[CAT] Shakespeare, reclining

[CAT] Five cat links: homophobia, perfume, tiger genetics, Japan, Freddie Mercury

• Bored Panda shares the story of a gay man in London apparently turned down as a prospective cat dad because of his sexual orientation.


• JSTOR Daily, reporting from the search for a man-eating tiger in India, notes that some perfumes apparently attract big cats (and small ones?).


• D-Brief notes findings from researchers in cat genetics that six different subspecies of tigers exist in the world today.


• Quartzy notes the story of two cats who have been trying to get into a Japanese art museum for two years.


• Vanity Fair notes how Freddie Mercury was terribly fond of his cats, devoting songs and albums to them, even.

[PHOTO] Tower north of Holt Renfrew, Yorkville

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: Doug Ford, Ontario Place, rent control, 650 Parliament, cannabis

• This Toronto Life profile examines how Doug Ford managed to get elected premier of Ontario.


• blogTO looks at how the province of Ontario has just taken over Ontario Place, preparing to redevelop this waterfront site in what we fear will be a bad direction.


• blogTO notes how the scrapping of rent control for new units risks making housing still more unaffordable in Toronto.


• Refugees from the 650 Parliament Street disasters are now being billed for their hotel stays, Global News reports.


• NOW Toronto has this first-person essay from Pete Young talking how his cannabis business took him to the Toronto Stock Exchange.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Queens, Edmonton, San Francisco, Manizales, Tbilisi

• VICE considers how mass transit issues in Queens will be changed by the Amazon HQ2 relocation there.


• The Edmonton alternate paper Vue Weekly will be closing down this month, Global News reports.


• The ongoing disastrous fires in California have left San Francisco with the worst recorded air quality of any city in the world, Global News reports.


• Guardian Cities looks at how the disaster-prone city of Manizales, in Colombia, prepares for catastrophes.


• Guardian Cities looks at how, after years of unregulated construction and growth, the Georgian capital of Tbilisi is trying to prepare for smarter growth.

[NEWS] Five indigenous links: Innu, Kahnawake, Cree, genetics, Andes

• CTV News reports on how Kahnawake, a Mohawk reserve near Montréal, is trying to learn from mistakes with tobacco in legalizing marijuana sales.


• La Presse reports on a case lodged before the Surpeme Court of Canada by an Innu group regarding their homeland on the Québec-Labrador border.


• CBC reports on efforts to preserve the Cree language as a vibrant community language in northern Québec.


• Enlisting indigenous groups in studies of their genetic history is becoming imperative for scientists active in the field. CBC reports.


• Scienceblog reports on a study of DNA from indigenous populations in the Andes that reveals not only how they adapted to the extreme environments of the area but resisted Eurasian diseases better than other groups in South America.

[NEWS] Five LGBTQ links: Ontario PCs, Bohemian Rhapsody, Scott Thompson, Internet, Check Please!

• Ontario PCs have shamefully voted in favour of no longer recognizing gender identity. If this party, forming a government that has already invoked the notwithstanding clause, tries anything else against transgender people, let the fight start. Global News reports.


• The essay of Peter Knegt at CBC Arts highlighting problems of queer representation in Bohemian Rhapsody needs to be read. Why is so much of the queer content fictionally represented as negative?


• Peter Knegt at CBC Arts points out that Scott Thompson deserves to be recognized as a Canadian treasure.


• This Jon Shadel essay at them exploring how the Internet opened up new channels for communication and self-identification as a queer person speaks deeply to me.


• The Houston Chronicle explores Check Please, Ngozi Ukazu's fantastic queer hockey webcomic.

[NEWS] Five links about identity: Durkheim, working-class, Petra Köpping, Dominican Republic, space

• Galen Watts at The Conversation takes a look at our world in the light of Émile Durkheim's sociology, arguing that the decline of the sacred in public life has opened the world up to new forces. What next?


• This Justin Quarry essay, republished at The Guardian, arguing that it can be more difficult for people like him to come out as working-class than as gay is provocative.


• Christine Keilholz has written a widely-syndicated article about Petra Kôpping, the integration minister of Saxony, who finds herself dealing as much with older East Germans who lost from reunification as with new immigrants to her state.


• This VICE article takes a look at the humanitarian disaster created by the Dominican Republic's destruction of birthright citizenship, displacing hundreds of thousands of people from their country on account of their foreign (Haitian) origin.


• Nadia Drake at National Geographic argues that the language used to describe space settlement has to be chosen carefully, that avoiding the rhetoric of past imperial conquests is a must.