratives, based on everything that has happened to different real people.

The message of the film seems to be about forgiveness, and about finding empathy even for your oppressor. At the same time, the message that I’ve been hearing from so many Iranians right now, as Trump threatens to bomb Iran, is that they want war—people who never believed in foreign intervention before are now desperate for something that will break the cycle of violence. What do you think about that?

As someone who has value for human life, I cannot defend war in any way, under any circumstance. I do not consider war to be to the advantage of people. I also believe that war will not bring anything other than the massacre of civilians and absolute destruction. But what the people of Iran might want or might not want, I think, will not change what the United States is going to do. What determines what happens with war is what advantages there will be for the party that’s going to attack. I can at the very least hope that there will be no war, and that the Islamic Republic will fall by the power of the people of Iran. And I can also hope that if there happens to be a war, what benefits the United States overlaps with what benefits the people of Iran.

My hope is that what happened to Afghanistan does not get repeated in Iran—that, after twenty years of war and massacre, the people will not be given into the hands of the radical Taliban. I hope that the people of Iran will not be forgotten like that.

Based on the way the regime is treating you and all these other political activists—imprisoning you all—what does that indicate about the regime? Is this the weakest you’ve seen it in your lifetime?

The Islamic Republic is on the verge of falling. All it needs is just the push of a finger for it to fall. That’s why it has killed the maximum number of people imaginable—because the Islamic Republic itself does not believe that it’s going to last. ♦

This conversation was translated by Sheida Dayani.