Amit's Blog

Navigating the Contradictions of an Iranian-American Scholar at the Crossroads of Memory, Money, and Regime Change   Abbas Milani, the Stanford-based historian and director of Iranian Studies, embodies a profound contradiction in contemporary Iranian scholarship. To his admirers, he is a rigorous archival researcher who has suffered under both the Shah's savak and the Islamic Republic—a double exile whose firsthand experience uniquely qualifies him to diagnose Iran's ailments. To his critics, however, he is a partisan operative whose institutional links to conservative think tanks, advocacy for "crippling sanctions," and uncanny embrace of the Pahlavi dynasty render him an instrument of Western regime-change agendas rather than an objective observer of Iranian reality. This article synthesizes the extensive debate surrounding Milani's reliability, examining the funding of the Iran Democracy Project, the statistical paradox of Iran's literacy boom under th...

How a Half-Century of Proxy Wars, Shifting Ideologies, and Chokepoint Diplomacy Redefined the Middle East The North Yemen Civil War, long dubbed Egypt’s Vietnam, ignited a half-century of regional turbulence that reshaped the Arab world’s geopolitical architecture. What began in 1962 as a republican coup rapidly metastasized into a proxy crucible between Nasser’s pan-Arabism and Saudi-backed monarchism, draining Cairo’s military, fracturing Egyptian society, and inadvertently setting the stage for the 1967 Six-Day War. As the Cold War waned, the ideological battleground gave way to pragmatic realignments, yet Yemen’s rugged topography, tribal autonomy, and strategic chokepoints ensured it remained a magnet for external intervention. The modern Houthi movement, evolving from the marginalized Zaydi Imamate, has resurrected old fault lines, while contemporary conflicts have spilled across the Gulf of Aden into Somaliland. Today’s Red Sea crisis is no longer a clash of secularism versus ...

How a Chinese toddler’s blonde curls, a Nigerian baby’s blue eyes, everyday Anglo-Indian family portraits, Hyderabad’s Ottoman princesses, and Mughal Turkic brides all reveal the same quiet genetic magic In a quiet Jiangsu village in late 2025, a toddler nicknamed Guojiang—or “Little Jam”—sparked global wonder. Born to two dark-haired, brown-eyed East Asian parents, she emerged with golden blonde hair and vivid blue eyes. DNA tests confirmed she was their biological child; the explanation lay generations back in a Russian great-grandfather whose recessive alleles had lain dormant until they paired perfectly in her. The same year, memories resurfaced of Nmachi Ihegboro, the 2010 London “miracle baby” born to Nigerian parents with fair skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes—another headline-grabbing case of recessive pigmentation traits resurfacing after centuries of hiding. These modern shocks sit beside subtler stories: Anglo-Indian families where siblings display wildly different skin t...

When the Planet Runs Out of the Right Kind of Dirt: A Global Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight Beneath the shimmering dunes of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, where sand stretches endlessly under the desert sun, a quiet paradox unfolds: these nations, blessed with vast sandy landscapes, must import millions of tonnes of construction-grade material from distant shores like Australia and China. The grains they possess—smoothed by centuries of relentless wind—are useless for modern concrete. They lack the sharp, angular edges needed to bind with cement and create structures strong enough to support skyscrapers, bridges, and entire new cities. This counterintuitive trade is merely the visible tip of a global sand crisis that has quietly escalated into one of the 21st century’s most nuanced resource challenges. As humanity pours concrete at an unprecedented rate—extracting 40–50 billion tonnes of sand and aggregates annually, enough to build a nine-storey wall around the equator every year—usabl...