Honeymoon in Tehran is an interesting title because not only does it describe the sequence of events in the story around Moaveni marrying an Iranian man, starting a family in the midst of reporting on local affairs and geopolitics of the middle-east, but it also does a great job of…

Usually, upon discovering that I’m a musician, people ask me what kind of music I make. Always a moment of stammering followed by me getting flustered as I mentally put together an answer that best suits the context. …

In April, succumbing to the anxieties over lost time during the quarantine, I signed up for Farsi lessons at the New York Persian Center. It turned out to be a great decision. I’ve been told I’m “good with languages”. While I don’t really know what that means, it is hard…

I’ve come to depend a substantial amount on taking notes. This has supplemented my general creative tendencies around interpreting one thing in the context of something else. …

Trains can be incredibly unwieldy. Freight trains can often be a mile long, if not longer, passing at once through varying terrain, subject to conflicting forces in different sections and hauling several thousand tons at 50 miles an hour. Stopping a moving train is a perennial problem with various solutions…

An inclined plane is a simple machine — so, obviously, it’s everywhere. If one needed to go from elevation A to elevation B, it would be rather easy to build a steep path than a shallow one since it would occupy less area. But it would be that much harder…

I had an eventful Fall in 2019 and have decided that it needs to be documented. This little series of blog posts will go over the various things I did in the last few months, and perhaps talk about how I feel now. Earlier this year, I put out an…

I had an eventful Fall in 2019 and have decided that it needs to be documented. This little series of blog posts will go over the various things I did in the last few months, and perhaps talk about how I feel now. For my birthday this year, I decided…

Learning the New York City subway system when you’re new to the city is an excellent meta-game with lots of little games in it. It is in equal parts delightful and frustrating and teaches you a lot about rapid transit in the United States. …