[PHOTO] Looking at Bridgepoint Health, Toronto

These photos of the Bridgepoint Hospital, taken during a traverse of Riverdale Park from West to East, do a much better job than last week's photo of showing how remarkable the structure is.

[LINK] "Why Iraqi women are turning to the Internet to buy books"

Al Monitor's Omar Al-Jaffal writes about how book markets and their female buyers have adapted to the trying situations in Iraq. On the one hand, it's great that books can achieve their liberatory potential anywhere, and that markets have adapted to even the trying conditions in Iraq. On the other, it's a terrible shame that this adaptation was necessary.

The deteriorating security situation in the Iraqi capital has prevented Noor Jamal Abdul Hamid from going to Mutanabbi Street to shop for books and stationery. Abdul Hamid is a young woman who found herself crippled by risky roads and social restrictions that prevent her from leaving her house. Despite all this, she manages to read plenty of books and hosts discussions of what she reads over Twitter.

Abdul Hamid, who was born in Baghdad in 1991, is a graduate of Alrafidain College. She is currently unemployed and reads to pass the time. In order to understand what is going on in her society and the mysterious Iraqi political life, she opted for “finding the truth in books,” as she told Al-Monitor, and so created her own library.

But how did she manage to collect 300 books, including novels, poetry and philosophy, when she had no access to a bookstore? “I found a bookstore on Facebook that delivers books to my doorstep,” she said.

This trend has emerged as a result of the security situation, giving housebound women access to books, and has also created a successful venue of commerce.

Abdul Hamid taught her friend Saja Imad how to order books over the phone or through Facebook, and Saja began to collect a set of books of her own.

“Reading is fun. It is like you are talking to someone else in another world,” Imad told Al-Monitor. She offered the following advice: “Whenever you feel like talking to someone, do not hesitate to grab a book and read."

[MUSIC] "Can Adele save the music industry, or just slow its demise?"

CBC's Sheena Goodyear makes the case that the huge commercial success of Adele's new album, 25does not in any way augur any kind of broader revival for the commercial music industry.

News that Adele is launching a new album following a nearly four-year hiatus came with sweeping headlines hailing the British songstress as the music industry's long-awaited saviour.

Hopes are high for 25, the third album from the Grammy-winning artist, due to be released Nov. 20. "Adele is here to save the music industry," pronounced Fortune. "Music industry breathes sigh of relief," said U.K. newspaper the Independent.

It's a big burden to lay on one woman's shoulders, but the hype is not unjustified. In a changing industry, Adele has consistently bucked the trend and convinced people, en masse, to shell out their hard-earned cash on her music.

[. . .]

"It's really incredible. You've got a market that's shifting dramatically to streaming, that is not as robust from a sales standpoint than it was before, and you get something that breaks the record not only by just a little bit, but really crushes it," said David Bakula, spokesman for Nielsen Entertainment, which tracks media consumption across all spectrums.

"I think that just goes to show the pent-up demand for Adele's music."

[LINK] On the naming of a star after Australian Aborigine activist Eddie Mabo

I found out via Facebook that a star in the constellation of the Southern Cross, has been named after Eddie Mabo, an Australian Aborigine activist whose court case established the existence of native title in Australia. The article "Eddie Mabo: It was written in the stars". The star named Koiki is known on stellar catalogues as SSSC 803504, from the Sudney Southern Star Catalogue, and is apparently a B-class star.

The decision to dedicate a star to Eddie Mabo is a remarkable step towards Australians acknowledging the true history of this country and recognising the vast cultural knowledge that Indigenous Australians hold.

Indigenous Australians were probably some of the first human beings to name stars. But sadly, first recordings by missionaries and ethnographers didn’t account for this knowledge. A general ignorance of of astronomy led to many errors and misunderstandings of Indigenous culture. But today a star that is dedicated to the late Eddie Koiki Mabo shows us that the mainstream is going some way to right previous wrongs.

The history of astronomy in Australia goes back tens of thousands of years. It is the Indigenous astronomy entwined with the laws and customs of the land, that has sustained both the environment and Indigenous Australians for over 40,000 years. Today, the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences’ plan to pay tribute to the memory of Eddie Mabo by dedicating and naming a star after him in the Sydney Southern Star Catalogue, acknowledges this history.

The dedication is part of a Dreamtime Astronomy program developed in partnership with the Nura Gili Indigenous Unit of the University of New South Wales, whichpromotes research into this important field of scientific thought.

Murray Islander Elder Alo Tapim says “The Southern Cross is totemic for southern tribe on the island of the Meriam people and it shows us the pathways and a star will always follows the same path.

[LINK] "Cold comfort: The trials of Sweden’s Syrian refugees"

Shannon Gormley's MacLean's article looking at the situation of Syrian refugees in small-town Sweden, struggling to adapt to a very different environment in relative isolation.

Mohammad Mahsoun doesn’t understand what he’s looking at. His morning began the way his mornings often do. He woke up. He climbed out of bed. He got dressed. He left his bedroom. He stepped outside. But when he saw it—whatever it was—he gasped, blinked, gasped again: a delicate, translucent film clung to the grass, the trees, the road, everything.

Is it some kind of chemical fertilizer? he wondered. Vandalism? The end of the world?

It’s not. It’s the season’s first frost, and Mahsoun, a 26-year-old Syrian from Aleppo with a master’s in engineering, will wake up to many more: He’s close to the Arctic Circle, where Sweden houses thousands of refugees. Throughout Europe’s deepening refugee crisis, the Swedish government has been uniquely generous: It predicts it will receive 190,000 asylum applications in 2015, and offers permanent residency to all Syrian asylum seekers who have come to Sweden. But some refugees find that coming to Sweden is easier than integrating within it.

[LINK] "Why Singles' Day in China Is Bigger Than Cyber Monday"

Bloomberg News reports on the scale of the popularity of China's Singles' Day, coming on the 11th, as a commercial phenomenon.

Singles' Day, a twist on Valentine's Day, started in China in the 1990s as an obscure holiday but has snowballed into a consumer phenomenon thanks largely to Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., founded by Jack Ma and which runs China's largest online marketplace.

Singles' Day is celebrated on Nov. 11 because the date—11/11—is reminiscent of "bare branches," the Chinese expression for bachelors and spinsters.

In 2009, Alibaba sparked the flame that turned it into what it is today—a massive marketing event selling everything from electronics and clothing to cosmetics and food at big discounts. It sells through Tmall, AliExpress and Taobao Marketplace platforms, and through merchants' brick-and-mortar stores.

[URBAN NOTE] Mark Jacobson at New York on the Uzbeks of Brooklyn

At New York, Mark Jacobson uses the high-profile case of the arrest of two Uzbek immigrants on charges of supporting ISIS to illustrate the much larger Uzbek immigrant community in New York City.

This ISIS business is a problem for us, but we want everyone to know it does not define all Uzbeks in this country,” Farhod Sulton told me recently, not for the first time. Since the news broke, Sulton, a 35-year-old Tashkent-born insurance agent, had become the local go-to guy on the case. He is the head of Vatandosh, one of the very few Uzbek organizations in the city. Blessed with the dark good looks befitting the far-flung genetic legacy of his homeland, Sulton also speaks English, which the majority of Uzbeks living in Brooklyn don’t.

“We are new here, but we want to show we belong,” Sulton said. This was the purpose of today’s Vatandosh-sponsored activity, a trip down the I-95 corridor to Washington, D.C. “Uzbek immigrants need to realize that America is bigger than just Brooklyn,” he said while the bus crossed the Delaware River, just as George Washington did in 1776.

For the 40 or so Brooklyn Uzbeks on the bus, it had been a long journey. Today, if it rang any bell at all, Uzbekistan was known to most New Yorkers as a dusty (doubly) landlocked ’Stan among other Central Asian ’Stans. Yet Uzbekistan was once a great crossroads of civilization. This was Transoxiana, key pathway of the famous Silk Road, the prime conduit between the ancient marvels of East and West. It was in the fabled cities of present-day Uzbekistan — Khiva, Bukhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent — that Marco Polo stopped to water his camels. Before that, Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan had overrun and ruled the place. Tamerlane rose up from its midst to conquer much of Asia, from Persia to Delhi. More recently came the conquering Turks and the Russians, who in 1924 invented the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, which would last until 1991, when Uzbekistan finally became an independent state.

There are three kinds of Uzbeks in the New York area. There are the Bukharans of Rego Park and Kew Gardens, who are mainly Jews and have done well in real estate and the Diamond District. You can spot the younger Bukharans, who are assimilated into the New York scene, tooling down Queens Boulevard in their hot cars. There are also the “Old Uzbeks,” Muslims who came to the U.S. as refugees from the Soviet Union back in the 1980s. Staunch anti-communists, they have also prospered, with many living in New Jersey’s upwardly mobile Morris County.

“Then there’s us,” Sulton said with a half-smile, pointing to the passengers on the bus.

[URBAN NOTE] "The Davenportage is a walk through Toronto’s history and geography"

The Toronto Star's Shawn Micallef writes about a new celebration of Toronto's past.

“Why we do it is a mystery,” says Nicholas Brinckman. “There is no reason to walk across the city carrying a canoe on your back. It’s madness.”

On Nov. 15, Brinckman and others will be doing just that for an event they call the Davenportage, a 17-kilometre portage between the Humber and Don Rivers.

The bulk of their route follows Davenport, one of Toronto’s oldest roads that roughly traces an even older First Nations trail called Gete-Onigaming, or “the old portage.”

Davenport also passes south of the shoreline of ancient Lake Iroquois, the former expanded glacial version of Lake Ontario, today a prominent escarpment running across the middle of Toronto between Davenport and St. Clair that is the bane of all north-peddling cyclists.

Brinckman and a few other colleagues were working together in a shared office in Yorkville when they came up with the idea to do a long walk that both explored the city and honoured some of its history.

“It’s a profound way to be in the city,” he says. “It made me feel more connected to this place.”

[URBAN NOTE] "What the World's Biggest Bookstore looks like now"

blogTO's Derek Flack notes that the site of the former World's Biggest Bookstore will now house condos.

When last we wrote about the future of the World's Biggest Bookstore site, the widely publicized plan was to erect a restaurant row at 20 Edward St. As it happens, this was a short-lived scheme. Back in late January, a zoning amendment application (PDF) was submitted to the city, one which called for a 35 storey mixed-use development.

There will still be retail at grade, but the scale of the units suggests that restaurants won't be the plan (think big name corporate retail). If food is part of the mix at 20 Edward St., it will likely be at the underground level. The development also calls for 242 parking spaces and 610 spots for bikes.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO shares photos of Yonge and Dundas in the grimy 1970s.


• The Big Picture shares photos from a Tibetan Buddhist assembly.


• Crooked Timber shares a photo of Bristol's floating bridge.


• The Dragon's Gaze reports on an estimate of the number of extraterrestrial technological civilizations.


• The Dragon's Tales notes an atlas of drought in Europe.


• Geocurrents examines the fallacy of environmental determinism.


• Joe. My. God. notes how open travel between the European Union and Ukraine has been endangered by the failure to protect gay employment.


• Language Hat links to an essay by a feminist talking about what it is like to live in a language environment, that of Hebrew, where everything is gendered.


• Language Log engages with fax usage in Japan and notes rare characters in Taiwan.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the plight of the dying steel town, all the worse because it was evitable.


• Marginal Revolution has a bizarre defense of Ben Carson.


• The Russian Demographics Blog and Window on Eurasia report on a rectification of the Russian-Chinese frontier.


• Window on Eurasia is critical of village values in Russia, and notes the return of ISIS fighters to Azerbaijan.

[URBAN NOTE] "Enter our draw to go on Lower Bay Station photo tour"

Spacing Toronto has a superb contest.

For the first time in our history, Spacing did not host a party for the release of an issue. Instead, we’ve opted to do a small event that connects directly to our issue’s theme of the underground.

We’re offering 20 lucky readers the opportunity to spend 30 minutes in Lower Bay Station to take as many photos and videos as they wish. We will have TTC staff on site to provide a little about history about the station and how it is used today. If you don’t know about Lower Bay Station you should read about it now.

We know there is a lot of interest in this event, so the only way for us to be fair is to randomly select winners. Only the selected winners can attend (i.e. no add-ons).

Send an email to lowerbay@spacing.ca by Wednesday, Nov. 11th and we will select winners on Thursday morning and notify them by email about where and when to meet at Bay Station.

I've applied.

[URBAN NOTE] "Cop guilty of G20 assault won’t be fired — but he loses 5 days’ pay"

Wendy Gillis' report in the Toronto Star conveys unbelievable news. Clearly, the police cannot be expected to administer justice to those of their own who commit crimes.

The sole Toronto Police officer convicted for using excessive force at the G20 summit has been docked five days’ pay at a police disciplinary tribunal, after the retired judge who heard his case ruled Toronto police Const. Babak Andalib-Goortani “has already paid too large a price for his misdeed.”

Andalib-Goortani pleaded guilty last month to misconduct under Ontario’s Police Services Act after he was criminally convicted of assault with a weapon for striking G20 protester Adam Nobody with his baton at the June 2010 G20 Summit. The officer served no jail time.

During sentencing submissions, Nobody’s lawyer Marc Gibson argued Andalib-Goortani’s should immediately be dismissed — a penalty that has been meted out to other Ontario police officers found guilty of assault with a weapon.

Prosecutor Brendan van Niejenhuis asked for a penalty of a one-year demotion in Andalib-Goortani’s rank from first-class constable to fourth-class, which would include a salary cut of approximately $30,000.

But retired justice Lee Ferrier ruled the assault on Nobody was “barely over the line of wrongfulness,” and the fallout from the assault has “wreaked havoc on the life of this officer,” including the loss of his house and a depression diagnosis.