Podcast summary

Iran, as any civilization, is defined most thoroughly by the stories it spawns. Join us for a candid conversation between novelist Gina Nahai (Caspian Rain) and Robert Scheer (editor-in-chief, Truthdig.com and host of KCRW's Left, Right and Center) about faith, modernism, and the emotional ties that bind the people of Iran and America.

Participant(s) Bio

Gina B. Nahai is the author of Cry of the Peacock, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith (finalist for the Orange Prize in England and the IMPAC award in Dublin), and Sunday's Silence. Her novels have been translated into sixteen languages, and her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Magazine, and the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. She is a former consultant for the Rand Corporation, and has studied the politics of pre- and post-revolutionary Iran for the United States Department of Defense. She is professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.

Robert Scheer is the editor-in-chief of the political blog www.truthdig.com and the author of seven books, including Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power; With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War and America After Nixon: The Age of Multinationals; with his son Christopher and Lakshmi Chaudhry, The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us about Iraq. Most recently, he wrote Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I and Clinton--and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush. Between 1964 and 1969 he was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts Magazine. From 1976 to 1993 he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Scheer can be heard on the political radio program Left, Right and Center on KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Monica, Calif.
Scheer was raised in the Bronx, where he attended public schools and graduated from City College of New York. He studied as a Maxwell fellow at Syracuse University and was a fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley, where he did graduate work in economics. Scheer is a contributing editor for The Nation as well as a Nation Fellow. He has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford.

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