"Abstract thought has real purchase in Iran. It's a culture that prizes philosophy and poetry. And I wanted to convey the revolution as a revolution in ideas as much as in politics, and as an impetus to a culture that has never stopped evolving. Iranian thinkers — I think we in the West have had a notion that the revolution was a rejection of the United States, a rejection of the West. In fact, Iranian thinkers have long seen themselves in dialogue with the West and it is a dialogue that continues and has a lot of interesting elements of serendipity."
— Laura Secor, journalist and author of "Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran."
Secor, a State College native, has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Foreign Affairs and other publications. She has worked at the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the American Prospect and Lingua Franca. Secord has been a Fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center and at the American Academy in Berlin. She has taught journalism at New York University and Princeton University.