Iran

23 Jun 2025

Could Trump’s Attack on Iran Start a Nuclear War?

In 1983, nuclear explosions devastated my hometown, Kansas City, Missouri, in the made-for-TV film The Day After. The movie frightened me when I first watched it circa 2000. Not so dated that the mind couldn’t compensate, inky mushroom clouds spliced with real nuclear test footage still proved frightening. But the

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A beach.
17 Jul 2023

When You Can’t Go Home, You Get on A Boat

BY DENA ROD Welcome to The Transgender Sabbatical Blues, an ongoing series exploring Dena Rod’s experience as a transgender, non-binary, Iranian American Bay Area local who took a five-week sabbatical all over the Northern Hemisphere. But stopped I was. Without anyone responding to me on WhatsApp, there was no way that I

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19 Jun 2023

Why My Sabbatical Needed to Take Me to Iran

What to do with mine was so clear to me: I had to go to Iran. After a lifetime of my parents always advising me I should wait until my thirties to sojourn to the motherland (something I’ve explored before), here was the perfect opportunity. What could possibly go wrong with planning this type of adventure? 

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18 Mar 2020

American Imperialism Is a Pulsing, Vascular Chad Muscle

By Ian Firstenberg American empire and liberalism go hand in hand and this resolution on Nicaragua is no different.  ‘We must stop the divisiveness.’ It’s a common line in today’s political climate, meant to decry the emotional fervor from the extremes of the political left and right, upholding that meaty

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09 Jan 2020

Don’t Be a Tacky Asshole With Your WWIII Memes Just Cause Trump Sucks

Sooner or later, Northern California will experience a major earthquake. Statistically, it’s likely to be on the Hayward Fault, which means less-affluent parts of the Bay Area like Oakland and Richmond may bear the brunt of the destruction. The recovery will be arduous, and decades-long, and it will almost certainly

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07 Jan 2020

Donald Trump Is Tweeting Us into WWIII. But Is It Even Him?

“There’s always a tweet” has been the axiom of the Trump era, the definitive proof that almost any ridiculous thing the president says or does will have been preceded by an accusation that someone else was doing it. It’s as true as “There’s always a bigger fish” or “There’s always

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10 May 2018

This Week’s News, America, People’s Park, & People’s Strikes

We’ve got a loaded news wrap for you, stacked full of history, homeless, strikes and being black in America. Here goes…   Fight Brewing at People’s Park There’s a long history of resistance at the site of Berkeley’s People’s Park – it was actually built by the community itself out

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03 May 2018

News to keep you afloat for the week of May 3, 2018

Buckle your seat belts, this week’s news dives into the Oakland A’s and their search for a home, a submarine gone astray, violence in Kabul and the latest out of the Trump legal circus. A’s: Last stop, Oakland There’s no question that 1968 was a year to remember, here in

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