Jenny White, "Turkish Kaleidoscope: Fractured...

In 1971, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi threw a party to celebrate the 2,500-year anniversary of the Persian Empire. It was planned to be a massive party, with tents set up in the desert, and invitations sent to just about every world leader across both the Western and Soviet blocs. ...  Show more

Iran is, once again, in global headlines, following U.S. strikes on the country earlier this year. Operation Epic Fury, as the Department of Defense called it, is the latest twist in Iran’s modern history, starting from the coup that brought the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to powe ...  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 ...