The Fortnightly Circular

Analysis ·Foreign Voices

Iran, Give Me My Country Back

A Lebanese architect in exile since 1984 argues that the price of Tehran's grip on Beirut is measured in lost decades, captured institutions, and a country no longer answerable to its own people.

By Ramzi Khalil Nassar

Victorian-style pen-and-ink engraving of Beirut's Ottoman and French mandate skyline descending to the Mediterranean, with a cedar of Lebanon in the foreground — Beirut from the hillside, the cedar still standing watch over the Mediterranean.

I left Beirut in the summer of 1984. I was thirty-one years old, newly married, carrying two suitcases and the absolute certainty — the kind only a fool or a young man can possess — that I would return within the year.

Forty years have passed.

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In This Number

Analysis

J. Alderton Vane Nowruz vs. the Mahdi Iran's ancient spring festival and its messianic state religion are in a civilizational contest. The outcome will shape the Middle East for decades.
J. Alderton Vane When Every LLM Says "Buy": Agentic AI and the Future of Fund Management If four leading AI systems unanimously recommend the same stock, has the research told you anything at all? A dissection of what human fund managers can still do that no model can replicate — and why most of them probably shouldn't bother trying.
H.C. Whitmore When AI Prose Is Worth Reading The question is not who wrote the words. The question is whether someone with genuine curiosity and editorial judgment directed the work — and took responsibility for the result.
Eleanora Sefton My Side Always Wins in the Long Run Noah Smith says liberalism always wins in the end. We think he's mistaken — not because liberal ideas fail, but because the Great Conversation has no sides, and the movements that claim credit for progress are riding waves they didn't create.
J. Alderton Vane The Experts Had Their Turn Gary Sick has spent forty years thinking about what he got wrong on Iran. He still hasn't considered the possibility that his method — not just his conclusions — might be the problem.
H.C. Whitmore Warning: The More You Use AI, the More You'll Turn Republican AI is following the climate pattern, not the internet pattern — and the partisan sorting has already begun.
Eleanora Sefton The Woman Who Made Kant Interesting A Prussian countess shaped Kant's thinking for thirty years. The philosophical tradition barely noticed.
H.C. Whitmore The Internet Nobody Planned The most consequential technology platform of the late twentieth century emerged not from a grand plan but from productive friction between competing interests. What that means for AI.

Light Reading

R.W. Calder Stop Calling Me "The Great" by Alexander, Son of Philip of Macedon, King of Kings
Eleanora Sefton Iran: From Zoroastrianism to Shia Islam Twenty-five centuries of spiritual identity, conquest, and reinvention on the Iranian plateau.
R.W. Calder A Brief, Occasionally Embarrassing History of Ice Cream Nobody knows exactly who invented ice cream, which is a travesty, because that person deserves a statue, a holiday, and possibly a Nobel Prize.

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Iran, Give Me My Country Back

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