Three Women’s Lives Become One Of Iran’s Most Celebrated Stage Dramas

“None has a name, but their [well-known] identities emerge from the tales they tell. Each narrates a monologue, never acknowledging the others. But they have common memories – of childhood, of war – and when their stories cross, one stops and another picks up the thread. They cook as they speak, each in her own kitchen corner, chopping, cutting, mixing … This is Hamhavaie (acclimatising), … which is now being prepared for Europe and possibly the United States.”

Deadly Attack On Tunisian Museum

“Eight people were killed as they got off a bus to visit the museum, according to an Interior Ministry spokesman; 10 more were taken hostage and then killed. State television reported that a Tunisian museum guard who was injured in the attack and died later of his wounds.”

This American Culture – A Mean Anti-Elitist Streak

When did “difficulty” become suspect in American culture, widely derided as anti-democratic and contemptuously dismissed as evidence of so-called elitism? If a work of art isn’t somehow immediately “understood” or “accessible” by and to large numbers of people, it is often ridiculed as “esoteric,” “obtuse,” or even somehow un-American.

Islamist Extremists And The Destruction Of History

Jon Lee Anderson: “All around the Middle East, archeological treasures of the ancient world have been stripped of their original glory – often, of what some call graven images. ISIS’s fanatics do so hatefully, as if to spite all others, but they are not the only perpetrators. Muslim extremists have long sought to destroy the physical evidence that any other faith worth valuing existed before their own.”