Tag Archives: higher

This Composer Wants You To Know Who Syrian Refugees Really Are

by Bradly2804 Posted on November 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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When Suad Bushnaq thinks of Syria, she thinks of the wonderful years she spent studying at one of the Middle East’s top conservatories, attending performances at the Damascus Opera House, and catching jazz gigs in back-alley cafes.

She thinks of musakhan, shwarma, fresh-squeezed juices; and of her dearest friends and the jokes they told each other.

She thinks of her late mother, born and raised in Syria, and of her mother’s family still living there.

But these days, watching events unfold from the safety of the United States, she is barraged by daily images of violence, airstrikes, and fleeing refugees. And the public apprehension, ever since the Paris terrorist attacks, that has allowed craven politicians (including the governor of her home state) to paint those refugees as a threat. “No one in the West has the image of the Syria that I know,” Bushnaq told me. “The beautiful Syria filled with culture and history and amazing food and people who laugh.”

Syria has changed dramatically in the decade since Bushnaq, one of only a handful of Arab women composers on the planet (Layal Watfeh and Farah Siraj being among the other notables), last set foot there. The ongoing civil war has disrupted and even claimed the lives of many of her friends and relatives. Now she’s fighting the loss of Syrian culture in the only way she knows how: by creating orchestral pieces and scores that combine the Western and Middle Eastern musical traditions.

She has released two albums and collaborated with award-winning Arab filmmakers, as well as the Syrian Expat Philharmonic Orchestra, which performed a movement of her orchestral suite Hakawaty (or Suite for Damascus) to a sold out international audience in Bremen, Germany, this past September.

The 33-year-old composer was born and raised in Amman, Jordan, by a Syrian mother and Palestinian-Bosnian father with a large LP collection. (“My house was full of music,” she says.) She started piano at age four, but hated her lessons, preferring to make up her own songs. “When I was in fifth grade, my mom told me, ‘If you stop taking piano lessons I will break the piano! I am not the type of mom who would allow us to have a piano as a piece of furniture.”

By 16, she decided that composition was more than just a whim. She dreamed of attending McGill University’s Schulich School of Music in Montreal, but her parents said no. It was too far away and too expensive. So Bushnaq moved to Damascus.

There she attended the Higher Institute of Music, where she learned from and performed with some of the region’s premier musicians—many of them women who’ve gone on to international success. But Bushnaq was the only one studying composition. She would also be the only Arab woman ever admitted to McGill’s prestigious composition program, where she landed a full scholarship in 2005. At McGill, she further honed her compositional style—a distillation of the influences of “a classically trained pianist who grew up in the Arab world, who has a bit of Balkan blood, and who likes to listen to jazz.”

Bushnaq, who now lives with her husband in North Carolina, has worked on the scores of several films. One of them is a documentary about a 12-year-old Syrian refugee, by the female Lebanese director Niam Itani. There’s also a psycho-thriller called The Curve, which will premiere at the Dubai International Film Festival in December, by Jordanian-Palestinian director Rifqi Assaf. (The strings on the soundtrack were recorded by Syrian musicians in Damascus.)

Lately, Bushnaq has been looking around for an orchestra to perform her Suite for Damascus in full, following on the success of the Syrian Expat concert. She remains in constant contact with friends and family back in Syria, where, despite all the chaos, the Higher Institute of Music continues to operate, and its musicians continue to perform.

“It’s sad what’s happening now,” Bushnaq told me. “But it makes me happy to know that the music scene is still going. It shows me that despite the war, people are still trying their best to live.”

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This Composer Wants You To Know Who Syrian Refugees Really Are

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Say What You Will About Almonds, but They Are Wildly Popular

by KimberlUMA Posted on April 24, 2015

Mother Jones

California’s thirsty almond orchards have been generating an impressive amount of debate as the state’s drought drags on. But that won’t likely stop their expansion. The title of a new report from the Dutch agribusiness-banking giant Rabobank explains why: “California Almonds: Maybe Money Does Grow on Trees.”

The report is “exclusive for business clients of Rabobank,” but an accompanying blog post offers some good tidbits. “Drought conditions and the stronger US dollar have increased the price of almonds for all buyers,” it states. On the US East Coast, wholesale prices for premium almonds have risen 20 percent since last year. “In Europe, the almond is becoming increasingly popular, not only as a nutritious snack but especially as a go-to ingredient for manufacturers,” it continues. There, wholesale prices are up 50 percent since last year, while “buyers in India and Hong Kong are paying 25 percent and 20 percent more, respectively.”

Those higher prices will evidently more than compensate California farmers for higher watering costs, and inspire than to expand acreage. Rabobank expects California almond production to rise by 2 percent to 3.5 percent per year over the next decade, accoring to Sacramento Bee‘s Dale Kasler, who got a look at the Rabobank study.

That’s impressive growth. If almond output expands by 3 percent per year over the next ten years, then—using this trusty formula—production will grow a whopping 34 percent between now and 2025. That’s a lot of growth for a state that already churns out 80 percent of the world’s almonds. This scenario doesn’t imply a 34 percent expansion in almond acreage—some of the almond trees that will contribute to that growth in output have already been planted and will be coming into production over the next few years (it takes almonds about four years to begin producing after they’re planted). But it does imply a robust expansion. Kasler quotes the study:

Higher prices and good profits for California almond growers will continue to encourage more planting of almond orchards…. Nurseries report very little slowing in orders of new trees.

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Say What You Will About Almonds, but They Are Wildly Popular

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There Is No Higher Ed Bubble. Yet.

by MabelBugnion Posted on December 22, 2014

Mother Jones

Is there a higher-education bubble? Will technology produce cheaper, better alternatives in the near future? Are kids and parents finally figuring out that if Bill Gates can drop out of Harvard and become the richest man in the world, maybe an Ivy League degree isn’t actually worth 50 grand a year? Dan Drezner thinks the whole idea is ridiculous, and he’s willing to put his money where his mouth is:

If, in fact, there really is a higher ed bubble, it should pop before 2020. And if it does pop, then tuition prices for college should plummet as demand slackens. After all, that’s how a bubble works — when it deflates, the price of the asset should plummet in value, like housing in 2008. So who wants to bet me that an average of the 2020 tuition rates at Stanford University, Williams College, Texas A&M and the University of Massachusetts-Lowell will be lower than today?

I’m open to changing the particular schools, but those four are a nice distribution of private and public schools, elite and not-quite-as-elite colleges, with some geographic spread. Surely, true believers in a higher ed bubble would expect tuition rates at those schools to fall.

I really don’t think that will be the case. So anyone who believes in a higher ed bubble should be happy to take the other side of that bet.

Not me. I’d be willing to bet that eventually artificial intelligence will basically wipe out the demand for higher education completely. But “eventually” means something like 30 years minimum, probably more like 40 or 50. Maybe even more if AI continues to be as intractable as some people think it will be.

In the meantime, Drezner is right: the vast, vast majority of college students don’t want to strike out on their own and try to become millionaire entrepreneurs. They just want ordinary jobs. And that’s a good thing, since if everyone wanted to run their own companies, entrepreneurs wouldn’t be able to find anyone to do all the non-CEO scutwork for their brilliant new social media startups.

So if something like 98 percent of college grads are aiming for traditional jobs in which they work for somebody else, guess what? All those somebody elses—which probably includes most of the people who think there’s a higher-ed bubble—are going to want to hire college grads. They sure don’t want to hire a bunch of losers who were too dim to drop out and become millionaires and couldn’t even manage the gumption to accrue 120 units at State U, do they?

Look: the rising cost of higher education has multiple causes, but it’s mostly driven by two simple things. At public schools, it’s driven by declining state funding, which transfers an increasing share of the cost of higher ed onto students. Unfortunately, I see no reason to think this trend won’t continue. At private schools, it’s driven by the perception of how much a private degree is worth—and right now, all the evidence suggests that even with fairly astronomical tuitions at elite and semi-elite universities, the lifetime value of a degree is still worth more than students pay for it. Universities understand this, and since these days they mostly think of themselves not as public trusts, but as businesses who simply charge whatever the traffic will bear, they know they still have plenty of headroom to increase tuition. So this trend is likely to continue as well.

If I had to guess, I’d say that there’s a class of 2nd or 3rd tier liberal arts colleges that might be in trouble. They have high tuitions, but the value of their degree isn’t really superior to that of a state university. They might be in trouble, and if Drezner added one of these places to his list it might make his bet more interesting.

But he’d still win. He might lose by 2040, but he’s safe as long as he sticks to 2020.

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There Is No Higher Ed Bubble. Yet.

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