The New YorkerModify

TEXT: Hi, your dad’s friend Bill here. He mentioned that you’re freelancing now, and that you may need some help with your taxes.

SUBTEXT: Hi, your dad’s friend Bill here. Neither your father, nor I, knowing very little about you, have any confidence that you can be expected to handle filing your taxes by yourself.

TEXT: Please be sure to update the spreadsheet with your writeoffs for the year.

SUBTEXT: What did you waste your money on that we can try to justify as a business expense?

TEXT: Time to get organized again!

SUBTEXT: I’m really trying to help you, though I’m not sure why.

TEXT: So, I see that you’ve decided to spend another year as a freelance writer.

SUBTEXT: Have you considered doing something more practical, like being a C.P.A. in the nineteen-seventies? Worked out well for me.

TEXT: Whenever you receive income that will result in a 1099, you should take twenty-five per cent and put it in a separate account. Don’t touch that account except to pay taxes (estimated or at year’s end). That way, you will have money to pay your taxes!

SUBTEXT: You have the financial acumen of a fifth grader.

TEXT: Is this the total income for 2025?

SUBTEXT: It would take you three lifetimes to amass the wealth that I have accumulated, even though I did everything pretty normally. I know that you can’t help when you were born, your gender, or the economic circumstances created by my generation that your generation now suffers under, but I am going to judge you harshly for all of it anyway.

TEXT: Happy Passover.

SUBTEXT: Happy Passover.

TEXT: I’m still waiting. Please send details by April 1st.

SUBTEXT: It’s times like these that I wonder, Maybe I shouldn’t have let your father save me back in Vietnam.

TEXT: I have several trips planned for the end of March, so I’d like to prepare your returns sooner rather than last minute.

SUBTEXT: God, I hope you don’t want kids.

TEXT: Please read this Financial Times article. It summarizes a tax-court case regarding a writer who got in big trouble with the I.R.S. for taking deductions that the I.R.S. said lacked a profit motive.

SUBTEXT: Did you ever stop to think that your minor indiscretions could lead to jail time for tax evasion, and how embarrassing that would be for me, to have a friend whose daughter went to jail for tax evasion?

TEXT: It looks like you had a good year!

SUBTEXT: I am well aware that this message will be the exact validation that you desperately seek from an older authority figure, and, because I have been withholding any kind of praise for the work you have done, it means that much more to you. I did not think about this sentence until I typed it, and I will not think about it again, ever, after I am done typing it. I will pretty much immediately go back to thinking that all of your life choices are wrong.

TEXT: You can’t write off rent on your taxes.

SUBTEXT: Damn. I should’ve bought in Williamsburg when I had the chance. ♦

If, by chance, you know my story, you will understand why I’m spending my days fixated on the fast-changing news and the terrible images from Iran. I am an Iranian American, a citizen of both countries, the son of a rug merchant from Mashhad, a city in the northeast that is home to three and a half million people and to the holiest site in the country. In January, Mashhad was the scene of immense anti-regime protests. Now many of those protesters—the ones who survived the Islamic Republic’s violent backlash—are in prison, and the city is under bombardment.

For a long time, Iran was home. In 2001, while living in California, I started making periodic trips, and, in 2009, I fulfilled a dream by moving to Tehran, where I worked as a foreign correspondent, mainly for the Washington Post. In Tehran, I met and married an Iranian reporter, Yeganeh, and, for years, we did our work the best we could within one of the world’s most restrictive media landscapes. Over years of interviewing, we met countless people who dreamed of a day when the regime might give way to a more humane government, perhaps even a democratic one.

In July, 2014, at the height of negotiations between the Islamic Republic and world powers over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, my wife and I were arrested and thrown into Evin Prison, a notorious facility known throughout Iran for its cruelty. She was never charged with a crime, and was released after seventy-two days. I was charged with espionage and became the latest American hostage of a regime that has never hesitated to use innocent people as bargaining chips. (There are currently at least six Americans wrongfully detained in Iran.)

After a year and a half in Evin, an experience that I describe in my memoir, I was released and immediately transported back to the U.S., with Yeganeh. We left behind many family members and countless friends. Now, as I follow the war—through telephone calls, WhatsApp and Signal messages, social-media D.M.s, and cable news—I am both here, living in the suburbs of Washington, and there, in a home we never properly said goodbye to. The reports I get arrive sporadically and without warning, and they describe the chaos and the destruction with a nonchalance that is unsettling.

During the first week of the war, I had not connected directly with anyone inside Iran until I saw an Instagram Story posted by a young relative in Tehran. Our grandmothers were sisters. He and his parents were our first family members to move from Mashhad to the capital. Their home, in northern Tehran, was the first one I ever visited in the country, a large flat on the top floor of a multi-unit building, with a view of the sprawling city below. When we first met, he was seven, precocious and always smiling. The image he shared, which I viewed just seconds after he posted it, was of an exploding building in the distance—I recognized the view—over which he had written, “Why won’t it end?”

I sent him a message immediately to see if he was all right. “Hi cuz. I’m at home. I’m fine,” he wrote. “Stressful, though.” I pressed him with more questions, but I could tell by his vague responses that he was watching his words, aware of potential surveillance by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Even the V.P.N.s that many people use to get online are controlled by the government.

My cousin said he would check in whenever he could. I have not seen a digital trace of him since. Such wartime silences are common; my wife has two elderly relatives we were particularly concerned about, but they went silent, and we feared the worst. Several days passed before the husband phoned us. “Don’t worry. We’re alive,” he told me.

The few calls that we receive are always brief, revealing little information or emotion, but we do learn things. For example, people now take care to wear shoes at home in case an explosion shatters glass, or there’s a need to evacuate immediately. Most of the neighborhood bread kiosks that are still standing remain open, but there are strict limits on the amount individuals can purchase. Many checkpoints once manned by Basij paramilitary forces have been destroyed or abandoned.

As far as we know, none of our family members have been killed. We have been lucky. Another former Tehran correspondent, now living in Washington, heard from a childhood friend still living in Iran. Her aunt had resisted leaving the capital for two weeks, but was finally convinced to evacuate. Realizing she’d forgotten her medications, she returned home to retrieve them. Her apartment building was bombed as soon as she went back inside. Her niece watched it happen from the car.

Once communications return to normal, stories like this will be frequent. Yet there remains a stream of messages that are undeniably optimistic. There is a sense of hope that grows whenever another high-level official is killed. The latest was Ali Larijani, a fixture of Iranian politics and repression, and one of the slain Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s most unflinching loyalists.

It’s impossible to say how much support the ongoing military campaign enjoys inside Iran, but it’s not insignificant. Even as civilian infrastructure is levelled, the fact that I’m still hearing this optimistic sentiment, almost four weeks into this operation, is a strong indication of how reviled the Islamic Republic has become inside Iran. That feeling could change if Trump follows through on threats he made over the weekend to “obliterate” Iran’s electrical power plants if the regime doesn’t fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz. (On Monday, Trump asserted that his Administration was engaged in “very strong talks” with Iran, and that he had instructed the U.S. military to postpone the strikes for five days.)

Some of those I hear from in Iran dream that the U.S. and Israel will somehow put an end to the Islamic Republic from the air. “I am staying because I truly hope this is the final battle and the regime gets the hell out of here,” a young software engineer from southern Tehran told me. “People are still in good spirits, even though the bombing is much worse than during the Twelve-Day War,” he said, referring to the conflict last June.

This kind of remark is not surprising. I’ve heard calls for foreign intervention from inside Iran since 2003, the year of the American invasion of Iraq. “When will it be our turn?” Iranians kept asking. “When are the American commandos coming to liberate us?”

Iranians’ desire for American intervention cooled as sectarian violence spread across Iraq—much of it fomented by Tehran’s regional proxies. After the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government, Iraq’s Shiite holy sites in Karbala and Najaf reopened to international pilgrims. Iranians were among the first wave to visit, but they were witnesses not to liberation and prosperity but to chaos, violence, and ruin from terrorist attacks.

In many ways, Iran would have been far more prepared for a transition toward democracy at that time than either Iraq or Afghanistan, and, frankly, more prepared than it is right now. It was a society yearning for more social liberties and integration with the rest of the world. Time and again, in tightly controlled elections, Iranians voted overwhelmingly for candidates seeking to take steps to liberalize the country.

Without diplomatic ties or other windows into Iran, the transformation taking place inside the country was difficult for Washington to imagine. Since the 1979 Revolution and the four hundred and forty-four-day siege of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran that followed, hawkish policymakers like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Tom Cotton, and Lindsey Graham have built careers on seeking vengeance on Iran. “Boys go to Baghdad, real men go to Tehran” has been a favorite line of neocons who consider regime change in Iran to be the ultimate goal. This mentality underscores the U.S. foreign-policy community’s fundamental misunderstanding of Iranian society; for generations, our stance on Iran has been solely focussed on crippling the government, when our greatest leverage has always been with the Iranian people, who are among the world’s biggest believers in the American brand.

Yeganeh has always told me that, for Iranians, “America isn’t just a place or a government; it’s a phenomenon that happens to us.” People experience it in many ways, but it’s unavoidable—in the Islamic Republic’s official antagonism, and its calls for “death to America,” certainly, but more viscerally in the fragmented influence that America has on daily life, through popular culture beamed in via satellite and all manner of products that have managed to sneak in across porous borders.

Most of all, Iranians covet an American education. This is a crucial element of American soft power that the Trump Administration has undermined, with attacks on U.S. universities, a reduction in the number of foreign students, and a travel ban on Iranians. At the height of U.S.-Iranian relations, in the nineteen-seventies, when Iranian women were wearing the latest styles from New York and Paris, nearly one in five foreign students in the U.S. was from Iran. Now such opportunities for Iranians are vanishingly rare.

No one questions the power of U.S. military capabilities, but at this point it’s hard for Iranians to understand American intentions. There seems to be little plan for anything other than further strikes. After issuing confused bromides about “regime change,” the President has had little to say that is coherent about helping the Iranian people. It is more than likely that Trump, sensing the perils of rising oil prices, economic chaos, and political opposition, will, within a matter of weeks, declare victory and end the bombing. The announcement, last June, that the U.S. and Israel had inflicted “monumental damage” on Iran’s nuclear program proved only one thing: that there are no clear indicators of success, only manufactured victories.

Regarding what will follow, several grim scenarios are possible. The regime will declare a victory of its own—its survival in the face of American and Israeli bombings—and it may well grow even more oppressive than before, increasing its hold on the economy and surveillance over its people. New crackdowns have already begun, including executions, last week, of protesters arrested in January. With each new round of repression, the country’s cycle of violence continues. The vehement desire for vengeance grows within the population as well, and hopes of a just future for Iran dwindle.

As analysts have pointed out, most of our leverage has been squandered, and the Islamic Republic may very well disdain all future negotiations and build the nuclear weapon that they could have built, but chose not to build, before. A more plausible and equally unattractive outcome is the kind of deal that Trump seems to want to strike with Tehran—one that would put limitations on uranium enrichment and missile production but totally ignore the plight of the Iranian people and the promises he has made.

Following decades of antagonistic policy that has hurt Iranians by design, it was always unrealistic for them to expect to be liberated by the U.S. and Israel. But an outcome that sets them back in their quest to live in a free society will stand out as a cruel and historic mistake.

Until the strikes stop and the aftermath becomes clearer, every analysis remains little more than an underinformed guess. For now, there is but one certainty—that the hopes and lives of Iranians don’t matter. Not to Israel, not to the U.S., and certainly not to their own regime, gunning them down in the street. ♦

Last week, CNN rolled out some experiments in form and in manufactured authenticity. Anderson Cooper wore his sleeves rolled up for a roundtable discussion among a clutter of clunky microphones on a desk; Jake Tapper recorded a show from his home office, near a clothes rack of dress shirts and blazers, and talked about bringing viewers to the actual desk where he and his team do their journalism. The impression wasn’t particularly subtle—someone had obviously suggested that the network try to make its shows look more like the podcasts that millions of people now watch on YouTube or see clips of on TikTok and Instagram—and it certainly didn’t succeed in making CNN come across as more trustworthy or natural, which was presumably the goal. It felt like watching Ronald Reagan take off his shirt, paint on some jeans, and start screaming like Jello Biafra. The podcast industry’s currency, deservedly or otherwise, is oppositional: people don’t listen to Joe Rogan because they think he’s better at his job than CNN; they do it because they hate CNN.

The podcast aesthetic—casual, long-winded, sometimes profane—directly opposes, perhaps not coincidentally, the sterility and bizarre right-this-minute quality of cable news, on which everything seems incomplete and therefore manipulative, and yet somehow endless. The visual style of podcasts is purely functional, with the pandemic-inspired appearance of remote work: people are talking at you from boxes on your screen. I record my podcast, “Time to Say Goodbye,” in my basement, and have a pretty standard setup: a Shure SM7B microphone, my daughter’s art work in the background, poor lighting because why bother, and some soundproof foam panelling that’s slowly peeling away from the wall. My co-host, Tyler Austin Harper, sits in front of a bookshelf in his home office. Over the dozens of episodes we’ve recorded together, we’ve never changed the “look” of what we’re doing, because we understand that nobody really cares. Just as the best talk radio feels like a phone conversation you’re having with a friend, we want the podcast to seem like a slightly unhinged Zoom call you’re having with your annoying cousins who won’t stop ranting about why the Democrats keep losing.

But, in the past few years, podcasts have trended toward what we can loosely call professionalization, which made CNN’s recent effort even odder. The COVID-era signature of bookshelves in the background and plug-in USB microphones in the foreground has slowly given way to generic studios featuring some decent wood panelling and a couple of plants. Webcams, which produced a washed-out and slightly pixelated image, have been replaced by stand-alone video cameras that capture podcasters in deeper and richer tones. (This is one reason that so many of the big podcasts you see these days look like they borrowed the dark and moody interview sets of “Wild Wild Country.”) I doubt that these production changes will erode the supposed authenticity of an already beloved podcaster, but I also don’t see any likely benefits. Kylie Kelce, who hosts the enormously popular podcast “Not Gonna Lie,” splits her time onscreen between a standard Zoom square with her kids’ art on the wall behind her and a studio where she sits on a beige couch and talks to her guest in person. To someone who watches her clips on Instagram, there’s no meaningful difference.

What happened in podcasting is that money arrived, and some of it went into producing video clips. (“Not Gonna Lie” was created by Wave Sports & Entertainment, which produces and distributes content that features popular athletes.) Now, whenever any new media venture is launched, a whole lot of people with related experience get hired, and they start buying equipment, renting studio space, and booking production time. There’s also an acquisition war going on, with podcasts such as the sports-chat show “Pardon My Take” moving to Netflix, which might demand higher video quality than social media. Previously, the credibility that podcasters enjoyed stemmed from their opposition to mainstream media, and the low-tech and intimate videos reflected this. Today, all the professional podcast sets look similiar—a table of microphones, some swivelly mid-century-modern chairs, a dark wall—and they convey nothing at all, really. As the industry has expanded its budgets, and added more line items for improved production, the aesthetic currency of the old D.I.Y. podcast look has decreased. CNN’s experiments in information populism, then, feel doubly tragic: the network isn’t fooling anybody, and it has also misdiagnosed the value of its appropriation, like the kid putting on a Misfits shirt after Hot Topic popped up in every mall in America.

If CNN’s flirtation with podcast fashion is a bellwether for the news industry, it’s not because of what it tells us about cable networks or legacy media companies. After all, CNN has rolled out poorly conceived and wildly derivative online products for the past thirty years. The problem with all these projects is an old and recurring one: you can’t dress up like a revolutionary when you’re the reason that the revolution is kicking off. Sometime soon, we will see CNN reporters live-streaming on Twitch and YouTube from Capitol Hill. (“Hey, chat, I see Marie Gluesenkamp Perez walking up the stairs. . . . Super-chat me a question to ask her!”) Eventually, someone will pull the plug, because they’ll realize that nobody wants to subscribe to a CNN Twitch stream, just as they don’t want to watch a CNN anchor doing a video podcast from his living room. But what does it say about podcasting that its visual signals are so bland and neutered? Or that, when you scroll through your time line, you see the same types of sets, the same lighting, and, increasingly, a man at a desk talking directly to the camera, in the style of a news anchor? Right now, podcasters can still signal their authenticity by saying, “Hey, we aren’t the mainstream media.” But, as those institutions die out, and podcasters get more and more tied up with big money, the relationship between CNN and Big Podcast might start to resemble something we saw in the late two-thousands, when legacy media and well-funded startups tried to corral bloggers into a corporate shape, which held for about a decade before people scattered again, flocking to Substack and to independent podcasts. Media is always fragmenting, reconsolidating, and then fragmenting again, as yesterday’s disruption inevitably becomes today’s institution. I’ve been sitting in the same basement for almost six years now, recording the same podcast I started with my friends during the COVID lockdowns, and sometimes I think about how dated it already feels. But what I’ve concluded, and perhaps what CNN should figure out, is that you can’t really fake the insurrectionary energy, or its aesthetic. You just have to hope your audience grows old with you, before you give way to whatever comes next. ♦