“It has been mocked and pilloried as a ‘festival of Brexit‘, but the newly appointed boss of the £120m nationwide celebration planned for 2022 has said he is going to embrace the cynics – and prove them wrong. In his first interview as the director of Festival 2022, Martin Green said the aims would be to bring the nation together, showcase British creativity, and on a basic level bring some ‘joy, hope and happiness’.” – The Guardian
Houston Is Nearly 50% Hispanic. Why Doesn’t The City Have A Major Hispanic Cultural Center?
“Some community leaders … wonder why a city with such a fierce appetite for new parks, public spaces, museums and theaters has not invested in a major facility that acknowledges their significance. Why doesn’t Houston have a Latino cultural center on the scale of, say, the Asia Society Texas Center?” – Houston Chronicle
America’s Textbooks: Same History, Different Stories
The books have the same publisher. They credit the same authors. But they are customized for students in different states, and their contents sometimes diverge in ways that reflect the nation’s deepest partisan divides. – The New York Times
Pharoah Sanders On Finding Your Own Sound
A lot of time I don’t know what I want to play. So I just start playing, and try to make it right, and make it join to some other kind of feeling in the music. Like, I play one note, maybe that one note might mean love. And then another note might mean something else. Keep on going like that until it develops into—maybe something beautiful. – The New Yorker
The Victor Klemperer Case – How Political Language Shapes What Happens
In Hitler’s Germany linguistic habits shaped attitude and culture, and eventually acquiescence to a system of segregation and dehumanization. The language of the Third Reich was corrosive, and contagious. Forced to repeat “the Jew Klemperer” enough times, one thinks of that person not as Victor Klemperer but as “The Jew.” The Jews were in effect deprived of their name, and in turn of their humanity. – The American Interest