Syria’s greatest monument, one of the world’s preeminent mosques, sits on a site that once housed a temple to Jupiter and then a great Byzantine church. In fact, for decades after the Arab conquest of Syria, Muslims and Christians shared the building, and when a caliph finally built a dedicated mosque, he incorporated many of that church’s building materials and hired Christian craftsmen to decorate the space with Islamized Byzantine-style mosaics.
Category: today’s top story
Infecting Our Prose: Colons Go Viral
Punctuation resurrection: Thanks to the spread of texting and tweeting, a once-neglected punctuation mark is making a comeback everywhere from blog posts to The New York Times Op-Ed page. The new element of style: the “jumper colon.”
UK Arts Leaders: 25% Cuts Would Have Dire Consequences
“The Arts Council has warned that such cuts over the next four years would mean dropping at least 200 arts organisations out of more than 800 they fund, with the loss of thousands of jobs. A group of major philanthropists” cautions the government “that its aspirations for a major growth in private funding giving cannot bridge the gap left by a collapse in state cash.”
Conductor Charles Mackerras, 84
The Australian conductor, for decades a mainstay of British musical life, was known for his Handel and Mozart on both period and modern instruments. His greatest renown, though, was as the world’s leading expert on Leoš Janáček, whose music.Mackerras did more than anyone else to bring into the standard repertoire.
Cities See New York High Line’s Success And Wonder If They Can Do It, Too
“Detroit is thinking big about an abandoned train station. Jersey City and Philadelphia have defunct railroad beds, and Chicago has old train tracks that don’t look like much now, but maybe they too … The High Line has become, like bagels and CompStat, another kind of New York export.”
Court: FCC’s Indecency Rules Violate First Amendment
“On Tuesday, the appeals judges called the FCC’s policy, in place since 2004, ‘unconstitutionally vague, creating a chilling effect that goes far beyond the fleeting expletives at issue here.’ The vagueness left broadcasters uncertain about what they could air, which impinged on their freedom of speech, the judges said.”
Where Arts Council Cuts Will Hurt Most: Rural Areas
“[R]ecent Arts Council cuts come as a particular blow in communities that are already struggling to support their cultural institutions. … [I]t’s easy for town and city-dwellers to forget how very, very different things can be in the countryside. But in a rural area, arts organisations are often the backbone of the community.”
How Authors Came To Cast Themselves In Their Fiction
“[H]ere we were, writing in an era obsessed with celebrity and reality shows, where the first question readers and journalists nearly always threw at us was, ‘How much of this novel was based on your own personal experiences?’ At which point we faced the contemporary writer’s dilemma–we could be only one of two possible things: a liar or a bore.”
Study: American Creativity Is Declining
“With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect–each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.”
Pasadena Playhouse Emerges From Bankruptcy
“The Pasadena Playhouse announced Thursday that it has emerged from bankruptcy, having shed more than $1 million in debt, and will immediately make the intensive, sustained fundraising push needed to re-establish itself as a major theater company.”