[PHOTO] Goldfish pond decorated for the holidays, Allan Gardens

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• blogTO contrasts fashion on College and Carlton streets.


• Centauri Dreams considers the turbulent atmosphere of the early Earth.


• The Dragon's Tales notes the tight linkage between greenhouse gases and rainfall in Africa.


• Language Hat links to an online archive of Northern Territory Aboriginal languages.


• Language Log considers the role of grammatical tenses in different languages.


• Spacing argues in favour of reclaiming neighbourhood planning.


• Torontoist shares John Tory's plan for making traffic more efficient in Toronto.


• Towleroad notes the economic issues facing elderly GLBT people.


• At Wave Without A Shore, C.J. Cherryh notes problems with amateur online genealogists.


• Window on Eurasia notes mosque construction in Russia, notes possible unrest in Chechnya and the North Caucasus, and suggests that the concept of the Russian world is used to solve the modern Russian state's ethnic issues.

[LINK] "Former ‘God Hates Fags’ church member travels to Jamaica to help homeless gays"

Via Towleroad, I learned of the Pink Press article describing a former notorious homophobe who really is trying to make up for past sins.

A former member of the notoriously homophobic Westboro Baptist Church is reaching out to Jamaica’s oppressed gay community.

Grace Phelps – the daughter of church spokeswoman Shirley Phelps – is one of the many members of the Phelps family who have left the church and expressed pro-gay beliefs.

Ms Phelps travelled earlier this year to Jamaica to reach out to the many gay people who have been ostracised by society in made homeless.

The trip was organised by Planting Peace – a grass-roots equality group who run ‘Equality House’ directly across the street from the homophobic church in Topeka.

She said: “I spent twenty years learning why God hates gays, preaching that they’re ‘beasts’ and ‘depraved,’ and protesting anyone who dared to speak up for them.

“When I heard about the young people living in Jamaican sewers because their parents kicked them out for being gay, my heart hurt for them.

[LINK] "French ISIL fighters want to return home, plead for clemency"

My sympathy for these and other foreign volunteers for ISIS, as described by Al Jazeera's Michael Pizzi, is limited. Let them return if they want to face the consequences of their actions. If not, let them rot in the polity they went to join.

Letters from disillusioned French fighters in Syria published by a French newspaper this week have revived a contentious debate in Europe about what to do with radicalized recruits to foreign wars who wish to lay down their arms and return home.

In excerpts published by Le Figaro on Monday, several of the estimated 376 French fighters with the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) reveal that they were bored, terrified or otherwise "fed up" with the grueling reality of their jihad in Syria.

Fighters complain of difficult conditions, especially as the winter cold sets in. Their concerns range from the practical, including a couple worried that their child, born in Syria, would not enjoy French citizenship, to the trivial. “I'm sick and tired. My iPod doesn’t work anymore,” one writes. “I have to return.”

Le Figaro reports that the fighters were stationed mostly in Aleppo and Raqqa, ISIL's de facto capital in Syria. ISIL, which has declared a restored Islamic “caliphate” straddling Syria and Iraq, has drawn thousands of recruits from across the globe thanks in part to a sophisticated propaganda machine touting jihad as an adventure and life under ISIL rule as paradise.

The reality described in many of the letters — days filled with disappointingly menial work — is a far cry from the dramatic violence that featured in ISIL’s YouTube videos. "I've done practically nothing but hand out clothes and food. I also clean weapons and transport dead fighters’ corpses," wrote one. "The winter is here. It's become very difficult."

[LINK] "'Daesh' adopted as new name for ISIS by U.S., France"

CBC's Kathleen Harris notes the growing popularity of the word "Daesh" to represent ISIS. I agree with the arguments from language, actually.

Sources tell CBC News Network's Power and Politics host Evan Solomon that the U.S. is moving away from calling the militant group ISIL, in favour of the more pejorative Arabic acronym Daesh.

Speaking in Brussels yesterday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry adopted the new name.

“In less than three months the international community has come together to form a coalition that is already taking important steps to degrade and defeat ISIL, or Daesh,” he said. “Daesh is still perpetrating terrible crimes.”

[. . .]

France was first to embrace the Daesh name in September, and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius asked the media and others to do the same.

"This is a terrorist group and not a state. I do not recommend using the term Islamic State because it blurs the lines between Islam, Muslims and Islamists," he said in a statement at the time. "The Arabs call it Daesh and I will be calling them the 'Daesh cutthroats.'"

Daesh also sounds similar to the Arabic words daes — which means someone who crushes something underfoot - and also dahes — which is someone who sows discord.

[LINK] "Europa Life: Could ‘Extreme Shrimp’ Point To Microbes On That Moon?"

Universe Today's Elizabeth Howell describes parallels between Earthly oceanic extremophiles and hypothetical Europan counterparts.

For all of the talk about aliens that we see in science fiction, the reality is in our Solar System, any extraterrestrial life is likely to be microbial. The lucky thing for us is there are an abundance of places that we can search for them — not least Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter believed to harbor a global ocean and that NASA wants to visit fairly soon. What lurks in those waters?

To gain a better understanding of the extremes of life, scientists regularly look at bacteria and other lifeforms here on Earth that can make their living in hazardous spots. One recent line of research involves shrimp that live in almost the same area as bacteria that survive in vents of up to 750 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Celsius) — way beyond the boiling point, but still hospitable to life.

Far from sunlight, the bacteria receive their energy from chemical combinations (specifically, hydrogen sulfide). While the shrimp certainly don’t live in these hostile areas, they perch just at the edge — about an inch away. The shrimp feed on the bacteria, which in turn feed on the hydrogen sulfide (which is toxic to larger organisms if there is enough of it.) Oh, and by the way, some of the shrimps are likely cannibals!

One species called Rimicaris hybisae, according to the evidence, likely feeds on each other. This happens in areas where the bacteria are not as abundant and the organisms need to find some food to survive. To be sure, nobody saw the shrimps munching on each other, but scientists did find small crustaceans inside them — and there are few other types of crustaceans in the area.

But how likely, really, are these organisms on Europa? Bacteria might be plausible, but something larger and more complicated? The researchers say this all depends on how much energy the ecosystems have to offer. And in order to see up close, we’d have to get underwater somehow and do some exploring.

[PHOTO] "Fragmented Thoughts On Photography"

Writing Through the Fog's Cheri Lucas Rowlands reacts to a discussion on photography. I don't agree with her--the idea of photography as one form of prosthetic memory is something I accept wholeheartedly--but it's a very interesting discussion regardless of this disagreement.

I was drawn to a number of thoughts, and I left the piece feeling contemplative, but also a bit scattered. On Twitter, Maya Baratz compared the read to a long walk; there’s a lot to think about, and since I go back and forth on how I feel about digital photography, Instagram, and my relationship to my iPhone, I’m not sure what shape my musings below will take.

At one point, Rise says that we’re remembering more because we’re taking more photos. I don’t quite agree — I think we’re documenting more, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re remembering more.

[. . .]

And I agree. I’m reminded of when I moved out of my loft earlier this year and gave away most of my belongings in a first step of downsizing. My furniture, my clothes, my stuff — it felt good to be free of these things. Parting with most of my books, however, was a challenge. I held irrational attachments to even books I’d never read — abandoning so many potential stories, so much knowledge.

I’d thought getting rid of old film photographs, negatives, and contact sheets would be difficult as well. But I was surprised: I found myself tossing entire sets of photos spanning middle school and college — pictures of family, of close friends — but then saving random, meaningless images[.]

The image is a byproduct, a shadow of a memory.

While sentimental, images aren’t everything. They record specific moments, yes. But I don’t think photographs truly preserve memories in the way that we’ve been told, in that warm and fuzzy Hallmark card-sort of way. I might look at an image from long ago to remind myself of tangible details: the color of a shirt, the faces in the background. But in my mind, the insides of that moment have melted away: the sounds, smells, and sensations have long transformed into something else. The image is a byproduct, a shadow of a memory.</blockquote.

[LINK] "Orion's 'Picture Perfect' Splashdown Marks New Era in Spaceflight"

National Geographic News' Dan Vergano reports on the successful test flight of NASA's Orion spacecraft.

Unmanned for this test flight, the Orion space capsule successfully splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 11:29 a.m. EST, after a 20,000 mile per hour (32,000 kilometer per hour) plunge through the atmosphere.

"A picture-perfect splashdown," said NASA's Amber Philman, from a ship some 630 miles (1,014 kilometers) southwest of San Diego that is recovering the floating capsule.

"This is NASA, very slowly, on its way to deep space again," said space policy expert John Logsdon of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The next test of the space capsule comes in 2018, with another unmanned mission that will take the capsule into orbit around the moon.

Orion is intended to carry four astronauts aloft on 21-day missions that will fly higher than low Earth orbit, beyond the altitude of the International Space Station, which travels only 270 miles (430 kilometers) up. The capsule's reentry test was designed to show whether its new heat shields could withstand temperatures of 4,000°F (2,200°C) as it passed through the atmosphere on its high-speed return from deep space missions.

[. . .]

This reentry test was a trial run for the capsule, part of a decade-long, $9-billion development effort by NASA intended to eventually carry astronauts on deep-space missions. If funding comes through, Orion will help carry astronauts on an asteroid exploration mission around 2025, and perhaps someday to a deep space habitation vehicle for future years-long trips to Mars.

[LINK] "Russia's new European friend"

Al Jazeera's Leonid Ragozin writes about the Russian government's funding of and support for far-right groups in Europe. I wonder if this, like other initiatives, will backfire. I also find it amusing that, this time, it will be the far right not the far left that will be compromised by Russian support.

Former State Duma deputy Konstantin Rykov has 133,000 followers on Twitter. A prodigious web entrepreneur back in the pre-Twitter era, he is dubbed the father of Russian troll culture and the toxic, beyond-the-pale language that is still used by millions in the Russian-language sector of the world wide web. He later helped set up several pro-Kremlin news portals and the website of Russia's main TV channel.

Bashing Russian democrats, Barack Obama, Ukrainian and EU leaders is his main pastime on social networks, but there are two politicians he absolutely reveres. One is naturally Vladimir Putin, the other one is Marine Le Pen. While regularly posting fresh pictures of the National Front leader on his main feed @rykov, he also runs a separate French-themed account - @rykov_fr. The latter is almost entirely dedicated to her progress as a front runner in the next presidential election.

[. . .]

When in March Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine in a referendum hastily organised three weeks after the Russian occupation of the peninsula, Marine Le Pen said that the poll "raised no questions" and that Crimea was "historically a part of Russia". Her foreign policy adviser Aymeric Chauprade even travelled to Crimea during the referendum and announced that the vote was "legitimate", although not even Russia's closest allies - Belarus and Kazakhstan - have recognised it as such.

In response to Le Pen's endorsement, Rykov launched a campaign on Twitter, urging his followers to flood her feed with messages of gratitude. He led by example with a tweet that simply read: "Merci, Marine!" Thousands of Russians joined in.

The exchange of favours continued throughout the year. MEP Jean-Lux Schaffhauser, who represents a party affiliated with the National Front, travelled to the rebel-held Donetsk at the end of October to express support for the elections held by the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic. Clips from his press conference featured prominently on Russian TV channels which were keen to show that Europe is far from unanimous on the issue of Ukraine and that Kremlin is not completely isolated.

It was Schaffhauser who, according to the French investigative website Mediapart, has brokered a 9 million euro ($11m) loan provided to the National Front by the Russian-registered First Czech Bank - a little-known fiscal organisation once investigated by the Czech authorities on suspicion of being linked to Russian secret services.

Six days after the loan story broke, the deputy head of the Russian State Duma Andrey Isayev appeared as a guest star at the National Front's congress. In his address, he lamented that "the sovereignty of once mighty nations, such as Germany and France, […] is being eaten away by the so-called Trans-Atlantic integration", and that "the will of European countries is being suppressed by little known EU bureaucrats, who are in fact marionettes of the US". Isayev is a leading member of Putin's United Russia party, which has, in recent years, rebranded itself as a defender of "traditional Christian values" echoing the slogans of the European far right.

It would have shocked someone living in the USSR circa 1980s had they learned that Russian officials would be cozying up to the party created by Jean Marie Le Pen (Marine's father) - who was lambasted by Soviet TV as a "neo-fascist" and a "brown plague". But Putin's spin doctors and Soviet ideologues are about as similar as a MacBook and abacus. People who shape the political agenda in Moscow these days are happy to tap into any ideology as long as it serves their political goals.

[URBAN NOTE] "In the Relics of a Desert Utopia, a More Sustainable Future"

A while ago, numerous people on Facebook shared Allison Meier's Hyperallergic essay on Paolo Soleri, his community of Arcosanti, and the idea of arcologies. Illustrated with numerous of his crayon drawings, Meier introduces her readers to a vision of an urban future that, despite Arcosanti's failure to develop, might still seem relevant.

It never reached the 5,000 inhabitants its creator dreamed of or produced much more than decorative wind bells, but the utopian city of Arcosanti may have just been ahead of its time. Designed by Italian architect Paolo Soleri, the compact metropolis was the embodiment of his idea of “arcology” — a fusion of architecture with ecology.

[. . .]

Among all these Soleri has a vision that’s equal parts reality, impossible, and perhaps increasingly relevant. Arcosanti hit its peak in the 1970s, with Soleri leading the construction of his dream city out in Arizona, a city where urban sprawl would be compacted and people would live in a way minimally invasive to the environment and harmonious through close interaction. Not dissimilar from Frederick Law Olmsted before him, Soleri believed that good design could make people morally good. Born in Turin, he first came to Arizona as an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright. Yet while Wright’s own future-thinking urban plan Broadacre City — recently the focus of a MoMA exhibition — was all about beautifying a suburban spread, Soleri took the opposite approach and pulled everything a metropolis would need into one super-structure. The “Bowl” and “Tower” sections on display at AVAM are just two parts of a 50-foot scroll that formed the foundation of Arcosanti. With common areas and embedded gardens, it’s a sort of hive of interconnected, self-sufficient spaces — all enthusiastically and vividly sketched in colored crayon.

A few of the bronze wind bells Soleri designed for his city hang in the AVAM window, and they along with about a dozen structures half-finished, 70 miles north of Phoenix, are the physical realization of Arcosanti. Its sign proclaimed at the entrance: “If you are truly concerned about the problems of pollution, waste, energy depletion, land, water, air and biological conservation, poverty, segregation, intolerance, population containment, fear and disillusionment, join us.” Soleri died on April 9, 2013 at the age of 93, now buried among the pieces of his urban planning experiment legacy that he worked on until his death, long after his profile as a prophet of the future had lowered. Still, while the concrete structures might feel more retrofuture than realistic, there is something still contemporary about Soleri’s ideas

[LINK] Six links on the implosion of The New Republic

Bloomberg's Gerry Smith described the scale of the event in his "New Republic Editors Resign Following Management Shake-Up".

At least 28 editors at the New Republic resigned today following a management shake-up at the century-old political magazine.

The departures by staff editors and contributing editors were reported in a tweet by Ryan Lizza, a contributing editor, who also stepped down.

The editors stepped down en masse after Chief Executive Officer Guy Vidra announced to staff in a memo yesterday that the print publication frequency would be halved to 10 issues a year and two top editors would leave. The magazine will also move its offices to New York from Washington, according to the memo, which was obtained by Bloomberg News.

“As we restructure The New Republic, we will be making significant investments in creating a more effective and efficient newsroom as well as improved products across all platforms,” Vidra said in the memo.

Franklin Foer, the magazine’s editor, will be replaced by Gabriel Snyder, a Bloomberg News digital editor, Vidra said. Leon Wieseltier, the longtime literary editor, is also leaving.

Megan McArdle, back at Bloomberg View, places this in the context of the difficulty of managing media companies.

[U]nlike most journalists, I've also worked at a bunch of firms that are not media companies, including ones that failed. Both journalists and non-journalists usually fail to understand just how weirdly different media companies are from other sorts of firms, which means they don't understand that experience with one side gives you virtually zero insight into how the other kind works. Without unduly sucking up to current and former executives, let me note that David Bradley succeeded at The Atlantic by hiring people who understood the business -- including Justin Smith, who now works for Bloomberg -- and giving them room to do what needed to be done.

Turning around any money-losing company is difficult, but media companies are especially tricky, because you're not running a normal type of organization; you're running a professional group. Most of the lessons that you learned in another business aren't very relevant.

Prominent among the unique challenges of the media manager: the frequent tension between the actions that build your reputation and audience, and those that monetize it; the difficulty of getting creative types to produce great stuff on demand; the astonishing amount of autonomy that journalists need, because it's impossible to write hard guidelines, and too expensive to supervise long hours of reporting and typing; the fact that great writers are frequently terrible managers and editors, which screws up the normal management pyramid; the simultaneous need for speed and accuracy; the fact that media employment selects for a cluster of personality traits that resists closer management; the professional ethic that will stymie you when you decide to make a different set of trade-offs between competing priorities such as speed, accuracy, and the need to monetize your content; the fact that writers, especially in the digital age, frequently take their audience with them if they leave, making it even harder to impose discipline. These days, add the fact that the whole industry is having trouble figuring out a financial model that works. Not all of these problems apply to every company -- and each of these problems can be found in some other industry. But the collection of all these problems in one place makes media, particularly the glamourous prestige media that most outside owners want to buy, an unusual headache.

At the Bloomberg View, Clive Crook was rather sardonic about the fuss.

Let me see if I understand. The owner of TNR had his own plans for the title, and these didn't include the present editor. What astonishing presumption. Let there be mass resignations. If you're a subscriber -- you almost certainly aren't, but I'm saying if you are -- cancel at once. The New Republic is about to be crippled, which is a disgrace; all that remains is for people of conscience to combine forces and shut it down altogether.

I'm grateful to Twitter for recording this orgy of egotism and entitlement. The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza asked to be removed from the masthead as a contributing editor (a vanity title, in case you're wondering: quite a sacrifice to give that up). New York's Jonathan Chait said me too, "it goes without saying." "Okay, no joking now," said Ross Douthat of the New York Times. "This TNR news is bad for everyone." Well, I hadn't thought of that. Bad for everyone. How will I ever break it to my neighbors in West Virginia? I'm concerned the news has not yet reached them.

Douthat's pointless hand-wringing wasn't enough for Slate's Jacob Weisberg. He demanded action: "Anybody who didn't quit TNR today deserves to be fired." (An hour later, he'd had second thoughts and pleaded irony. I don't think so.) By Friday afternoon it seemed much of the editorial staff had indeed quit or been fired. Weisberg may think that's excellent, but I'd like to go further and suggest that he now resign in solidarity from his own job (running digital titles that aim to disrupt the magazine business and make money in a post-print world). Think of the power of that protest! A shot heard round the world.

Slate's Seth Stevenson placed this in a broader context of American journalism.

Whence all the handwringing over changes at a teensy political magazine? The New Republic as an institution has a long, storied history. Its pages have been home to deeply considered essays and legendary bylines. But Hughes’ new CEO, the former Yahoo News executive Guy Vidra, seems bent on ditching TNR’s ruminative style. Instead—those close to TNR who read between his lines fear—he’s hoping to emulate modern, quick-hit outlets that thrive on churning out less meaty work from squadrons of inexperienced writers. Hughes’ new editor, Gabriel Snyder, is formerly of Bloomberg Media and the Atlantic Wire, and hails from the whiplash world of reactive Web journalism—not the staid, chin-stroky milieu of a century-old journal of opinion.

In statements to staff, Vidra has vowed to “break shit” and has called himself a “wartime CEO.” At the magazine’s recent centennial celebration, he mispronounced Foer’s name. It doesn’t help that Vidra speaks in jumbly tech jargon that sets many journalists’ teeth on edge. In announcing yesterday’s shakeup, he claimed these changes were part of “re-imagining The New Republic as a vertically integrated digital media company.” Vertically integrated? Are they going to, like, mine their own pixels? It’s one thing for journalists of a certain age to warily watch the BuzzFeeds ascend from afar—it’s another feeling when the insurrection overruns one of your own, formerly impregnable ramparts.

A splinter group—a backlash to the backlash—has suggested that Snyder might be an interesting choice to lead TNR into its brave new digital future. And to be fair, some of the rending of garments is overblown. TNR’s influence had long been on the wane. It will live on, it may modernize in helpful ways, and, one assumes, will continue to publish good work—though at what frequency and just how good remains to be seen. Much of the rage (the majority of TNR’s staff resigned today) probably derives as much or more so from the way Foer was treated as it does from ill ease about the direction the magazine is taking.

Crooked Timber's Corey Robin argues that The New Republic just stopped being relevant a long while ago.

No, the real problem with The New Republic is that for the last three decades, it has had no energy. It has had no real project. The last time The New Republic had a project was in the late 1970s/early 1980s, when it was in the journalistic vanguard of what was then called neoliberalism (not what we now call neoliberalism). That is what a great magazine of politics and culture does: it creates a project, it fashions a sensibility. The Spectator did it in the early 18th century, Partisan Review in the 1930s did it, Dissent in the 1950s did it, and The New Republic in the 1970s/1980s did it. I’m not saying that I like that last project; I don’t. I’m just saying that it was a project, and that it was a creation. Love them or hate them, great magazines gather the diverse and disparate energies of a polity and a culture and give them focus. They shape assumptions, they direct attention, they articulate a direction. The New Republic hasn’t done that since I was a teenager.

At Esquire, Charles R. Pierce argues, with abundant links, that the magazine was in decline for a long while regardless.

As someone who once worked for a paper that folded beneath him, I feel for the people at the magazine who are going to lose their jobs behind this move. And, as someone who suddenly lost the publication at which he learned all his chops, I feel for Jonathan Chait. But, institutionally, the slow destruction of TNR by its new and witless owner doesn't come up for me to the slow and deliberate destruction of its credibility as a legitimate liberal voice during the ownership of the execrable Marty Peretz.

John Cole has helpfully provided a brief list of the atrocities committed by the magazine under Peretz's leadership, and under the editorships of Michael Kinsley, Andrew Sullivan and the late Michael Kelly, among others, whose reputations as thinkers and journalists have survived largely untouched because that's the way it is when, to poach a phrase from the estimable Driftglass, there is a club and you're not in it. It was at TNR where Kinsley pole-vaulted over the line separating being an interesting contrarian from simply being an overeducated dick. It was at TNR where Kelly let loose his unguarded mania against Bill Clinton. The New Republic became the index patient for a lot of terrible stuff that happened to progressivism over the past 30 years.