Arts & Culture

A bill passed by the Senate yesterday would help U.S. Postal Service keep post offices around the country open, NPR reports.

The Postal Service is not pleased.

The key issue: The Postal Service, which loses $25 million every single day, wants to save money by closing hundreds or thousands of post offices and shifting services to places like grocery stores.

More than 90 years ago, on April 29, 1922, Jean-Baptiste "Toots" Thielemans was born in Brussels. An organization formed to celebrate his landmark birthday, TOOTS90 is presenting a series of eight concerts, featuring Thielemans' quartet and special guests Kenny Werner on piano and Oscar Castro-Neves and Philip Catherine on guitar. All take place in Belgium, tracing a route from Antwerp to Gent, Brussels, Hasselt, Brugge, Liège and Dinant.

There's no language gene.

There's no innate language organ or module in the human brain dedicated to the production of grammatical language.

There are no meaningful human universals when it comes to how people construct sentences to communicate with each other. Across the languages of the world (estimated to number 6,000-8,000), nouns, verbs, and objects are arranged in sentences in different ways as people express their thoughts. The powerful force behind this variability is culture.

The 2012 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, presented by Shell, kicks off Friday at the Fair Grounds.  We go Inside the Arts for conversation with jazz vocalist and native daughter Stephanie Jordan, who will pay homage to the legendary Lena Horne. 

The Stephanie Jordan Big Band performs April 27th at 4:00 p.m., at the 2012 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.