Francesca Maria Lorenzini

From Nobel laureates at Sharif University to the reductionist clichés of legacy media, Kourosh Ziabari challenges the “nuclear-proxy” binary.

Students pressed shoulder to shoulder in the corridors of Sharif University, spilling into stairwells and doorways long after the lecture hall had reached capacity. The auditorium was built for 400; nearly 1,400 arrived. When Nobel Prize-winning physicist Joseph Taylor began to speak, the silence was absolute. Students listened from the floor and the hallways, straining to catch fragments of a lecture that, in the standard Western telling of Iran, was never supposed to happen.

This is the Iran that exists outside the frame of legacy journalism. While news cycles are dominated by the rhythmic predictability of “nuclear dilemmas” and “proxy activities,” scenes like the one at Sharif University—or the five-year project by journalist Kourosh Ziabari to interview 30 Nobel laureates for the science magazine Daneshmand—reveal a civilization defined by an unrelenting appetite for global connection.

Now based in New York, Ziabari has spent two decades navigating the dissonance between Iran’s internal pulse and its external caricature. A contributor to Foreign Policy, New Lines Magazine and other outlets, he remains struck by how a nation of 90 million people is routinely reduced to a handful of geopolitical abstractions. This simplification, he argues, does more than distort reality; it actively dehumanizes.

“Whatever Iran does has to be described in terms of a cranky child that is behaving badly and needs to be disciplined,” Ziabari says. It is a lens that casts a sophisticated, secularizing society as an irrational object of Western management rather than a living, breathing community.

This reductive mapping also obscures a deeper, more painful internal reality. Recent protests, though sparked by the economic desperation of a plummeting Rial, have exposed a state suffering from a form of “military humiliation.” Incapable of effectively defending its borders—evidenced by the loss of hundreds of civilians in recent Israeli attacks—the state has frequently turned its aggression inward. The target is often Iran’s intellectual future: the journalists, academics, and cultural figures most capable of articulating a different path forward.

In our conversation, Ziabari unpacks how understanding Iran requires abandoning comforting simplifications and recognizing a society that is increasingly secular yet deeply historical, fragmented yet creative, constrained yet forward-looking.

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