[CAT] Shakespeare, back turned

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• blogTO notes this weekend will be a messy one for traffic, with repairs and closures.


• Dangerous Minds reports on a Life photo essay from 1966 looking at the madness of the modern disco.


• The Dragon's Tales considers the thickness of Enceladus' crust.


• Language Log looks at surfer-inflicted language on Twitter accounts.


• The LRB Blog counsels against cancelling the Olympics on the ground of Zika.


• Marginal Revolution looks at the effect of tenure on risk-taking among academics.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer considers what President Trump could do trade-wise.


• Towleroad notes migrant men in Greece who are prostituting themselves to survive.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes, after Trump, that bigots can't exclude judges of certain backgrounds from judging their criminal cases.


• Window on Eurasia wonders if there will be an impending Western-Russian deal.

[NEWS] Some Saturday links

• Bloomberg considers wind power off of Long Island, looks at Odebrecht's progress despite high-level arrests, and notes New Zealand's criticism of China's maritime expansionism.


• Bloomberg View notes that Germany is a country thoroughly opposed to genocide.


• The CBC notes the Tragically Hip tickets have sold out, and looks at ice melt in Antarctica.


• MacLean's notes the mounting of a monument in Moncton to the three RCMP officers recently killed there.


• The National Post notes that Iraqi Kurds want to be armed, looks at how Calgary is a center for language change in Canadian English, and looks at how Australians want Canada to take in refugees.


• Wired looks at the Louvre's defenses against flooding.

[URBAN NOTE] "In soaring housing costs, Vancouver is not alone – but London offers hope"

In The Globe and Mail, Stephen Quinn argues Vancouver should look to the experience of London in managing housing costs.

People who live in this city know all too well the problem of housing affordability.

The mayor has outlined the issues well: “People who grew up here unable to rent or buy, parents forced to raise children in homes that are too small, rents taking up more and more of people’s income. Home ownership is slipping increasingly out of reach for more and more. Many now face far longer and more expensive commutes, and businesses struggle to recruit and retain the people they need to grow and prosper.”

When I say, “this city,” I’m not talking about Vancouver. The city described above is London, England. And when I say, “the mayor” I’m quoting Sadiq Khan, London’s newly elected Labour Party mayor, who has made housing his priority.

The quote comes from Mr. Khan’s housing manifesto – part of his election campaign.

There is more. Mr. Khan told The Guardian this week: “There is no point in building homes if they are bought by investors in the Middle East and Asia. I don’t want homes being left empty. I don’t want us to be the world’s capital for money laundering. I want to give first dibs to Londoners.”

[URBAN NOTE] "How Brampton, a town in suburban Ontario, was dubbed a ghetto"

In an extended photo essay, Noreen Ahmed-Ullah engages with modern Brampton's history as a centre of Canada's South Asian communities, and the ways this works out. (Some, as the title of the article indicates, are not nice.)

I live in a suburban Ontario town where the visible minorities are now the majority.

Brampton – a.k.a. “Browntown,” “Bramladesh”or “Singhdale” – is just like the nicknames imply: mostly brown.

On our street of new semi-detached houses, I see brown and black families, mostly immigrants. Strip malls consist almost entirely of Indian-only grocers, stores selling fancy South Asian clothes and sweet shops. My drive home off Highway 427 is lined with palatial Sikh gurdwaras, a monumental Hindu mandir and a soon-to-be-built mosque – the only church in the area is a tiny historic landmark.

At the walk-in clinic, brown and black families. At Service Ontario on a weekend, 30 people in line – only two are white and they are related. At the nearby library, an entire section carved out for Punjabi and Hindi books. And on Diwali, the night sky above Gore Road is lit up on both sides, crackling with competing fireworks displays.

It doesn’t surprise me any more when staff at a local Canadian Tire speak to me in Punjabi, or grocery stores advertise Diwali and Eid sales. Sobeys recently opened a supermarket in the heart of Brampton called “Chalo Freshco,” or “Let’s Go, Freshco,” marketing it as the first Canadian grocery store designed for “desis,” or those of South Asian descent, serving everything from spices and basmati rice found at an Indian grocery store to Indo-centric vegetables and ready-to-eat tandoori chicken and snacks.

On any given day, groups of women in colourful shalwar kameez (tunic and baggy pants) stroll vigorously along the sidewalk, getting in their daily exercise. Men in brightly hued turbans and flowing white beards bike to the neighbourhood park to hang out with friends.

Sometimes, I wonder if I live in India or Canada.

[URBAN NOTE] "In Yorkville, architectural modesty faces death from above"

In NOW Toronto, Catherine Nasmith criticizes development plans in Yorkville.

Almost every time I mention Toronto’s York Square, people ask, “Where is that?” That’s a compliment to its success: its modest approach has been so widely copied that it’s almost invisible today.

Better known as the location of the Vidal Sassoon hair salon in Yorkville, the seminal work of Jack Diamond and Barton Myers’s groundbreaking architectural firm set the architectural and planning world on its head when it was completed in 1968. We now take for granted the idea of working with and around existing buildings, but York Square was one of the first projects in Toronto to mix historic and new. It set out on a different path than the scorched earth approach to “urban renewal.”

In 1968, Yorkville was home to the counterculture, to hippies, street kids and musicians like Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot. Toronto had not yet been hollowed out for urban renewal in the same way many American cities had, but it was charging headlong over that cliff, goaded on by planners and developers.

The development made news in architectural and planning journals around the world, and made Diamond & Myers the firm architecture graduates wanted to join. The round windows pay homage to Louis Kahn, reflecting the firm’s connections to the University of Pennsylvania, where Kahn taught.

Prior to the passage of the Ontario Heritage Act in 1975, it was hard to make the case to save lovely old buildings like Old City Hall and Union Station, let alone old houses. But the reform council of the 70s made Toronto famous as a liveable city and place of progressive urbanism.

[ISL] "More in Debt Than Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands Rejects Rescue"

Bloomberg's Brian Chappatta reports on the impending financial apocalypse in the US Virgin Islands, one that seems likely to impact Puerto Rico's efforts to find a viable solution to its issues.

Congress’s plan to throw a lifeline to Puerto Rico is making waves in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The measure that passed a House committee last week would allow for a federal control board to oversee the finances -- and potentially restructure the debt -- of any U.S. territory, even though Puerto Rico is the only one now asking for help. Virgin Islands Governor Kenneth Mapp and Rep. Stacey Plaskett have blasted the bill, warning that it may tarnish its standing with investors. That concern is already starting to materialize: Returns on its securities are trailing the $3.7 trillion municipal market for the first time since 2011.

The Caribbean island, Puerto Rico’s closest American neighbor, has a sliver of the population -- about 104,300 -- and a fraction of the debt, with $2.4 billion across all issuers. But divvied up, that’s $23,000 of obligations per person, even more than Puerto Rico’s $20,000. The two Caribbean territories with a shared culture also have similar fiscal strains: declining populations, underfunded pensions, histories of borrowing to cover budget shortfalls and unemployment rates that are twice as high as the U.S. mainland’s.

“It’s the same template: Over a period of years, you keep issuing debt to cover your operating deficits, your economy isn’t growing, your population isn’t growing, but your liabilities keep growing,” said David Ashley, an associate portfolio manager at Thornburg Investment Management, which holds $11.5 billion in municipal bonds. “Just by virtue of math, your per-capita debt just continues to rise, probably to an unsustainable level at a certain point.”

[ISL] "Cruise ship, Ocean Endeavour, to dock in Summerside on Monday"

Nancy MacPhee, writing for Summerside's Journal-Pioneer, notes the advent of cruise ship season in Prince Edward Island's second city. May Summerside do as well as Charlottetown on this front.

The Ocean Endeavour, operated by the Adventure Canada, usually spends the summer season showing tourists around Canada’s artic, but this June it will be making a stop in Summerside before heading north.

Arnold Croken, president of the Summerside Port Corporation, said the 450-foot cruise ship, operated by Adventure Canada, is expected to arrive at 7:30 a.m.

“They sail out of Quebec, come down the St. Lawrence and they decided to put Summerside on their list this year, which is great,” Croken said Wednesday. “We have a working group that consists of people representing organizations from Summerside to Tignish. As a result of this visit, that group has been focusing on putting together itineraries for them.”

There are an estimated 175 passengers expected with the ship.

[ISL] "Miminegash is a town haunted by a dying fishing industry"

Writing in The Guardian of Charlottetown, Teresa Wright examines at length the decline of western Prince Edward Island fishing community Miminegash. The story of this community is being repeated throughout Atlantic Canada, at least.

Perched at the edge of the westernmost side of P.E.I., Miminegash is almost like a ghost town, haunted by the memories of a fishing industry now almost extinct.

Skeletons of fishing boats and gear dot the perimeters of people’s yards. Homes are modest, some as weathered as their inhabitants.

The few roads that make up the community of Miminegash branch out in a V-formation from the heart of the community – the harbour.

This is where everyone in the seaside community spent their days and nights in what locals call “the good old days” when Irish moss was plentiful.

Back then, big families with 15 and 18 kids were bursting from homes in the community.

Trucks were lined up all the way down the roads leading to the two Irish moss plants in Miminegash, filled with dried moss to sell.

[REVIEW] Akira

Thursday night showing's of Akira at the Revue Cinema in Roncesvalles happily did not disappoint. The showing itself could have been better: the start time was delayed, but more frustratingly the organizers kept having sound trouble, starting with the dubbed version and then trying to get the sound going on the subtitled one only to opt for the dubbed version on the fourth try. The film itself was superb, no disappointment to my old memories.

A quick Googling reveals that I encountered Akira for the first time a bit more than a decade ago, Sam showing me the movie in December of 2005 and then lending me the translated volumes of the original manga over the first part of the following year. It's been a decade since I last engaged with this in depth, and I was a bit worried. I had been afraid that my memories of Akira were wrong, but I had also been afraid that the appraisals I wrote at the time would be massively incorrect. Neither is the case: Akira still stands up as a powerful and artistically credible depiction of the human encounter with the post-human, and the movie in particular remains an effective distillation of the sprawling sagas of the manga.

I was off on one thing, though, or--at best--I was reflecting the perspectives of my time, back in the halcyon pre-crash days of 2005 and 2006. At the time, I wrote that Akira did not feel like our future, not with its post-apocalyptic urban civilization beset by mass protests and terrorism and the real dangerous conspiracies of the powerful and disenchanted. History has since returned, and watching some of the scenes featuring the revolutionaries and random protesters of Neo-Tokyo gave me chills. The imagining of the possibility of radical human transcendence embraced by so many of Akira's characters may be widely unrealistic, but what does it say about our civilization that the only thing left to us is chaos and despair?