Monday, August 24, 2026

On 24 August 2026, the U.S. government expanded the scope of its threat of secondary sanctions against the regime and Iran, warning governments and companies doing business with Tehran that their access to the dollar-based financial system could be restricted; at the same time, Iran blacklisted 45 oil tankers for violating new regulations on passage through the Strait of Hormuz and threatened to seize ships and confiscate their cargoes. In Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian’s chief of staff announced that a reduction in the gasoline quota had been finalized, although no new price has yet been set; that same day, the police commander also told his commanders to prepare for possible “unrest” related to livelihoods, unemployment, and fuel prices. In Europe, six EU countries called for a formal discussion in September on a mechanism to tax oil companies’ windfall profits.

In Kyiv, coinciding with Ukraine’s Independence Day, the leaders of the “coalition of willing countries” gathered; Britain announced that it would provide Kyiv with classified information about components of SCALP long-range missiles to strengthen Ukraine’s missile production, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia had not accepted the proposal to stop attacking ships carrying agricultural products in the Black Sea (since when must one make a proposal not to commit crimes?). In Gaza, Israeli attacks and gunfire once again killed at least four Palestinians, including two children, and a desalination facility in Gaza City was also targeted (presumably on some legitimate pretext, and with criminal cold-bloodedness and self-righteousness).

On the same day, the World Health Organization made public the new recommendations of the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee concerning the growing outbreak of Bundibugyo Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; an outbreak in which sustained transmission has continued (though perhaps, for now, it does not matter at all until it reaches a proper country, right?). The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre also issued a report expressing concern about exceptional heat and drought.

A serious part of the day was spent expanding LeraLink and the knowledge organization studio within it. Now this platform is becoming something for itself that I have always needed. I hope others, too, need such a systematic response as I do, and that I can invite the serious ones to join the platform and build their own version of it. Today, we gave thanks for life at least three or four times. Danadel played for hours, but came home earlier than on other days, as if he had grown tired. At night, I was anxious. My hand went to the pen and did not. I wanted to write about the explosive anger that sometimes overtakes me, in order to understand it. The work of organizing knowledge had consumed all my energy and psyche throughout the day. I had become tender-hearted. Easily hurt. I was tired. I missed the house in which I grew up. We had a large house, with a greenhouse in its middle, its large hall, its even larger yard, and a small garden where I had planted peach trees. It occurred to me that I wished I could buy it again. When pieces of a person are scattered across the farthest reaches of the world, especially in moments of tenderness, they want to return to some wretched city, to a place that also produced all the pains of their childhood, with its generally unpleasant culture, its fanatical, suffocating atmosphere, to buy again their childhood home—which has now taken on a romantic form after the “years away from home”—and rebuild something that seemingly has been lost.

nóstos meaning home and álgos meaning pain, which Johannes Hofer put together a few centuries ago to coin the interesting word “nostalgia,” is the best description of this state: “the pain of returning home,” or perhaps “the pain of being unable to return home.” For a stranger, an exile from one’s homeland, a wanderer, an immigrant, an exile, or a political activist in exile—whatever name we give them—the desire to reclaim a romantic version of one’s childhood home (whose larger-scale counterpart is the romantic version of “We Will Take Back Iran”) becomes a kind of anchor of identity amid this temporal-geographical-cultural-intellectual-generational rupture. Even if you buy the whole world, this rupture will not be healed, and that lost experience and time cannot be reconstructed. But here we are dealing with the logic of nostalgia, not wisdom or rational judgment. What we seek is the possibility of experiencing continuity within an identity rupture. Today it is the childhood home; tomorrow, Si-Metri Street; the day after tomorrow, Hafezieh and its hangout; and another day, another place and another period in time. We do not want home in order to return to the past. Even the home we live in today—the relative stability we strive to build, while “wind and rain both pound” to topple, wash away, and carry off this semblance of stability at any moment—is in fact a search for a possibility to experience the past and the present in a single body, mind, place, and time.

The concept of restorative nostalgia, as well as the concept of self-discontinuity[1], are very helpful explanatory concepts. Self-discontinuity raises a question: Is the person I am today continuous and connected with the person I was in the past? And restorative nostalgia is one of those ways that emerges in response to this rupture from people and cultures, through an effort to restore a lost place, order, or world.

How interesting the relationship is between this rupture in the continuity of the self and the matter of quitting smoking, which I am [for now] unable to do!