Built with Bounce

On Iranian hustle and why grief has shoulders.

Go to an Iranian dinner party in America and count how long it takes before someone gives you unsolicited advice about your career, your investments, and your posture. My record is four minutes. It will be delivered at volume, in two languages, by a person who has known you since dessert.

It will also be correct.

And underneath it, always, the jokes — not told so much as run continuously beneath the conversation, like a baseline. A pun folded into a backhanded compliment. A devastatingly hilarious impression of a relative performed while that relative is in the next room. A punchline that arrives in the middle of a sentence about something genuinely terrible. Nothing is too grim to be funny. Exile is funny. Inflation is funny. The uncle who lost everything and is now a dean of engineering at a top university has the best material at the table, and he knows it, and he'll use it before the rice comes out.

People mistake that for deflection. It's the opposite. It's the same instinct as everything else in this essay, despite Persians always being fashionably late, the purpose of this essay is arriving early — the refusal to let a bad situation have the last word in the room. A person who can find the joke in a catastrophe has already established that the catastrophe doesn't get to run the evening. Of everything my family handed me, that one is the first thing I'd put in the suitcase.

The culture piques interest. Paradoxical, respected, but an enigma. Underneath the noise is a specific critical and wise rigor, and it wasn't an accident of temperament. It was built.

Where the bounce comes from

Briefly, because you can look it up.

In 1953, Iran had a democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and a country plausibly on its way to becoming a pioneering democracy in the Middle East. The CIA and MI6 removed him — a role the CIA finally acknowledged in writing in declassified documents released in 2013. Twenty-six years later, in 1979, the revolution, which is the regime that the US is handling now, came — and it is a serious argument, not a fringe one, that the first event made the second possible. What matters here isn't the geopolitics. It's the lesson underneath it, which every Iranian family absorbed at speed: a country can invert in eighteen months. The currency, the law, the language of public life, the rules governing women, what is safe to say at dinner. One crown can turn into a veil. People who were leading the military on Tuesday were teaching Farsi in Los Angeles by the following spring.

Once you know that, you can't un-know it. It permanently reorganizes what you think is worth investing in.

Iran today, which is a paradox

Everyone dresses modestly in the street. And I like that actually. Until a few years ago, women — me included — had to be covered head to toe. Head to toe. What that does to a person is complex, and it is not what you would guess.

Because Iran today is also RKOT. Some of the best parties I have ever been to in my life were not in Berlin, or Brooklyn, or Tokyo. They were in Tehran. I check that page and pray I never see a friend's face on it — living that openly is genuinely dangerous. And it is very real, and very fun, and very rich, and very poor, all at once. They aren't even showing the good stuff. Every minute of it is illegal. Singing is illegal. Which should tell you something about how alive a room becomes when the room itself is a crime.

We take fun for granted here. There, it's a practice — a pragmatic, resilient, delicious kind of freedom, invented under pressure. Everything worth having is underground: the parties, the music, the money, the networks, the resources. All the while, the real gems are the people, above ground. It's a lot, and it's hard to explain, and I loved every moment I spent there.

Persians also come in every color, because Iran was never one people. The north looks toward the Caspian and Russia - where they have more blond and blue-eyed features. The west runs into Kurdistan and the Caucasus - where the features are more bold, chiseled, and curled - like mine. The south carries the Gulf and East Africa with it, where the features are more exotic. The east reaches toward Central Asia, where the features are more beautifully Asian. All of it shows up in our faces, and all of it is gorgeous. Strong features. By the way, what sorts of lasers are they making these days? Where did all the hairiness go? We seem to have zapped that gene expression away.

The portable skillset

If governments are temporary, and rights can be seized, and your credential might be void in the next jurisdiction, then you stop investing in things that sit still and start investing in what you can carry in your hands — and you hedge by being generous and genuine, because we are all we have at the end of the day. And that's plenty.

So: languages, fluently and without embarrassment. Money — how it actually moves, not how it's described. Social fluency, which is the underrated one: how to read a room, locate the person who decides things, the person who knows things, the person who is special and kind, and how to host elegantly and become useful to others by Thursday. How to land somewhere with nothing and be inside the culture within a year. How to be genuinely liked by people who had no particular reason to like you because you are valuable and like them too.

It is the world's least glamorous skill stack and it works absolutely everywhere. Berlin, Tokyo, Caracas, Mogadishu, wherever turns out to be next. That's the entire point of it. You don't get to know where the next promised land is. So you become the kind of person who can build one on arrival.

And the poetry

Which brings me to the least practical-sounding item on that list, and the one that travels best.

Iranians do not treat poetry as a school subject. Hafez has been dead six hundred years and is still consulted like a friend with better judgment than you — on Yalda night you open his Divan at random and read whatever page you land on as an answer to the question you were holding. Rumi, Saadi, Ferdowsi, Khayyam: quoted across dinner tables, deployed to win arguments, produced from memory by taxi drivers. A thousand years of writing about loss, wine, exile, longing, love and the impermanence of absolutely everything — which is to say, a manual, written well in advance, by people who had already been through it.

My grandfathers taught me about fifty adages, and watched me copy them into a book every summer in my endearing elementary Farsi at the time. Oh, the sweetness of those adages. They rhyme. They sing. They love. Adages about gambling. About dignity. About manners. A few lines each, as rhythmic as they are true, and they are yours to give away freely to anyone who needs peace or advice. I still use them like a gentle compass.

And they were built for exactly one situation. Imagine being told: your country is now run by clerics, we don't know what's coming, it sounds risky. Take what you can. Move what assets you can. Go somewhere you don't speak the language, don't know the culture, don't know what not to do — where people dress immodestly and carry their food in baskets on wheels. Now decide which city will be kind to you. Decide where your money is safe. You were a Persian prince or princess and now you are a blank.

Think about the sheer number of decisions that person has to get right. Then raise a decent kid in that country, while raising yourself.

You cannot carry a house across a border. You can carry all of that in your head. It makes any life you land in immediately richer, and it is timeless and piercing in a way that very little written this decade manages to be.

The receipts

The skill stack works, and the roll call is faintly ridiculous for a group that is less than 0.25% of the country.

Tech. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar, born to Iranian parents. Oracle's database — the thing a startling share of the world's records still sit on — was largely written by Bob Miner, its co-founder and chief engineer, born to an Iranian Assyrian family from a village in West Azerbaijan. Uber is run by Dara Khosrowshahi, who left Tehran as a nine-year-old in 1978. Dropbox was co-founded by Arash Ferdowsi. YouTube was run for years by Salar Kamangar. Among Google's first business hires was Omid Kordestani, who went on to be executive chairman of Twitter. Saeed Amidi turned his family's Palo Alto office building — where Logitech, Google and PayPal got their start — into Plug and Play, which for years has been the most active and pioneering startup accelerator in the world. Sasan Goodarzi, CEO of TurboTax. Ali Rowghani, Partner at Y Combinator and last but not least Artemis Patrick, the CEO of Sephora North America - that’s right, Girls!

Science. Maryam Mirzakhani, at Stanford, became the first woman in history to win the Fields Medal, the Nobel Price of Mathematics Award. Anousheh Ansari became the first Iranian in space — self-funded, in 2006 — and now runs the XPRIZE Foundation. Lotfi Zadeh invented fuzzy logic at Berkeley, which is quietly inside a great deal of the machinery you touched today. Firouz Naderi ran Mars exploration at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Finance and real estate. Hamid Moghadam — my mother's cousin — left Tehran as a boy, went to MIT, and built what became Prologis, the largest logistics real estate company on earth: roughly $196 billion in assets across 1.2 billion square feet in 19 countries. Statistically speaking, your packages move through his warehouses. I will make this list someday too, Hamid Joon.

Arts. Shirin Neshat. Shohreh Aghdashloo, Oscar-nominated, also one of our family’s dearest gems. Marjane Satrapi, who turned a childhood under the revolution into Persepolis. Ramin Djawadi, who wrote the music you associate with dragons. Jasmin Larian Hekmat, CEO of Cult Gaia, she’s a big point on the board. 

The underlying numbers are duller but they explain the roll call. 79% of Iranian adults in the U.S. have at least some college, 35% hold an advanced degree. Among Iranian immigrants specifically, 62% work in management, business, science or the arts.

Two generations. One revolution. No familiar context to fall back on. That isn't luck and it certainly isn't genes. It's a strategy and skill stack — plus the standing assumption that you will probably need to use it.

About America

Let me say the thing I actually believe.

My family's ascent happened here in a single generation. Not three. One. The same financial security would have taken three generations anywhere else I can name, and exponentially more decisions made correctly along the way. I've looked for the counterexample and I haven't found it.

America isn't perfectly consistent about who it lets in — Iranians have been on the wrong side of that door within living memory, and the rights around us need tending. I do worry about that, and it should be better. But the door was never the interesting part. What's interesting is what happens after you're through it.

America is unusually willing to let an outsider become something. Nobody here is confused by the idea that you might arrive with an accent and end up owning the building — the category exists, the story is legible, people will hand it to you as an explanation. In much of the world you can be admitted for forty years and remain, permanently, a guest.

Uniquely good at letting you become something. Still inconsistent about letting you in. Both are true. Iranians know both halves personally.

What the bounce is actually for

Here's where we get misread, and it's the part I care about.

People see the hustle and assume it's fear. Grim survivalism. Armor. A whole culture bracing for impact. It isn't — or it isn't only that. Because if the lesson were simply everything can be taken, the rational response would be to hoard, flinch, and trust no one.

That is conspicuously not what Iranians do.

What Iranians do is throw a party.

And the bonds at that party are real. The humanity, the resilience, the refusal to bow — bowing to a government, bowing to a "no," bowing to being basic — none of that is happening. It's learned early and it doesn't come out.

The other half of the lesson — the half that never makes it into the geopolitics essays — is that if the future isn't guaranteed, then joy cannot be deferred into it. You can't put it away for later. Later is speculative. This is why the food is excessive, the hospitality is borderline aggressive, and nobody is permitted to leave before 1 a.m. It isn't denial. It's arithmetic.

The operating question was never how do I stay safe. It's what can we do to enjoy this, right now, today.

And then there's the dancing

Which brings me to the room I actually wanted to write about.

The first time I watched a room of grieving women turn into a dance floor, I thought a mistake had been made. The tea was still going around. Someone was still crying in the corner. Then the music came on, and an auntie who an hour earlier had needed two people to hold her upright — lifted her wrists.

Nobody stopped her. Nobody asked her what was wrong, either. She was handed a beat instead of a question, which on certain days is the kindest thing a person can be handed.

Here is the political version of the same instinct, and I'll warn you that it's an emotional clip. Usually women dance far more elegantly than that — but grief-dancing and party-dancing are two different languages, and this is the first one. The cover photo for this post is my cousins and I at Hippie Hill. A Golden Gate Park tradition for decades. My Mom has been bringing us to rise here since I was a kid. Dancing with strangers in silence. Makes me feel alive.

Persian dance doesn't live in the hips. It lives in three places, and each one has a job.

The wrists are the grammar. A hand turns outward like a question and folds back like an answer, and the whole sentence takes two seconds. An Iranian woman can deliver an entire eulogy — or an entire opinion about her son-in-law — with one unspooling of the wrist and no words at all.

The eyes are the meaning. This is a conversation, not a performance. The gaze finds you, holds you a beat too long, and releases you. An eyebrow lifts. Something has been said, and you are expected to have received it.

And the shoulders are the work. They shiver, roll, and shake — small, quick, insistent. We say we carry things on our shoulders. This is the only place I know where you can put a thing down by shaking it loose from the exact spot you'd been holding it.

Grief has shoulders. I have watched a woman say he was mine and now he isn't, with one shoulder and an unspooling wrist - nobody in the room needed it translated. Or another woman say death, fine, I’m alive and in pain. 

Not a coping mechanism

It's worth saying plainly: the habit of looking at a community dancing through its grief and reading it as denial, or hysteria, or something exotic and faintly unhinged, gets it precisely backwards.

Collective rhythmic movement isn't what people reach for because they lack better tools. It's one of the oldest and most sophisticated regulation systems our species has built — an entire group breathing, stepping and swaying on the same beat, which is about as direct a route to a settled nervous system as a human being has access to. Researchers who study funeral dances instead of raising an eyebrow at them keep finding the same results: more cohesion, less anxiety, people held.

The ritual isn't a substitute we fell into for want of a therapist, it’s a form of therapy. It's a form of healing that therapists respect and spend their time encouraging — gatherings, outings, movement — because the body keeps the score.

And we've been at it a while. The Kurdish chamari is danced slowly, on a drum, by people whose faces are wet. The zār on the Gulf coast has a whole community move for hours around one person's suffering, on the belief that whatever has hold of you will loosen its grip if enough people are willing to move with you. We have never been a people who grieve quietly. We grieve in rhythm.

Because a feeling is not a thought. We keep trying to solve feelings with language — talk it out, name it, reframe it — and language is a wonderful instrument built, unfortunately, for smaller things. Poetry is the exception, which is precisely why we hoard it — but even Hafez can only meet you halfway. Sadness doesn't live in your vocabulary. It lives behind the sternum and across the jaw and in the tops of the shoulders. Which is why sit with it so often produces a person who is simply sitting, holding something heavy, indefinitely.

A feeling one refuses to move becomes a feeling that settles. And things that settle get heavier, not lighter.

The whole thesis, in one paragraph

Bounce was never the absence of grief. It's the refusal to let grief become your final position.

You feel it — fully, out loud, in company, no armor required. And then you move it through, because nothing about being alive is stationary. Not cells, not seasons, not currencies, not countries, not grief, not you. Life isn't something you hold. It's something you do.

So: learn the language. Read the room. Keep the skills portable and the friends numerous. Dance. Assume the map will be redrawn at least once in your lifetime, and refuse to spend that lifetime waiting to find out how.

And when it gets heavy — which it will, and that isn't pessimism, that's Tuesday — don't hold it.

Stand up. Put on the song. Feel it in your shoulders.

Lift your wrists. Love yourself through it. Let me know if I can help you.

Sources

[^1]: The CIA's own internal history of Operation TPAJAX, released under FOIA and published by the National Security Archive in August 2013, was the agency's first formal acknowledgment of its role. See CIA admits organising 1953 Iran coup, Al Jazeera, 20 August 2013, and In declassified document, CIA acknowledges role in 1953 Iran coup, CNN, 19 August 2013. That the 1953 coup helped make the 1979 revolution possible is a widely held historical argument, not a settled fact.

[^2]: Pierre Omidyar; Bob Miner, Oracle co-founder and chief engineer, whose parents emigrated from Ada, West Azerbaijan, in the 1920s; Dara Khosrowshahi, whose family left Iran in 1978; Arash Ferdowsi; Salar Kamangar; Omid Kordestani. Maryam Mirzakhani, Fields Medal, 2014; Anousheh Ansari, XPRIZE Foundation; Lotfi Zadeh; Firouz Naderi. Hamid Moghadam, born Tehran 1956, co-founder of AMB Property, merged with ProLogis in 2011; Prologis scale figures from the company and The Real Deal. Shirin Neshat; Shohreh Aghdashloo, nominated for Best Supporting Actress for House of Sand and Fog (2003); Marjane Satrapi; Ramin Djawadi. This list is illustrative, not a ranking — and several of these figures were born outside Iran to Iranian families rather than emigrating themselves.

[^3]: 7 facts about Iranians in the U.S., Pew Research Center, 5 March 2026, drawing on 2024 American Community Survey data. Iranians sit at or near the top of U.S. immigrant groups on advanced-degree attainment, alongside Indian and Taiwanese Americans. The frequently repeated claim that Iranians are the most educated group in America traces to a 2004 analysis of 2000 census data and no longer holds cleanly.

[^4]: Immigrants from Iran in the United States, Migration Policy Institute, using 2019 American Community Survey data. These figures cover foreign-born Iranians specifically, which is why they differ from the Pew numbers above.

[^5]: On collective mourning dance, social cohesion and anxiety: "Dance for the dead: The role of top-down beliefs for social cohesion and anxiety management in naturally occurring collective rituals", PLOS ONE (2023). I've deliberately avoided the vocabulary of polyvagal theory here, which circulates widely in wellness writing and is more contested than it sounds.

[^6]: The phrase is Bessel van der Kolk's, from The Body Keeps the Score (2014) — hugely influential, and worth noting that parts of its trauma-neuroscience framing remain debated among clinicians.

[^7]: On the zār: "Understanding the Zār: An African-Iranian healing dance ritual", Anthropology of the Middle East, vol. 13, no. 1 (2018). On the Kurdish chamari: Kurdshop.