If you want to understand Iran through Iranian voices then this substack is for you.
I’m a historian of the Middle East. I spend my time reading, translating, and contextualizing what’s actually being written inside Iran right now — by scholars, workers, dissidents, and ordinary people living through extraordinary things — so English readers can hear it directly, not filtered through someone else’s summary.
The substack’s name comes from my mother. When she wants to underline a point, or agree completely with someone else’s, she’ll nod and say, casually, “these are the true things.” Not the truth. Not the whole story. Just: true things, plural, partial, honest. I liked that framing enough to build a newsletter around it. What you will read here are the true things, as many and as honestly as I can gather them.
Subscribe to get the true things as they come. In your inbox. And free.
