[PHOTO] Looking out at Lake Ontario, from the Palais Royale

Monday afternoon I went on a walk along the waterfront in Sunnyside, from the Palais Royale east to Exhibition Place. This photo was taken looking out at Lake Ontario under the limbs of a tree on the shore, in the full afternoon heat.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Centauri Dreams considers low-mass objects in Orion.


• Crooked Timber engages with the racism among the Brexiteers.


• The LRB Blog notes the huge complications of Brexit.


• The NYRB Blog looks at controversies in the Clinton campaign.


• Savage Minds visits Ukraine's new museum of corruption, and the refugees who live there.


• Transit Toronto looks at the expansion of GO Transit's infrastructure northwards.


• Torontoist notes a possible revival of public art at Yorkdale station.


• Window on Eurasia looks at the controversies over Orthodox Christianity and nationality in Ukraine.

[NEWS] Some Wednesday links

• Bloomberg notes Ireland's huge unexpected recent reported growth, looks at the deindustrialization of Israel, observes Deutsche Bank's need to search for wealth abroad, looks at the demographic imperatives that may keep healthy Japanese working until they are 80, notes the slipping ANC grip on Pretoria and looks at the rise of anti-Muslim Pauline Hanson in Australia, and predicts Brexit could kill the London property boom.


• Bloomberg View calls for calm in the South China Sea.


• CBC notes some idiot YouTube adventurers who filmed themselves doing stupid, even criminal, things in different American national parks.


• The Globe and Mail reports on the plans for a test tidal turbine in the Bat of Fundy by 2017.


• MacLean's looks at the heckling of a gay musician in Halifax and reports on the civil war in South Sudan.


• The New York Times looks at the new xenophobia in the east English town of Boston.


• Open Democracy notes that talk of a working class revolt behind Brexit excludes non-whites, and reports on alienation on the streets of Wales.


• Wired looks at how some cash-strapped American towns are tearing up roads they cannot afford to maintain.

[URBAN NOTE] "Lower TTC ridership leaves $25 million budget gap"

Ben Spurr's report earlier this month in the Toronto Star is alarming. We need more funding, people.

Faced with declining ridership and a projected $25-million shortfall, the TTC intends to cancel planned service improvements and crack down on youngsters who ride for free by making kids as young as 10 get photo ID.

According to a ridership update released on Wednesday, the commission has carried 250.3 million passengers so far this year, which is slightly less than numbers posted at the same time last year and 7.4 million fewer than the amount the TTC was anticipating by this point in 2016.

Commission staff project that by the end of the year, the agency will fall short of its originally-projected 553 million rides by up to 13 million trips, leaving it with a $25-million hole in its budget.

In order to make up the shortfall, the commission has already identified about $10 million in savings that include lower-than-anticipated costs of fuel, hydro, and employee benefits. To save an additional $1.5 million, the TTC intends to abandon service improvements planned for the fall of this year. That leaves a gap of about $13 million that the commission needs to bridge.

[URBAN NOTE] "Creating Girls’ Spaces in Toronto Community Centres Isn’t That Simple"

Torontoist features a report by Viviane Fairbank on creating girls' spaces in Toronto community centres, complicated by the question of what such spaces should be.

Last year, a few dozen girls aged 13 to 18 sat in colourful, decorated rooms in four different community centres across Toronto and spoke to researchers from Social Planning Toronto. The centres, ranging in location from North Kipling to Scarborough, were host to Toronto’s newest youth spaces funded by the City. As similar establishments were being built across the GTA, researchers wanted to learn about the initiative’s successes and shortfalls.

But a previous report from that year, led in part by SPT, had omitted young women’s perspectives from its evaluation. The report’s leaders had done so inadvertently, as is so often the case: they had simply spoken to a majority of boys and taken their responses as universal.

Now, SPT returned to the community centres to determine whether, as suspected, researchers would gather “other information” by speaking to the girls who used the space. Let’s call it a well-meaning afterthought.

Two weeks ago, SPT published its results [PDF]. For the most part, they were unsurprising: young women had a lot to say. But the girls were also remarkably traditional in their understanding of femininity. For the most part, their suggestions for girl-friendly spaces did not allow for a richer, more inclusive future for Toronto’s young women. Instead, they painted a stark picture of today’s teenage girls, and prompted questions about just how to respond.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto Has a Wi-Fi Problem"

Torontoist's Anders Marshall writes about the yawning digital divide in Toronto.

According to Mayor John Tory, Toronto has a culture of “haves” and “have nots”: those with privilege, with access to resources and services—and those without them. It’s our job, the mayor told a crowd at Thorncliffe Park’s Public Library branch last month, to bridge that divide.

“I believe the best thing to do is build people up, to allow them to be everything they can be,” Tory says.

Among the resources unavailable to many is access to internet. The city has a Wi-Fi problem: though it is a necessity when it comes to job searches, education, and employment, many Torontonians cannot afford home internet packages.

In an effort to improve access, the Toronto Public Library has begun a partnership with Google Canada to create a Wi-Fi hotspot rental program.

The program completed its pilot phase in June, beginning with 210 individual mobile units. Aside from Thorncliffe, branches participating in the program include Albion, Cedarbrae, Evelyn Gregory, Parliament Street, and York Woods. Users can rent hotspots from any participating branch for six months at a time, and are allocated 10 gigabytes of data to use each month.

[URBAN NOTE] "Are we killing Yonge Street?"

NOW Toronto's Robert Allsopp fears for the future eof Yonge Street as a dynamic urban streetscape.

Downtown Yonge Street isn't what it used to be.

The high energy of street life is fast disappearing. There are not many people around. We rarely walk far along the street because it lacks a sufficient variety of shops or range of sensory experiences to tempt us.

We do most of our specialty shopping and eating elsewhere. We do our chain-store shopping in the Eaton Centre and the many other interior malls linked by the underground PATH network that are vacuuming the life and the paying customers from Yonge.

The Bay and Saks Fifth Avenue (which occupy the old Simpson's store) are still in full-blooded conversation with the street. Yonge-Dundas Square and Ryerson U have made a big difference, but their energizing effects seem locally concentrated.

The condo invasion has hit Yonge, but oddly, the hyper-densities haven't added much public life to the street.

The key to Yonge Street's success has been the rows of independently operated, narrow-fronted shops and businesses that collectively support intense social and commercial activity. What sustains Toronto's main street are the many comings and goings from shops, cafés and bars at street level and the offices, showrooms and apartments on the upper floors. Entrances occur every few metres. There's an intense synergy between the repetitive building type and the street. But this synergy is disappearing as buildings are stuffed and preserved in a lifeless trend I call urban taxidermy.

[ISL] "The Forgotten Jewish Pirates of Jamaica"

Smithsonian.com's Ross Kenneth Urken writes about the vestiges of a golden age of Jewish piracy, and also community, on Jamaica.

I was in Kingston’s spooky Hunts Bay Cemetery, located in a shantytown near the Red Stripe brewery, tramping through high grass with a dozen fellow travelers. We passed a herd of cattle that was being pecked by white egrets before finding what we were looking for: seven tombstones engraved with Hebrew benedictions and skull and crossbones insignia.

Centuries ago, the coffins buried here were ferried across Cagway Bay from Port Royal, once known as “the wickedest city in the world” and an inspiration for the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise and amusement park ride. This was once the domain of the little-known Jewish pirates who once sailed the waters of Jamaica. Their history captures a somewhat different side of the island than its recently adopted tourism slogan: “Jamaica—Get All Right.”

Jews have been a recognized part of Jamaican cultural life since 1655, when Britain took power from Spain and welcomed Jewish immigration, though some date their presence here to Columbus’s second voyage to the Americas. Many were successful gold traders and sugar merchants. Some, like Moses Cohen Henriques, a crony of Captain Henry Morgan who once plundered the modern day equivalent of almost $1 billion from a Spanish galleon, were marauding buccaneers. Though today’s Jamaican Jewish population is fewer than 200, there are at least 21 Jewish burial grounds across the island.

Since 2007, Caribbean Volunteer Expeditions (CVE), a nonprofit focused on cultural preservation throughout the Caribbean, has been leading groups like mine in an effort to document this largly forgotten history by transcribing epitaphs and compiling an inventory of grave sites. With trips spearheaded by Rachel Frankel, a New York-based architect, it hopes to promote conservation of Jewish cemeteries and raise public awareness of them. In the 18th century, the French Enlightenment writer Guillaume-Thomas Raynal advocated that Jews adopt Jamaica as a homeland in the Caribbean, since it had already become a locus of Semitic commerce. With Kingston just a four-hour flight from New York, the island could still become a vital part of Jewish life, if this part of its history were better known.

[ISL] Bloomberg on progress toward sthe reunification of Cyprus

Bloomberg's "As Brexit Splits Europe, One Divided Island Edges Toward Unity" gives some hope for Cypriot reunification.

It looks like an ordinary summer’s evening on Ledra Street, the pedestrianized thoroughfare of stores and cafes that bisects Nicosia’s old town: Elderly Greek Cypriot men sip coffee as Turkish Cypriot teenagers rush through a border crossing at the end of the road to catch a local band.

This is the opposite side of the European map from the rift caused by the U.K.’s Brexit referendum, and the mood couldn’t be more different in the continent’s last divided capital city. The reunification of Cyprus -- split between north and south since Turkey’s invasion in 1974, a little more than a dozen years after independence from Britain -- is a tale of false dawns, but the feeling in Nicosia is that the stars in the eastern Mediterranean just might be aligning.

What’s changed is that the leaders of both parts of the island are pursuing talks on their own power-sharing arrangement rather than one imposed by the United Nations. While they have the traditional backing of the U.S. and European Union, Turkey now supports hammering out a deal in coming months.

"This time I feel we have a real chance as both leaders seem determined,” said Maria Sophocleous, a 60-year-old Greek-Cypriot pensioner whose home village now lies on the Turkish-speaking side. “They know that it’s the last opportunity for reunification."

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto pokemasters rediscovering their city with Pokemon Go"

Metro Toronto's Luke Simcoe describes Pokemon Go in a way that might even get me playing.

In their quest to catch ‘em all, Pokémon GO users in Toronto are rediscovering the landmarks, avenues and alleyways that make up their city.

“I had never been to the Jack Layton ferry terminal before, but I went there after work and got to see all these interesting things while trying to catch Pokémon for fun,” said Sushil Tailor, a self-described Pokémon fanatic who works downtown.

The augmented reality game – which Nintendo hasn’t been officially released in Canada yet – is based on a database of global parks, public art, heritage sites and popular buildings. Pokémon are more likely to be spotted near these locations.

“It's easy to marry urbanism with Pokémon,” Tailor said. “Walkable neighbourhoods directly correlate with running into more Pokémon, more landmarks, and more gyms.”

Rachel Lissner, founder of Toronto’s Young Urbanists League Facebook group, has been playing the game non-stop since Monday. From chasing a Torterra through the Christie Pitts pool to scouring Kensington Market in search of a Jynx, the game has Lissner exploring the city a bit more than usual.