From Lebanon to Sweden to England to Indonesia to Turkey (President Erdoğan is a fan), 36-year-old Maher Zain draws enormous, cheering crowds and 100 million YouTube views every month. All this with music that’s as wholesome, in its Muslim way, as Donny Osmond or Amy Grant. “I don’t want to live this life, basically. I really don’t,” he says. “I believe I’m on a mission and you cannot turn it down, you know what I mean? I’ve been chosen.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
China’s Terracotta Warrior Museum Takes A U.S. Partner
The Emperor Qin Shihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum in Xi’an has signed a formal partnership agreement with the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, where an exhibition of the terracotta figures is currently running. The director of the Xi’an museum and colleagues were especially impressed with the Institute’s educational programs and its focus on culture and technology.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 11.09.17
Arts Funding, US vs. UK, and Chamber Music
One of the key issues which underlies this blog and the book which inspired it is the role of public funding in the arts. I hate to give the end away, but … read more
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2017-11-09
Who is the greatest living publisher of cookery books? Read on
As I am a regular contributor to The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,and still earn a bit of my keep by writing obituaries for the British national newspapers, it is a rare delight to … read more
AJBlog: Plain English Published 2017-11-09
Watch David Hallberg Teach A Tech Guy To Dance
The ABT star shows a butch, slightly stiff video producer how to do an assured waltz and a gracious stage bow – and even gets him doing a changement. (video with transcript)
Buddhist Thought Is More ‘Western’ Than You Think
Robert Wright, a scholar of science and religion, argues against the all-too-common belief in the West “that Buddhist ideas defy clear articulation – and that in a sense the point of Buddhist ideas is to defy clear articulation.” In fact, he writes, “not only have Buddhist thinkers for millenniums been making very much the kinds of claims that Western philosophers and psychologists make – many of these claims are looking good in light of modern Western thought.”
Television Still Hasn’t Stopped Reliving The Night Trump Was Elected
“There seems to have been an immediate need to memorialize it, even as its consequences are still playing out. And these depictions are still rolling in – while South Park and Saturday Night Live were able to recreate the moment almost immediately, shows with longer production timelines are only now getting around to it. But why are we even still interested in reliving the election?” Rachel Withers offers some ideas.
The Business Of Academic Publishing Is A Disaster That Can’t Hold Up
“As the dean of libraries at a state school, I contend that the economic model for academic journal publications is broken. As scholars are handicapped by limited access to the corpus of research in their fields, scientific progress is restricted and slows, and society ultimately loses.” Patrick Burns of Colorado State University explains how things have gone wrong.
A New Virtual-Reality Museum For Dutch Old Masters
“The results are startling. You may feel as though you’ll bump your head into the paintings, whose surfaces seem palpably close as you lean in to get a closer look – closer than you might in real life. Even the frames are stunningly 3-D.”
The TV Show That Ate Times Square
A brief history of Total Request Live, which saved MTV, midwifed the boom in boy bands, and filled the busiest crossroads in New York with screaming teenage girls.
Dead Grasshopper Found Embedded In Van Gogh Painting
“For over a century, it went unnoticed in the finished work, Olive Trees (1889), now owned by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, but a recent study by the museum’s curators, conservators, and outside scientists has revealed its old, brown carcass.”