[LINK] Some Friday Links

• Alpha Sources' Claus Vistesen warns about how rising inflation and exchange rate worries and falling credit ratings in Ukraine, besides promising bad things for that country, not only reflects wider trends in post-Communist Europe (Hungary and Romania are mentioned) but reflects a global environment in which central banks are trying to control inflation at the expense of growth.


• Phil Hunt at Amused Cynicism favours the introduction of thoroughly critical and comparative religious study classes in school, if not for the same reasons that I would pick.


• 'Aqoul's Shaheen writes about Saudi Arabia's abandonment of its ludicrous decades-old program of subsidizing wheat growing and exporting with precious reserves of non-renewable fossil water. Government subsidies to major business groups and families seems to be at least partly responsible for this program's survival.


• blogTo is now releasing its paper maps of different Toronto neighbourhoods.


• Over at Centauri Dreams, Larry Klaes and blog owner Paul Gilster talk at length about the possibilities of generation starships, massive manned spacecraft that would take centuries if not millennia to reach other planetary systems.


• Daniel Drezner's blog examines the interesting topic of the growth of Chinese soft power. The comments area is quite active.


• The Dragon's Tales takes a look at the geographical distribution of the five hundred fastest supercomputers. Surprisingly, Canada only has two, versus Slovenia's one.


• Over at Hunting Monsters, Ian notes that the Israeli-Hamas truce doesn't seem like much of a truce and that the European Union is strengthening its Israeli ties regardless.


• Joe. My. God reports that the usual suspects are upset with Katy Perry's hit song "I Kissed a Girl." Surprised?


• According to Marginal Revolution, more sex is safe(r) sex.


• Otto Pohl writes about the complicated problems facing Central Asians as they relate to their historical memories of the Stalinist era.


• Pure Product of America celebrates gay marriage in California.


• Danish coins can be very confusing for Canadians.


• Spacing shows us the Royal Ontario Museum's new rooftop garden.

[URBAN NOTE] On the Turkish-Canadians

I heard about Turkey's dramatic victory over Croatia in Euro 2008 for the first time only a few hours before I heard and saw it the streets of Toronto. Cars and minivans filled with happy people waving Turkish flags in plenty of different sizes, every one honking as they drove, in turn honking to greet other Turkish-driven vehicles, third parties in their own turn honking or yelling mostly in sympathy, et cetera. It has been going on for a while: When I disembarked from the Bloor-Yonge subway station at 6:30, the processions of soccer fans were going, and it's still going on as I write, around 7:30 when I'm well past Bloor and Bathurst--a distance of nearly two kilometres from my starting point. thebitterguy reports that the flag-waving was also happening on Highway 401, too.

This current visibility (and audibility) aside, the Turkish-Canadian community is relatively small, a consequence--as Multicultural Canada points out--of the fact that Turkish immigration to Canada only began around 1960. There might be something like forty thousand Turkish-Canadians, taking issues of ethnic identity and citizenship and chosen identity into account as much as one can. (Many Turkish-Canadians can trace their ancestry to Bulgaria and Cyprus, for instance.) One source dating from the time of the 1999 Izmit earthquake plausibly claims that one-third of Canada's Turkish-Canadian population, roughly fifteen thousand people, lives in the Greater Toronto Area. As Multicultural Canada also points out, Turkish-Canadians constitute an occupationally diverse group that encompasses everyone from tenured professors to unskilled workers.

I'm not inclined to expect that much more growth in the size of the Turkish-Canadian community, if only because, at present, Turkish immigrants seem to tend to go to the European countries that had earlier admitted Turkish migrants. This may certainly change, of course, and even now there are easily more Turkish-Canadians than there are Charlottetowners. In the meantime, Turkish-Canadians are certainly making their presence known!

[URBAN NOTE] Status report

The celebrations went as far west as the Ossington TTC station, about a kilometre west of the Internet café where I made my previous post.

As Ataturk said, "[h]appy is he who says, 'I am a Turk.'" *

* Yes, I know how profoundly complicated the sentiments and consequences of this statement are. Just work with me on this one.

[BRIEF NOTE] New York, New York

The recent reasonably enjoyable and very successful Sex and the City movie is famously embedded in New York City: its architecture, its celebrity and high-end consumer culture, its entire environment. That's why I was surprised to come across an article by Emily Nussbaum ("Sarah Jessica Parker Would Like a Few Words With Carrie Bradshaw) in New York Magazine where the actor portraying Carrie Bradshaw mourns her show's role in changing New York City.

Still, she says, her New York, like that of many New Yorkers, is one that is no longer quite there. "You know, when I arrived in the city in 1976, New York was financially a wreck," she remembers. "But to me it’s the New York that Matthew [Broderick] and I literally try to find every day of our lives. It was the best place in the world. It was literature. It promised everything. And for someone who loved food and smells and stimulation, who was rocked to sleep by the sound of taxis--well, there’s just so much money now, and the city is so affluent, and all the colors, all the shops, the look of a street from block to block is just terribly absent of distinguishing coffee shops, bodegas. All of that stuff that made it possible to live in New York is gone." Even Brooklyn is "very chic" now, she adds. "I guess there are places in Queens that are affordable."

Christian Peralta at Planetizen is more succinct.

With its portrait of glamorous living in Manhattan, some New Yorkers can't help but blame the television series for fueling the city's gentrification. Even the show's star, Sarah Jessica Parker, laments Manhattan's loss of 'grit'.

Advertise on Planetizen"Sarah Jessica Parker is bemoaning the loss of a city that many say she helped push out.

As trendy bars and boutiques take over Manhattan's corner bodegas and laundermats, the famously stiletto-heeled "Sex and the City" star laments the loss of grit for glamour in New York.

"I don't know if you do this with your husband," Parker told New York magazine in an interview that hits newsstands Monday. "But say one of us is walking down the street, I'll call him and say, 'You know, the Laundromat is closed!' And he'll say, 'What?' I'll be like, 'The Laundromat at 11th and W. Fourth St. is closed!'"

In the article, titled "Sarah Jessica Parker Would Like a Few Words with Carrie Bradshaw," Parker tells writer Emily Nussbaum that she and her equally famous husband, actor Matthew Broderick, keep a running tab on changes in their West Village neighborhood.

An actress-turned-fashion brand, Parker acknowledges that people blame her and the hit HBO series for the near-complete, high-end gentrification of the West Village."That's your fault!" Broderick says when he spots "a thong poking up from low-slung jeans," Nussbaum recounts."

The above is quite an unfair criticism of the show. A New Yorker expatriate I talked to today blamed the economic boom of the 1980s and Guiliani's sanitization of the city for those changes. Certainly the show had nothing to do with what seems to be a growing trend of growing income disparities within New York City's metropolitan area, at least as reported in this post by Larry Littlefield at Room 8 New York Politics, apparently making the old core of the city too expensive for lower- and even some middle-income people. Can New Yorkers please tell me that the old culture of New York City isn't disappearing? I would like to visit it again, and I do hope that the months-old mention by lord_whimsy of the decision of some New Yorkers to commute from the affordable bedroom community of Philadelphia is only an exaggeration.

I want New York City. It isn't as if I haven't tried to prep for a long time--I even began reading the New Yorker in my early teen years. Toronto's wonderful, but New York City is one of the most important world cities, easily the major cultural engine for all of northeastern North America, sadly far surpassing Toronto. (I only began to read New York Magazine after I moved to Toronto, but that reflects entirely different centre/periphery rivalries. Perhaps I'll touch on that later.) Call all this the desire of a northern barbarian to be accepted into the heart of things, but I can't be blamed for wanting to leave a place where the signature musical has the lyric "Anne of Green Gables/never change/I love you just this way.) That periodical's high quality aside, I certainly wouldn't have had to rely on The Island Magazine. insofar as local publications are concerned. I wanted more.

Could New York City go, transformed into a polished über-metropolis where everything is behind glass? If that's the case, does anywhere else--Toronto, say--stand a chance?