[URBAN NOTE] Six Toronto links: King Street, neighbourhoods, winter, Bentway, Judith Merril

• Sean Marshall notes that businesses complaining about the effects of the transit experiment on King Street need to remember why they are in such a central location in the first place, over at his blog.


• blogTO identifies five Toronto neighbourhoods set for a higher profile in 2018.


• Alanna Rizza takes a look at some other cold snaps in the past of Toronto, over at the Toronto Star.


• Torontoist celebrates the Bentway, the new skating rink underneath the Gardiner Expressway. (Is it an answer to the High Line? I wonder.)


• Edward Keenan quite likes the humanizing effect of the Bentway on the spaces around the Gardiner Expressway, and says so at the Toronto Star.


• Janice Bradbeer at the Toronto Star tells the story of how the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy came to be, thanks to American immigrant writer Judith Merril and Rochdale.

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[NEWS] Five links: meat tax, Civilization VI, Mount Washington, Niagara Falls, Soviet fall

• Is a sin tax to discourage meat consumption a good idea, at least environmentally? CBC considers.


• The use of Chief Poundmaker and the Cree as players in the new game Civilization VI is controversial among the Cree, who wonder why they were not asked first. The National Post reports.


• Mount Washington, in New Hampshire, sounds like a particularly frigid place. The New York Times describes the environment.


• Despite appearing frozen, water still flows underneath the ice of the Niagara Falls. CBC explains.<>/li>
  
• How could the fall of the Soviet Union, and the inclusion of successor states in the international order, have gone differently? What was possible? Transitions Online considers.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Montréal, Washington D.C., Detroit, Bangalore, Nazareth

• rue Sainte-Catherine Street in Montréal is set to have three years of heavy construction. The Toronto Star reports.


• Painting the brutalist structures of the Washington D.C. metro, as described and depicted by CityLab, sounds absurdly unaesthetic to me.


• The critical take of Vice on regressive taxation policies in Detroit that deprive people of homes is worth reading.


• Scroll.in suggests that bad planning has done terrible things to the Indian metropolis of Bangalore.


• Trump has had a decidedly negative effect on the Christians of the Palestinian city of Nazareth. Al-Monitor reports.

[NEWS] Five links about diverse Canada; Terry Fox & Métis, First Nations businesses, refugees, Tibet

• Suggestions that the family of Canadian hero Terry Fox have Métis ancestry and can claim Métis identity are, among other things, timely. The Globe and Mail reports.


• National Observer notes the growing foothold of First Nations businesses in Canadian cities.


• Identity is becoming complex in an increasingly multiethnic and intermixed Canada. The Globe and Mail reports.


• Québec companies are turning to some of the incoming wave of asylum seekers from the United States in the search for workers. CBC reports.


• The Toronto Star profiles two Tibetan-Canadians who are fulfilling their childhood dreams by heading off to be educated as dentists.

[PHOTO] Twenty-seven more photos of the Toronto Zoo

[PHOTO] Seven photos of the primates of the Toronto Zoo (@thetorontozoo)

The primates of the Toronto Zoo—the olive baboons, the gorillas, the Sumatran orangutan—I found particularly haunting. These are creatures so like us.