Jenny White, "Turkish Kaleidoscope: Fractured...

In 2012, US President Barack Obama stated that the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons on its population would cross a red line that would require the US government to reconsider its approach to the civil war then underway in Syria. Syria subsequently used such weapons, c ...  Show more

Eleven days into the attack on Iran by the United States and Israel, starting on Feb. 28, 2026, I speak with Vali Nasr, a renowned analyst of Iran. He’s the author of several books dealing with Iran, including most recently Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History (Princeton Un ...  Show more

Christine Philliou, associate professor of history at UC Berkeley, on “Turkey: A Past Against History” (University of California Press). The book examines the life of the writer Refik Halid Karay (1888-1965), interrogating the shifting meaning of political dissent from Ottoman to ...  Show more

Elif Mahir Metinsoy on her book “Ottoman Women During World War I: Everyday Experiences, Politics and Conflict” (Cambridge University Press). The book describes the lives of Muslim women in the Ottoman Empire during the Great War, moving beyond a focus on the educated urban popul ...  Show more

Helen Gurley Brown (c.1922-2012) helped shape a new vision of working girls. As editor and chief of Cosmopolitan magazine and author of the international bestseller “Sex and the Single Girl,” she advocated (sometimes controversially) for women’s sexual freedom and autonomy. For F ...  Show more

This episode is a fully-remastered edition of a previous episode we released, where we brought on Halil Karaveli to talk about Why Turkey Is Authoritarian. This discussion was our second interview ever on the show, and while the format of the show has slightly changed over the ...