Wednesday, August 20, 2008 
Fall term at the University of Tehran’s International Center for Persian Studies (ICPS) begins September 8th. Housed at the Dehkhoda Institute, the center offers Persian classes for everyone from complete novices to advanced speakers. Classes include general language courses, courses in history and classic and modern Iranian literature, as well as remedial classes in reading […]
Filed under: EDUCATION, LEARNING PERSIAN, VISITING IRAN
1 Comment
From NPR:
An Iranian-American scholar who had been jailed for months in Iran has been freed on bail.
Haleh Esfandiari is director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
In December, she was on the way to the Tehran airport after visiting her mother, when she was seized by masked men […]
Filed under: NEWS, POLITICS
No Comments
Despite continued political tensions between the United States and Iran, the Iran Cheetah Project, a joint effort of the U.S.-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Iran’s Department of the Environment (DOE), is working to study and save the Asiatic cheetah (also referred to as the Iranian cheetah, and “yuz palang” in Persian). Just 60 to […]
Filed under: ENVIRONMENT, WILDLIFE
7 Comments
Nima Taherzadeh may be the only Iranian man in the world who can pull off a ponytail. You can’t see it in the photo above, but he’s got one and he wears it well. When I met with him in Chelsea on a lazy Sunday afternoon a few months ago, he was wearing a black […]
Filed under: DESIGN, FASHION
No Comments
A few months ago, I wrote about finding a book of Persian fairy tales at a sidewalk vendor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Shortly after that discovery, I ran into something even more unexpected on that same street: a vendor selling war rugs. They look like any other rugs, except if you look carefully, you’ll see tanks, […]
Filed under: ART, FOLK ART
3 Comments
Hot on the heels of the Hoder blog shutdown, I noticed this story on the CIA’s alleged edits to Ahmadinejad’s Wikipedia entry, discovered by the WikiScanner, which matches up edits with their IP addresses. Questions of ethics, editing, censorship, and free speech aside, what did the CIA actually change? From the BBC article linked above:
On […]
Filed under: FREE SPEECH, INTERNET, POLITICS
2 Comments
Hossein Derakhshan’s blog, Hoder.com was shut down on Friday by his host, Hosting Matters, over allegations of defamation brought by the lawyers of Mehdi Khalaji, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). WINEP’s advisory board includes neo-conservative poster boy Richard Perle, and until 2001 counted Paul Wolfowitz as a member of […]
Filed under: BLOGS, FREE SPEECH, INTERNET, IRANIAN MEDIA, POLITICS
4 Comments