Afghanistan’s Orchestra For Young Women Faces Continual Threats And Pressure. Nevertheless, They Persist

“Violence and social pressures have not deterred members of the country’s nascent orchestra of mostly young girls from using music to ‘heal wounds’ and promote women’s rights in the strictly conservative Muslim society. The ensemble, known as Zohra, was founded in 2014 as part of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM) in Kabul.”

This Little Italian City Is Next Year’s European Capital Of Culture. It’s Not Even Close To Ready

In Matera, most of the venues are still unbuilt or unrenovated, and neither the rail line from Rome mor the new highway are finished. “Rome and Brussels secured €400m (£360m) to organise the year’s events, money that was supposed to pay for restoring buildings and repairing streets in a place famed for its stunning but dilapidated beauty and history of dire poverty. But … most of the money is still trapped in the labyrinth of Italian bureaucracy and has not yet been spent.”

Let’s Talk A Little More About The Spotify Direct Upload Thing

Is it good for indie musicians? Maybe. It’s probably going to be great for Spotify: “This might be a way to lure more influential users away from competitor platforms, something that’s been a difficult task until now since once a user has made a decision on a platform it’s hard to get them to change. With content that’s more or less exclusive to Spotify, fans of the artist will have to subscribe to listen as well.”

The Strong Literary Lure Of Magical Maps

Consider the map in Treasure Island: “We are now habituated to regard cartography as a science: an endeavour of exacting precision, whose ambition is the elimination of subjectivity from the representation of a given place. But before it was a field science, cartography was – as Stevenson proved – an art.”

Museum Director Quits Over Museum’s Removal Of Mapplethorpe Photos

João Ribas was the artistic director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal, for only eight months before he resigned to protest the museum’s removal of 20 photos from the Mapplethorpe show that he commissioned and curated. “The museum also restricted select rooms of the exhibition to those aged eighteen and older against the wishes of its curator, who told Público he ‘was no longer able to continue to lead the institution.'”

As New York’s Natural History Museum Tries To Expand, Its Neighbors File A Lawsuit – And The Museum Starts ‘Preconstruction’ Work

The lawsuit should be settled soon, one way or another. But the activists who filed it are furious to find that the American Museum of Natural History has started what it calls “preconstruction work” and what the neighbors and activists call “bullying tactics.” That work includes closing an entry to the park where it plans to expand.

There’s So Much More To Lorraine Hansberry Than ‘Raisin In The Sun’

As a matter of fact, Raisin has had the odd effect of making the playwright famous, and obscuring the realities of who she was. “She was a feminist before the feminist movement. She identified as a lesbian and thought about LGBT organizing before there was a gay rights movement. She was an anti-colonialist before independences had been won in Africa and the Caribbean.”