The Buenos Aires, Argentina singing duo (siblings) Joaquín and Lucía Galán, better known as Pimpinela (Spanish for pimpernel) make their 
way to southwest Houston in concert at the Arena Theatre. The two are famous for singing romantic musical pieces. They have sold over twelve million records in Argentina and a total of eighteen million worldwide, making them one of the best-selling Latin music artists in South America.
The Jalen Baker Trio, DACAMERA Young Artist Jazz Ensemble-in-Residence — Featuring Jalen Baker, vibraphone; with Nils Aardahl on bass and Gavin Moolchan on drums. The members of the trio are the first emerging 
Houston-based jazz musicians to join DACAMERA’s Young Artist Program, which seeks to encourage musicians to develop the skills necessary to become passionate, forward-thinking and community-focused “citizen artists.” Jalen Baker is a graduate of Kinder HSPVA. He studied at Columbia College Chicago and Florida State University before returning to Houston to compose and perform his unique blend of original modern jazz compositions and standards. Nils Aardahl is a student at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, and is an active member of the Houston jazz community.
The beloved opera Carmen features some of the most popular and iconic themes in classical music, and you’ll hear them all in Sarasate’s Carmen 
Fantasy, performed by the Symphony’s outstanding Principal Flute, Aralee Dorough. This program also features Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s lavishly melodic Symphonic Variations on an African Air, based on the African American spiritual I’m Troubled in Mind.
One morning in the summer of 1999, Shukriya Barakzai woke up feeling dizzy and feverish. According to the Taliban’s rules, she needed a Maharram, a male guardian, in order to leave home to visit the 
doctor. Her husband was at work, and she had no sons. So she shaved her 2-year-old daughter’s head, dressed her in boys’ clothing to pass her off as a guardian, and slipped on a burka. Its blue folds hid her fingertips, painted red in violation of the Taliban’s ban on nail polish. She asked her neighbor, another woman, to walk with her to the doctor in central Kabul.
To top it off: rude customers, whose abuses restaurant staff are often obligated to tolerate. And lately, testy diners have only gotten more impatient as they emerge from 
the pandemic shutdowns.
Cornett, off work for a few weeks, realized he received enough money through unemployment benefits to start saving — for the first time. He wondered if the work he loves would ever entail a job that came with health insurance or paid leave.
Nicole Krauss’s Beautiful 
Letter to Van Gogh on How to Break the Loop of Our Destructive Patterns
Early one morning, Linsey Marr tiptoed to her dining room table, slipped on a headset, and fired up Zoom. On her computer screen, dozens of familiar faces began to appear. She 
also saw a few people she didn’t know, including Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical lead for Covid-19, and other expert advisers to the WHO. It was just past 1 pm Geneva time on April 3, 2020, but in Blacksburg, Virginia, where Marr lives with her husband and two children, dawn was just beginning to break.
Over Zoom, they laid out the case. They ticked through a growing list of superspreading events in restaurants, call centers, cruise ships, and a choir rehearsal, instances where people got sick even when they were across the room from a contagious 
person. The incidents contradicted the WHO’s main safety guidelines of keeping 3 to 6 feet of distance between people and frequent handwashing. If SARS-CoV-2 traveled only in large droplets that immediately fell to the ground, as the WHO was saying, then wouldn’t the distancing and the handwashing have prevented such outbreaks? Infectious air was the more likely culprit, they argued. But the WHO’s experts appeared to be unmoved. If they were going to call Covid-19 airborne, they wanted more direct evidence—proof, which could take months to gather, that the virus was abundant in the air. Meanwhile, thousands of people were falling ill every day.