Category: people

“A Qatari poet jailed for 15 years for reciting verses that praised the 2011 uprising in Tunisia and criticised his own country’s ruling family has been freed after receiving a royal pardon.” Muhammad Ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami’s release “came days before Qatar hosts two international press freedom conferences.”

“Interpreting someone’s utterance often requires attending not just to its content, but also to the surrounding context. What does a speaker know or not know? What did she intend to convey? Children in multilingual environments have social experiences that provide routine practice in considering the perspectives of others: They have to think about who speaks which language to whom, who understands which content, and the times and places in which different languages are spoken.”

“The real question his biographer needs to answer is the impossible one: how a sixtyish architect from Los Angeles ever came to imagine, much less build, the coppery metal carapace of the Guggenheim Museum in the heart of Basque country, in the declining port city of Bilbao. Before that 1997 project, and the subsequent plan to build a new concert hall in Los Angeles, Gehry was best known for constructing cheap buildings of cheap materials in the funky geometric shapes that began to punctuate the cityscape of Los Angeles in the disco era.”

“The filing alleges that Jeff Melanson repeatedly got his personal and professional lives tangled up.”

“Filmmaker Firas Alshater was imprisoned for his activism in Syria. He became a sensation on social media after blindfolding himself in a Berlin public plaza with a sign that read: ‘I am a Syrian refugee. I trust you – do you trust me?'” (audio; includes video)

As he wrote, “Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” “It’s worth asking: Was Adams political in any orthodox – or unorthodox – way? And what would Adams make of the American political scene these days?”

“Famous for pushing boundaries, Sir Peter’s earlier works have been described as unplayable, generating controversy among audiences and critics alike. … But he made it his mission to connect with as many audiences as possible over his career, writing pieces for children, theatre and string quartet.”

“Hassani’s art shows women in traditional clothing with musical instruments. In subtle ways, they defy gender roles: These women are not playing the instruments to entertain someone else but, rather, wielding them on their own terms.”

“In 1986, Meyers and [Ronald] Swenson were part of an Austin contingent that traveled to the New Music Seminar, a trip that planted the seeds for a New Music Seminar-sponsored convention in Austin the following spring. ‘When the seminar people backed off of doing an event, he and I were the ones who talked (Chronicle editor and publisher) Louis [Black]and Nick [Barbaro] into doing the thing,’ Swenson said.”