repeat from 2008 (but here is better: in the second link she reviews Azar Nafisi)

Elaine Sciolino, who was better on Iran than any other American journalist. 

On that visit, he laments, he “couldn’t find a single good restaurant in Tehran.” He was invited to parties, which he heard were as “wild and hip” as anything in the West, but worried that he had “pressed his luck” and stayed away. Anyway, he adds, “I couldn’t stay up that late.” Readers who enjoyed George Clooney’s performance in “Syriana” (the character was modeled on Mr. Baer) might be disappointed that in real life Mr. Baer was too timid and tired to go to a party in a private Iranian home. He might have met some real Iranians there. And did he really have so few sources on the ground in Tehran that he could not find a good restaurant? (There are many.)

It made me wonder if she'd ever written about Emily in Paris. She has. She even mentions her escape to Tehran. 

Darren Star is doing to Paris what he did to NY: telling American provincials what they want to hear. But they'd already taken over NY by 1998. By the early 2000s I was meeting Eastern Europeans in who came here like Hongkongers who moved to Beijing and New Yorkers who moved to LA: giving up and cashing in. 

Sex in the City was a big hit with career girls in China for the same reason it was a hit in Cleveland: glass half empty or half full. It's all relative.

"You're not a real New Yorker. You're from Queens", says an NYU student with high school French, to a woman who speaks 6 languages and is married to a Frenchman. 

The girl from Queens—half-Iranian—works for Michael Kors. She said I reminded her of her father: he only wants to talk politics.