Editorial | Shahbod Noori
This week, the issue of Tehran in your hands carries a number that means much more to me than a number printed on a cover:
Issue No. 1,500.
Fifteen hundred issues have been printed, opened, read, carried into homes and businesses, placed on waiting-room tables, and sometimes passed from one reader to another.
I am not going to tell the history of Tehran today. I will save that story for another occasion.
Instead, I want to talk about something even more important:
Reading.
Publishing a weekly magazine for so many years has never been easy. We have lived through earthquakes, the COVID pandemic, devastating fires, economic crises, rising printing and mailing costs, and countless unexpected challenges.
Yet week after week, whenever possible, Tehran returned to the printing press.
Why?
Not simply to add another issue to the count.
Because we still believe in something that our modern world may slowly be forgetting: the importance of reading.
Today, our phones connect us instantly to more information than any generation before us could have imagined. But having more information in front of us does not necessarily mean that we understand more.
We wake up and reach for our phones.
A headline. A video. A message. A rumor. A photograph. An advertisement.
Before we have time to think about one thing, our finger moves and the next appears.
We may see thousands of words every day, but how many do we actually read?
That concerns me—not merely as a publisher, but as a member of a community that cares about its future.
When a society loses the habit of reading, it does not simply lose books, newspapers and magazines. It risks weakening its ability to think, question, compare, analyze and challenge what it is being told.
Reading requires us to stay with an idea.
A writer says something, and somewhere in our mind we respond: “Yes, I agree,” or “No, I don’t.”
That silent conversation is an exercise for the brain.
A thirty-second video rarely asks the same thing from us.
Perhaps that is one reason we live in a time when everybody seems to have an opinion, but fewer people have the patience to investigate before sharing it.
Technology, however, has not killed reading.
Here in America, thousands of public libraries remain part of community life. Millions of people continue to read printed books, and parents are still encouraged to read to their children from their earliest years.
The format may change. We may read a newspaper on a screen, listen to a book in the car, or turn the pages of a magazine on a tablet.
The format is not the most important thing.
The habit of reading is.
For Iranians living outside Iran, reading carries another responsibility.
When the next generation loses the ability to read Persian, it loses more than an alphabet. It gradually loses direct access to part of its history, literature and cultural memory.
Culture cannot survive only through food, music, celebrations and flags.
Culture must also be read.
Perhaps we should bring books back into our homes—not as decoration, but as something to be opened.
And perhaps once in a while, we should put the phone aside and tell our children or grandchildren:
“Come sit with me. Let’s read something together.”
That half hour may remain in their memory far longer than hundreds of videos forgotten the next morning.
As we publish Issue No. 1,500 of Tehran, I am grateful not simply for the number.
I am grateful that you are still on the other side of this page.
You still open the magazine.
You still stop at a headline.
And you still give a few minutes of your life to reading.
As long as there are readers, words remain alive.
As long as words remain alive, culture remains alive.
So today, I do not congratulate only Tehran on reaching 1,500 issues.
I congratulate you for still reading.
Read books. Read newspapers. Read magazines. Read Persian. Read English. Read whatever interests you.
And most importantly, let your children see you reading.
Because perhaps one of the greatest things we can leave to the next generation is not a house, money or a bank account.
It may be something much simpler:
The habit of reading.
— Shahbod Noori
Editor-in-Chief
Tehran International Weekly Magazine