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Toronto can be a gorgeous city, its towers glittering in early evening light.
Oct. 19th, 2018
- CityLab notes that mass transit failed in the United States not because it was unsuited for American cities but, rather, because mass transit was killed there.
- Geographic inequality in the United States is worsening, CityLab reports.
- Bloomberg View notes that, unlike in the US Northeast where population growth is concentrated in a few major centres, the US Midwest has recently been seeing more regionally balanced growth.
- Sarah Holder at CityLab takes a look at Slab City, an unrecognized settlement deep in California's Colorado Desert that has persisted for seven decades.
- Feargus O'Sullivan at CityLab looks at how, in the European Union, population aging and shrinkage is most significant away from prosperous capital cities.
- This Charlie Stross essay from August looking at the complicated, occasionally malign, influence of Heinlein by much later writers (at least, Heinlein as he is often misunderstood), merits reading.
- This Twin Cities Geek essay by Bryan Thao Worra examining the question of how people of colour can be Lovecraft fans despite his well-documented racism is worth reading.
- This io9 essay about queer representation in the current iteration of Voltron resonates with me, perhaps because I remember the show as it originally aired.
- This Wired essay takes a look at the trope of the academy in fantasy literature, noting how it is dealt with creatively in R.F. Kuang's The Poppy War. (I cannot wait for the sequel!)
- Michelle Villanueva at Syfy looks at the iconography of fascism in anime, even of latent sympathy. I disagree with some of her examples--Fullmetal Alchemist is a slow unbundling of these myths ad images--but there is something to be concerned about here.