English Transcript of the Iranian Television Documentary Program “Rules of the Game” (قاعده بازی)

On the evening of Monday, 15 February 2016, Iran’s television channel 3 aired a 13-minute report titled “The Rules of the Game” (in Persian, قاعده بازی) about the 17 January 2016 prisoner swap between Iran and the United States, arguing that the exchange was a victory for Iran and a loss for the United States. The program, produced by the “General Administration for Analytical and Documentary Programming” (اداره کل برنامه‌های تحلیلی و مستند) contends that the settlement of a longstanding property dispute between Iran and the United States was linked to the prisoner exchange, reporting among other things that on the day of the exchange, the U.S. flew $400 million in cash to Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport.

The following is a rough translation of the report that I have prepared. Comments are welcome.

Persian Word of the Day: تازه‌نفس

Today’s word is تازه‌نفس (tazeh-nafas), which literally means “fresh of breath” and more generally simply “fresh” or  It is especially used to describe military forces, and that is how I found it used today in an article on BBC Persian titled: آمریکا ‘صدها سرباز’ تازه نفس به هلمند می‌فرستد (“U.S. sends ‘hundreds’ of fresh soldiers to Helmand”).

Persian Word of the Day: خبرساز

In this “Persian Word of the Day” series, I’ll be highlighting noteworthy Persian words or phrases that may be of interest to fellow students of the Persian language.

Today’s word is خبرساز (khabarsaz) which literally means “news-making.” Farhang Moaser Kimia defines it as “that makes headlines, sensational” and notes that it is a new word. There is an Iranian news site called Khabarsaz.

Hello world!

Welcome to my new home page! I’ve had a personal home page since I was a graduate student, but I’ve decided to start fresh on a server that — for the first time — I’m administering myself. This site is currently hosted on a DigitalOcean “droplet” — a virtual private server — running CentOS. I’ve used Let’s Encrypt to secure the site and enabled HTTPS Strict Transport Security (HSTS). I’m pleased to note that as of today, Qualys SSL Labs gives this site an A+ rating.

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