Where Iranians dare to speak to each other without fear

In Iran today, the riskiest act is neither protest nor journalism. It's conversation.

Around eleven o’clock on a winter Thursday night in Tehran, when smog hangs low and the city braces for yet another morning of inflation, something improbable happens.

People lift their phones and dial into a live call-in program that invites them to do what the state has discouraged for nearly 50 years, speak to one another without fear. In no other broadcast media do Iranians speak so freely.

Conversation, elsewhere, is a habit. In Iran, it is an act of retrieval. The Islamic Republic has regulated public expression so thoroughly that even a modest exchange, an honest memory, an unfiltered admission can feel subversive.

Authoritarian systems seldom fear noise, they fear permeability, the small openings through which private truth seeps back into collective life.

Conversation cannot, on its own, remake a country.

But it can remind people that they still constitute a public, and that a public, once it begins to speak, is difficult to extinguish.

On Thursday nights in Tehran, beneath a sky thick with pollutants and unspoken truths, that public can be heard, quietly but insistently, returning to life.

Each week I begin my program the same way: "What should Iran talk about tonight?" And the phone lines come alive.

Nostalgia

The first caller, a woman in Tehran named Artemis, speaks with the steadiness of someone who has carried a sentence around all day.

We know what we have lost, she begins, political rights, economic stability, clean air, the artists and scientists driven into exile. But we do not talk enough about what survived. Our culture, our sense of who we were.

She identifies as a monarchist, yet her critique is directed at her own camp. When monarchists scream and insult online, she says, they betray the very values they claim to defend, dignity, coexistence.

She pauses. Iran was once a place where different voices lived safely, she claims: we should try to be those voices again. It is a simple thought, but in a country where political language has been battered for decades, simplicity can sound radical.

Then the tone of the program shifts. A man named Ehsan calls from abroad with the urgency of someone carrying unresolved grief.

The time for talk is over, he declares. Forest fires, a collapsing currency, students expelled from school—none of it, he argues, will change until Iranians swear an oath to reclaim their homeland.

His language is harsh, almost martial, yet the emotion beneath it is unmistakably human: grief straining toward agency.

'I was wrong'

Then, a quieter voice enters the line, one woven deeply into Iran’s cultural memory.

Esfandiar Monfaredzadeh, the composer behind the defining soundtracks of pre-revolution Iranian cinema and several anthems that accompanied the uprising of 1979, speaks with a calm that cuts through the evening’s tension.

To many, he embodies the contradictions of that era, an artist who lent his talent to a revolution that promised liberation and delivered something narrower. What he does next is rare for his generation.

"I was wrong," he says. "I hope the generations after me can forgive us."

The confession does not land softly for everyone. A woman named Irandokht calls in, her voice tight with exhaustion. You left, she tells him. We stayed. And we live with what followed.

Her anger is not directed solely at him, it is aimed at the long silence surrounding his generation, decades in which few publicly reckoned with how a movement born in the language of justice hardened into repression.

Monfaredzadeh listens and responds without defensiveness. Under the Shah, he explains, Iranians had social and cultural freedoms, but not political ones.

Under the Islamic Republic, even those limited freedoms contracted. Until political freedom exists for everyone, he says, monarchists, republicans, leftists, Islamists, there can be no future worth building.

Other callers widen the frame. A woman from Karaj admits that during recent protests many workers stayed home out of fear of losing their salaries, leaving young demonstrators exposed.

Another describes an improvised referendum, the clanging of pots and pans from balconies, a city speaking through metal because speech itself had become unsafe.

I close the program the same way each week, Take good care of the person sitting next to you, I say, and sign off the national dialogue.

Then I sit for a moment longer and think to myself, we have a long way to go, yet the possibility of change feels close.

So close, no matter how far.