I'm Wearing Green

The news and photos and videos leaking out of Tehran are absolutely captivating. Andrew Sullivan has provided the best steady stream of hard information, witness accounts, and rumor all weekend long.

This photo, of a protester helping an injured riot cop, seems destined for timelessness.

For no apparent reason, I've always been attracted to Iran and to Persian culture. It's always been at or near the top of my list places to travel. Having not lived in cities with particularly large Iranian/Persian communities, I find myself struggling to figure out how I've had such a disproportionate number of crushes on girls of that background. The reason must be buried thousands of years deep in my ancestral blood.

A lot of folks are complaining about US cable media's total silence on the emerging protests. The thing I find kind of surprising about this is that the media conditions for this event - foreign, mostly unexpected, chaotic waves of information, occurring over a weekend - seem very similar to me to the Mumbai massacre. Yet with that event, cable media provided round-the-clock frenzied coverage. I wrote critically of the coverage of the Mumbai attack at the other end of the spectrum - that it was too sensational and that there was an irresponsible blurring of rumor and fact. The events in Iran are incredibly compelling and the new information is so fast-breaking - I can't fathom why cable news wouldn't want in.