Lucerne Festival 2016 To Feature 11 Female Conductors

“Emmanuelle Haïm will conduct the Vienna Philharmonic, which, more than any other top orchestra, has been criticized for its slow pace of adding women to its ranks. Marin Alsop will make her debut in Lucerne conducting the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, and Barbara Hannigan will conduct the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Susanna Mälkki will conduct a new work by Olga Neuwirth, the festival’s composer in residence.”

Beirut’s Art Scene Remains Lively Despite The City’s Never-Ending Tumult

“The creative ferment is happening even as unrest in the region and domestic political instability have ground the economy and tourism to a near halt and threaten to embroil Lebanon in new conflicts. Beirut is also a city where luxury towers are redrawing the skyline while the arrival in recent years of an estimated 1.5 million refugees from neighboring Syria has strained the infrastructure of a country of 4 million. A crisis over garbage collection recently plagued the city, but seems to have subsided.”

What Libraries Can Still Do, Even As The World Becomes Digitalized

“The library has no future as yet another Internet node, but neither will it relax into retirement as an antiquarian warehouse. Until our digital souls depart our bodies for good and float away into the cloud, we retain part citizenship in the physical world … In the midst of an information explosion, librarians are still the most versatile information specialists we have. And the purest.”