Video: TEDx: Elif Shafak: Politcs of Fiction

Metropolitan Museum’s Moroccan Courtyard Takes Shape – NYTimes.com. Almost 30 years later the museum was embarking on the most ambitious rethinking and rebuilding of its Islamic art galleries in its history, a $50 million endeavor. At the heart of those galleries, which will open in the fall after being closed six years, it dreamed of showcasing the defining feature of Moroccan and southern Spanish Islamic architecture: a medieval Maghrebi-Andalusian-style courtyard, which would function in much the same way such courtyards still do in the traditional houses and mosques of Marrakesh or Casablanca, as their physical and spiritual center.

Created by my friend Kate Howe: AMYGDALA MACHINE I: Tomorrow Kate Howe 348 St Marks Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11238 May 13 – June 19, 2010 Standard procedure saves time and energy in every arena. I once read that when we get out of the shower, we towel ourselves off in the same series of motions, taking the same amount of time, every day. We take the same route to work and wear our heels out in the same lop-sided way. We date the same people in different bodies, respond the the same ad campaign in a different season, repeat the…

Aleppo, Syria, Preserves the Past by Enhancing the Present – NYTimes.com. But this quiet plaza is the centerpiece of one of the most far-thinking preservation projects in the Middle East, one that places as much importance on people as it does on the buildings they live in. The project encompasses the rebuilding of crumbling streets and the upgrading of city services, the restoration of hundreds of houses in the historic Old City, plans for a 42-acre park in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods and the near-decade-long restoration of the Citadel itself, whose massive walls dominate the skyline of Aleppo,…