It is another day where we’re looking for ties that might bring us closer.

In the case of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra, they’ve got another program on the docket that looks to bring in bring in a much wider selection of the local community. Havana Nights will be an evening of latin diaspora spanning music from the traditionally “classical” to modern samba, merengue, salsa, and more, featuring The Mambo Kings. We speak with SSO president Paul Lambert, SSO director of development Heather Gawron, and soloist Camille Zamora about the many ways music can bridge cultures, the importance of pop music in symphonic settings, and the joys of live music.

While across town, another sort of bridge emerges. On Feb 13th, NEPM will host a showing of the documentary “The Cost of Inheritance” at Springfield College. The film takes focuses on the issue of reparations for decendants of enslaved peoples in the United States by looking at efforts on both macro and micro scales. The showing will be followed by a moderated panel featuring local experts. We speak with two of those panelists, Amherst College’s Dr. Stefan Bradley, and AHRA’s Michele Miller, about why economic struggles are often subsumed under social ones, and what some of the local efforts towards reparations might look like.

We’re connecting our words too. And that requires punctuation. But a listener question from Anne in Montague has us wondering about the nature and need for commas. Our resident wordster, Word Nerd Emily Brewster, senior editor at Merriam-Webster, helps us unparse the use of the serial/Oxford/Harvard comma. (We also discover a bit of its history with the help from Shady Characters.)