High-Key with CMT

This week on the podcast I’m joined by Nilo Tabrizy, a Canadian-Iranian open source intelligence journalist, and one of the first to confirm the dreadful news that a U.S. missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Southern Iran, killing at least 160 people, many of whom were children. I was curious to ask Nilo about her approach to covering the Iran war; open source intellige...

On this week’s podcast, I want to turn to another deadly war for children that Israel is also litigating right now: Lebanon. “Recent escalation has killed or wounded the equivalent of one classroom of children every day, [in Lebanon]” according to UNICEF deputy chief Ted Chaiban, who helps lead the UN organization that’s dedicated to safeguarding children. That grim statistic is on top of the more...

In this week’s episode, I spoke with Hadi Ghaemi, founder of the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) about something the world is not paying nearly enough attention to: The fate of Iran’s political prisoners. “I am really worried that the regime feeling the insecurity, and the existential threat it feels right now [that] it will turn to political prisoners and massacre them to make sure they’re...

Today on the pod we’re talking about the state of the U.S. Supreme Court, an institution that’s supposed to be a check on the executive branch, but one that’s taken a reputational battering in the past few years. It was once one of the most respected facets of American life. Not any longer, and not just according to liberals either; many conservatives are increasingly dismayed by what they see as...

Today, the body that recommends what vaccines are given to Americans, and when , met in Atlanta for the first of a two-day summit. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices panel (ACIP) has a lot of power; states use its recommendations to decide the vaccine mandates for school-aged children, and ACIP recommendations impact how private health insurance companies and the U.S. government cove...

On the pod this week, I chat with Iranian-American essayist and novelist Porochista Khakpour to unpack Jafar Panahi’s remarkable Cannes win for his new film, It Was Just An Accident; a darkly funny revenge thriller about a group of men and women banding together after one kidnaps a man they believe tortured them in prison. Panahi, 64, is a true renegade, whose artistry is matched only by his incre...

Today is the one-month anniversary of Pope Francis’ death. A lot has happened since; the election of Pope Leo XIV, the first American to lead the Church, political spats between right-wing MAGA Catholics and the Vatican, and plentiful accusations that this Pope is even more “woke” than his predecessor…all less than two-weeks into the job. To unpack it all, I speak to Christopher White, the Vatican...