Short answers, pulled from the story.
Uzbekistan is doubly landlocked because not only does it have no coastline, but every country that borders it is also landlocked. It is one of only two countries in the world with this status, the other being Liechtenstein.
The Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest inland sea on Earth, shrank to roughly 10% of its former area after Soviet-era irrigation for cotton farming began diverting its water on a massive scale in the 1960s. It split into separate bodies of water, and the region adjacent to it, Karakalpakstan, suffers from severe soil salinity and contamination with heavy elements.
Islam Karimov was Uzbekistan's first president, elected on the 29th of December 1991 after independence from the Soviet Union. He governed as an authoritarian ruler, winning re-election in 2000, 2007, and 2015 each time with over 90% of the vote, results international observers dismissed as undemocratic. He died on the 2nd of September 2016.
In 2005, government troops fired on protesters in the city of Andijan. Official reports recorded 187 deaths; independent witness accounts put the toll in the hundreds. The United States, European Union, United Nations, and OSCE all called for an independent investigation, which the Uzbek government refused.
Shashmaqam is the classical music tradition of Central Asia. It arose in Bukhara in the late sixteenth century when that city was a regional capital. The name means "six maqams" and describes a six-part structure built on six musical modes, with interludes of spoken Sufi poetry woven throughout.
Cotton is a central export commodity and the country's second most important crop. In 2011 Uzbekistan ranked as the world's seventh-largest producer and fifth-largest exporter of cotton. The crop's water demands drove the near-total desiccation of the Aral Sea, and its harvesting has been linked to documented use of forced and child labour.