A new film version of Azar Nafisi’s critically-praised, worldwide bestselling memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, is now in theatres.

The film shows a group of women meeting clandestinely in Nafisi’s home in the mid-1990s, to read forbidden books. They read classics of the West, like Madame Bovary, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, and Lolita.

Education had become dangerous and even deadly during the Islamic Revolution, and reading forbidden books was Nafisi’s way to fight back.

The film, directed by Eran Riklis, begins with Nafisi as a university professor and ends with her exiled from her homeland. Nafisi told Scott Simon about the experience of seeing herself and her story depicted on the big screen, “I feel towards it the way I feel towards my children.”

The film is directed by Eran Riklis and won the the Audience Award and a special jury prize at the 2024 Rome Film Festival.

It stars Iranian actors Goldshifteh Farahani, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, and Mina Kavani. Like the author, some of the actors are exiled from Iran.

Actor Golshifteh Farahani stars as Azar Nafisi in Eran Riklis’ Reading Lolita in Tehran.

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“These girls were very different, one from the other,” Nafisi said of the students who studied with her in Tehran. Remembering them now, and seeing them depicted on the screen, Nafisi saw anew the power of great literature.

“Outside the classroom, they probably wouldn’t talk to one another. But in that class, they learned to communicate and to connect,” she said.

Through the stories in the books, Nafisi said each woman could find more and become more herself. “It reached a sort of magic,” she said.

The magic was brutally broken by a government that was desperate to quiet the voices of dissenters. Nafisi’s homeland changed quickly into a place she barely recognized

“This wasn’t my land,” she told Simon. “This was a country ruled by a regime that stoned people to death.”

When the religious hardliners in the government banned women from appearing in public without a headscarf, the film shows Nafisi, played by Goldshifteh Farahani, agonizing in front of a mirror with a black headscarf.

Get ready to catch a whiff of stink. Not one, but two rare corpse flowers are set to bloom at the Huntington in the coming days, with one of them making its first-ever public bloom.

If both plants unfurl on the same day, it would be just the second time a double bloom has ever occurred at the Huntington.

For those unfamiliar with these funky flora, be warned. Corpse flowers bloom for just 24 to 48 hours, and once opened, they reek of gym socks, rotten eggs and decaying flesh … or, well, a corpse.

Couple that with their tropical native climate of Sumatra, Indonesia, and you’re in for a sweaty, stinky viewing experience.

The stench is important for pollination, said Brandon Tam, the Huntington’s associate curator of orchids. It attracts carrion beetles and flesh flies, which lay their eggs on rotting animal carcasses.

At the Huntington, pollinators aren’t the only thing it entices. Since the garden exhibited its first corpse flower in 1999, thousands of people flock to its conservatory every summer, just to smell these putrid plants.

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It smells like rotting flesh, but thousands of people will be lining up to catch a whiff.

“The kids that first came in 1999 are now bringing their kids — their own kids — to experience this over 20 years later,” Tam said. “It’s amazing, this plant, the impact that it has had over many generations.”

Glendale resident Trinity Shi, 42, witnessed three blooms at the Huntington in 2022 and 2023 and compared the smell to rotten fish: pungent, but not unbearable. She was excited to feature such an unusual specimen on her Instagram plant blog, @cubehousejungle, and hopes to make it to this year’s bloom too.

“It feels really prehistoric to look at this plant, because it is so giant,” Shi said of the corpse flower, which can grow over 12 feet tall. “It’s become kind of like a mascot for the Huntington.”

Thanks to cultivation techniques, the Huntington coaxes the plants to bloom every two to three years, not four to six like they do in their natural habitat, where they’re endangered.

Still, the blooms are notoriously unpredictable, Tam said. He guessed one of the plants will bloom in the coming days.

This upcoming bloom spotlights a plant nicknamed Odora, who last opened in 2024, and Odorysseus, a rookie public bloomer. Visitors offered name suggestions for Odorysseus on the Huntington’s Instagram page, where contenders included Stinkerbell, Gagatha and Count Flatula, among others.

It’s not unusual for the Huntington to have multiple soon-to-be bloomers on display. But only once, in 2018, did two plants actually unfurl on the same day.

A detailed view of a corpse flower as it prepares to bloom.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

For Odora and Odorysseus, siblings from a 2002 pollination, a double bloom is unlikely, Tam said. The plants are inclined to bloom out of sequence, “because they want to pollinate another plant that’s in the vicinity.” That can’t happen if they bloom simultaneously.

Though many refer to these plants as “flowers,” they are actually an “inflorescence,” a flowering structure containing hundreds of smaller blooms inside.

When it’s almost time for the plant to open, the spadix — a conic protrusion from inside the plant — emerges and accelerates in growth, climbing up to six inches per day. After a few days, its growth slows down.

“When it gets to about the one-inch range, we’ll know it’s about to bloom for us fairly soon,” Tam said.

When it does bloom, the spathe — leaflike structures encasing the plant — unfurl around 3 or 4 p.m., reaching maximum size in the early hours of the morning. The odor comes from the spadix, which heats up to about 98 degrees to strengthen the smell.

Brandon Tam, associate curator of orchids at the Huntington, walks past the corpse flowers as they prepare to bloom.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

From there, visitors have until about 3 to 5 p.m. to smell the plant before it closes back up and collapses, losing its odor. Eventually, the plant returns as a leaf or a flower, photosynthesizing energy in preparation for its next bloom.

Today, the Huntington houses 43 corpse flowers, making it one of the largest corpse flower collections in North America. The Huntington cultivates them on-site and has distributed many to botanic gardens and zoos across the country.

“It’s important when it comes to conservation that we make plants accessible,” Tam said. “If we’re able to share these plants with other organizations and other hobbyists, we’re able to decrease the amount of plant theft that occurs in the wild, where a lot of conservation work is much needed.”

Eager sniffers can visit the Huntington from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday to Monday. Be sure to stay hydrated, cool and patient, as it’s humid inside the conservatory and lines can be long. For those who want to track the blooms’ progress from afar, catch the Huntington’s online livestream.

Wedding season is in full swing, bringing with it a familiar sense of dread for anyone who fears the dance floor.

But relief may finally be at hand with the help of a new app, Dance Guru, and a virtual reality (VR) headset.

The social dance instruction app transports users to a spacious, digital dance studio. Waiting inside is a computer-generated coach: a handsome, male avatar wearing a shirt open to his navel. He speaks with a slightly gravelly English accent.

“Watch me now,” he instructs at the start of a waltz lesson — which NPR tried out at the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, Calif., an annual conference showcasing the latest developments in virtual and augmented reality.

The avatar then demonstrates a basic box step.

From there, the lesson becomes interactive. The coach tells the user to hold his hand while an electric pinging sound tracks the student’s foot placement.

“One, two, three, four, five, six,” the virtual teacher counts down.

When the user stumbles, he remains remarkably patient. “Do not worry, foundations take time. Let’s try that again. Work on grounding your steps more intentionally.”

Solving the beginner’s dilemma

Dance Guru creator David Huang said he came up with the idea for the app a couple of years ago out of frustration.

“I always wanted to learn to dance and I was always terrible at it,” Huang said. “And I always ended up stopping midway through the lessons.”

He soon realized that many beginners hit the exact same roadblocks.

“Private lessons are too expensive, and you feel like you’re always forgetting the dance steps,” Huang said. “You cannot find a partner to dance with. So I figured maybe I can create something like this.”

The Dance Guru platform currently offers tutorials in salsa, bachata, waltz, and cha-cha, in both lead and follow modes. To make the digital instruction feel authentic, Huang used motion-capture technology to record the movements of real-life dance teachers — with their permission.

Building on the legacy of online tutorials and video games

Dance Guru belongs to a small but growing wave of apps using VR to demystify social dance. At a nearby booth, conference attendee Victor Chen is testing out a competing app called Trip the Light. It currently offers salsa lessons, as well as freestyle options, where a user can dance with a partner without having to learn specific steps.

Trip the Light’s booth at the Augmented World Expo included posters of the app’s virtual instructors. Real-life performers, who gave Trip the Light permission to motion capture their movements, were used as a basis for these avatars.

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“A lot of times when you’re trying to learn a choreography, it’s watching a YouTube video and you have to pause it, rewind, and play it,” Chen said. “If you were to have a virtual avatar dancing in front of you and correcting for any parts that you missed, it might be a lot easier.”