| Last month, Iran exploded in protests after the death of Mahsa Amini, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman who died in police custody after being arrested for exposing some of her hair. In response, women across the country have burned their hijabs in bonfires, adopting as a slogan “Women, Life, Freedom.” Authorities have cracked down harshly; the protests are among the largest in Iran in years. In 2016, the New Yorker staff writer Elif Batuman published “Cover Story,” about her own experience navigating the head scarf. Batuman’s parents hail from Turkey, a neighbor of Iran that long embraced secularism; in recent decades, it has become increasingly Islamist. While travelling alone in Turkey on a reporting assignment, Batuman buys and wears a head scarf, a requirement for female visitors to a holy site. “It was soft, gauzy, spring green,” she writes, “with a pattern of tiny intricate vines and leaves.” Later, realizing that she has forgotten to take it off, she observes how the scarf affects her reception: young women, similarly covered, smile at her in the park; men seem to step aside, to give her space. “It felt amazing,” she writes, of the pleasure of social acceptance, of the safety of fitting into a system. But the different treatment also troubles her, inspiring a nuanced, thoughtful reflection on a polarizing topic. “Once, when a driver pressed me particularly jovially for an opinion,” Batuman writes, earlier in the piece, “I said something like ‘I think all women should be respected. It shouldn’t depend on their hair.’ ” | 
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