Video: @MetMuseum and Why I like it

Muslim American Artists Strive to Bridge a Chasm – NYTimes.com. When Wajahat Ali, a young Muslim American playwright from Fremont, needed to build an audience for his work, he produced his plays in cramped Pakistani restaurants in the East Bay and used Facebook to get the word out.  His play “The Domestic Crusaders” went on to open at the Berkeley Repertory Theater in 2005, and then moved to Off Broadway.   … Mr. Ali is one of a growing number of Bay Area artists who are reimagining one of the country’s most complicated compound identities: Muslim American.  At a time…

Putting on the Veil – The Wooster Collective – GOOD. I’ve also found that my media, guerrilla art, presents a mystery and an impishness consistently missing from serious discourses on the hijab. The terms “hijabizing” or “hijabism” continue to define my work.

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,…