Life
Iranian schoolgirls visiting Vakil Bazaar in Shiraz. Vladimir Grigorev/Getty
My terrifying journey after fleeing Iran
Growing up in Iran, life was “never normal or ordinary”, says 19-year-old Rozhan on Radio 4’s Life Changing. Every morning at school, we had to walk over the British, American and Israeli flags before we entered the classroom, and say “Death to Britain”, “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” before classes began. Girls over nine who refused to wear a hijab outside were taken by police to sign papers promising not to repeat the offence. We were told that if you rejected Islam you would end up in jail, being tortured or even killed, and that Christians are “going to hell”. So when my mother quietly converted to the Christian faith, in 2020, she took a huge risk.
The day the government discovered her secret church, she grabbed a bag, bundled me and my 12-year-old sister into the car and headed for the Turkish border, where people smugglers promised passage to an unknown “safe country”. After weeks of exhausting walks, truck journeys and a terrifying wait in silence among trees in Calais – “you couldn’t even cough” – we boarded an overcrowded dinghy in freezing waters at 4am. Sitting on the floor of the boat, the water rose up to my neck, and at points we strangers all held hands, sure we were going to die. Finally, a British ship intercepted us and ferried us to Dover. I only really felt I could breathe a year later when our leave-to-remain letter arrived. The Christian community picked us up, providing clothes, helping us into school and guiding us through paperwork. Later, we were baptised, finally fulfilling my mother’s dream. My only wish now is that there comes a day when “each Iranian can be who they want to be” – and that I can be “useful for this country”, because it gave me the opportunity to be free.
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Waiting for the clouds to part
Gabriel Sacks, Lead Manager of Aberdeen Asia Focus, explores why long‑term investors should remain optimistic amid global market turbulence. He emphasises the importance of resilience, long‑term thinking, and the opportunities within smaller Asian companies.”
Property
THE MODERNIST TERRACE This three-bedroom house in Camden is part of Grand Union Walk, a modernist Grade II-listed terrace on Regent’s Canal, says The Guardian. The aluminium-clad homes were built on former industrial land, with curved walls and lozenge-shaped windows inspired by London buses. Inside, a double-height kitchen and dining area is flooded with light, and an industrial up-and-over door opens on to a balcony overlooking the water. The principal bedroom has a porthole window looking down to the floor below, and a painted steel staircase leads up to a roof terrace. Camden Town Tube station is a three-minute walk. £1.65m. Click on the image to see the listing.
Heroes and villains
Chalamet with his girlfriend Kylie Jenner. John Shearer/98th Oscars/Getty
Hero
Timothée Chalamet, whose controversial claim that “no one cares” about opera and ballet has done wonders for opera and ballet. Alex Beard, chief executive of the Royal Ballet and Opera, tells The Times ticket sales got an “immediate boost” after the Hollywood A-lister’s dismissive remarks. “Cheers, Timmy!”
Villain
Uganda’s defence chief, who has warned that his government will end all diplomatic relations with Turkey unless Ankara pays a $1bn “security dividend” and supplies him with “the most beautiful woman” in the country as a wife. General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, son of President Yoweri Museveni, has form in this field: in 2022, he offered 100 Ankole cattle as a “bride price” for Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, threatening to “capture Rome” if his demands were refused.
Hero
Leah Gazan, a socialist Canadian MP, for expanding LGBT to “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+”. The 54-year-old was speaking at a press conference when she casually dropped in the gigantic acronym, which apparently stands for “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual”. Incredibly, says Chris Nesi in the New York Post, she said it without looking down at her notes and with a “totally straight face”.
Villain
Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has become the subject of yet another weird animal story. A new biography of the US Health Secretary – whose previous escapades include cutting the head off a dead beached whale with a chainsaw and dumping a bear carcass in New York’s Central Park – claims that on a car journey with his family in 2001 he pulled over to slice off the genitals of a dead raccoon. His kids, he wrote in his diary, “waited patiently in the car”.
Hero
Keir Starmer, according to a restaurant in Beijing. The PM ate at Yi Zuo Yi Wang twice during his visit to China in January, ordering exactly the same dishes both times, and his selections – including plum ribs, beef rolls with mint and a mushroom dish with aubergine and black garlic – are now available to diners as the “Starmer menu”. When I asked the waiters what they thought of our PM, says Martin Rowson in The Guardian, they said: “He was kind, just like us.”
Zeitgeist
Phoebe O’Brien: a self-described “revolutionary”. TikTok/@lilla_flicka
The little-noticed rise of the “femosphere”
The overtly misogynistic, often hard-right “manosphere” has been well documented, says Emily Lawford in The New Statesman. Fewer are aware of its mirror image: the radically progressive “femosphere”, whose main obsessions are the war in Gaza, the iniquities of capitalism, “anxiety”, and, frequently, hostility to men. TikToker Phoebe O’Brien has racked up more than 80,000 followers for her screeds against the “Epstein class”. Sipping a hot chocolate in a keffiyeh, she tells me the October 7 attacks were a “catalytic moment” for her, and that she considers herself a “revolutionary”. Megan Cooper, a British “trauma-informed holistic therapist” has amassed a following around her belief that women literally feel global conflict – “the viscerality of the feminine wound” – and her “withering” attitude to men.
What happened? A decade ago, young feminists like me had fun reading Caitlin Moran, trying to parse “intersectionality” (was tanning cultural appropriation?) and wondering whether shaving our armpits was a “capitulation to the male gaze”. I knew lots of women who said they hated straight white men “while evidently finding them enthralling”. In the years since, the isolation of Covid and the Balkanising effect of algorithms has created a more profound divide. Significant numbers of bright young women see men as a threat and capitalism as a trap, and they are highly resistant to dating or even befriending people with different views. And the more these young women turn to the femosphere, the more it reinforces and deepens their malaise. They are only going to get lonelier, angrier, and less connected to reality. None of this makes them happy, but it isn’t meant to. “I think to be a person that cares about other people,” says a Leeds student with pink hair, “you’ve got to be pessimistic.”
😤📈 These are not merely fringe kooks. Polls show that women aged 18 to 30 are 26 percentage points less likely to feel positive about capitalism compared to young men. They are profoundly downbeat about the future and feel much more negatively towards young men than young men feel towards them. Strikingly, this gloominess is most pronounced among the privileged. Women in middle class professions are less likely to say they feel valued by society than their working class contemporaries. White women are more likely to say the country is racist than non-white women.
The Knowledge Crossword
Comment
Adding life to their years. Getty
“We should add life to our years, not years to our life”
I like life, says Simon Kuper in the FT, but it’s “too long”. Medical advances in immunotherapy, anti-obesity drugs and more should keep average life expectancy rising to the point where my children may be confident of surviving well beyond 90. I just “hope their generation will want to”. Life is extending while the things that traditionally gave it meaning are in decline. Particularly among the young, ever fewer people have partners, children, friends, faith or – “I suspect” – a belief that the future will be better than the past. “Instead we have our phones.” Now, another source of meaning is under threat: “engrossing work”.
Pretty much everybody has experienced the “AI shock” – moments when we suddenly glimpse how the technology could make us redundant. When I had a new idea for a book, I decided to prompt further thoughts by asking AI to produce a few sample passages. “I soon realised it could write the whole book that day.” Lawyers, coders, radiologists, translators and others are all experiencing some version of this. Do we really want to live longer lives with brains that have become superfluous? And in any case, the extra life expectancy is being added on to the end of life – those bleary final years in which illness and confusion are certain, but death is being forever postponed. The great psychologist Daniel Kahneman was perhaps wise to choose euthanasia in Switzerland aged 90, while still in good health. Much of the spice of life comes from its brevity – all that richness squeezed into a handful of summers. Peter Thiel’s dream of immortality sounds ghastly. We should honour the adage and add life to our years, not years to our life.
Weather
Quoted
“Money – the one thing that keeps us in touch with our children.”
Gyles Brandreth
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