[PHOTO] Backyard at night

[DM] Some links from the blogosphere

I've a post up at Demography Matters. As a prelude to more substantial posting, I thought I would share with readers some demographics-related links from my readings in the blogosphere.

• The blog Far Outliers, concentrating on the author's readings, has been looking at China in recent weeks. Migrations have featured prominently, whether in exploring the history of Russian migration to the Chinese northeast, looking at the Korean enclave of Yanbian that is now a source and destination for migrants, and looking at how Tai-speakers in Yunnan maintain links with Southeast Asia through religion. The history of Chinese migration within China also needs to be understood.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money was quite right to argue that much of the responsibility for Central Americans' migration to the United States has to be laid at the foot of an American foreign policy that has caused great harm to Central America. Aaron Bastani at the London Review of Books' Blog makes similar arguments regarding emigration from Iran under sanctions.


• Marginal Revolution has touched on demographics, looking at the possibility for further fertility decline in the United States and noting how the very variable definitions of urbanization in different states of India as well as nationally can understate urbanization badly.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes that Israeli non-profit SpaceIL plans to launch a lander to the Moon in February.


• Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber writes about the material power of ideas and knowledge in 2019.


• D-Brief shares the latest images from Ultima Thule.


• Earther notes that temperatures in the Arctic have been higher than they have been for more than one hundred thousand years, with moss spores hidden by ice caps for millennia sprouting for the first time.


• Far Outliers notes the economic importance, in the early 20th century, of exports of tung oil for China.


• JSTOR Daily notes the uneasy relationship of many early psychoanalysts with the occult.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes an alarming report from California showing how the police have been deeply compromised by support for the far right.


• Gillian Darley at the LRB Blog writes about a now-forgotten Tolstoyan community in Essex.


• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution notes a new book by Kevin Erdmann arguing that the United States has been experiencing not a housing bubble but a housing shortage.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes the Boomerang Nebula, a nebula in our galaxy colder than intergalactic space.


• Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Conspiracy looks at libel law as it relates to the Covington schoolboys' confrontation.


• Window on Eurasia notes a window, in the early 1990s, when the independence of the republic of Karelia from Russia was imaginable.


• Arnold Zwicky free-associates around blue roses, homoerotic and otherwise.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Tornoto links: homelessness, cohabiting, TTC, fashion, Brooke Lynn Hytes

• Paul Salvatori writes at NOW Toronto about the homeless encampments beneath the Gardiner, surely a call for some meaningful action at the municipal level.


• VICE reports on how six young Torontonians dealt with the housing shortage in Toronto by buying a home together, cohabiting.


• blogTO takes a look at the ease of fare evasion on the TTC.


• Jamie Bradburn takes a look at some vintage fashion ads from Toronto in the 1980s.


• Etobicoke-born Brooke Lynn Hytes has become the first Canadian to compete on RuPaul's Drag Race, in Season 11, CP24 reports.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Wasaga Beach, Montréal, Barcelona, Narva, Luanda

• The question of how to develop, or redevelop, the Georgian Bay resort town of Wasaga Beach is ever-pressing. Global News reports.


• Le Devoir enters the discussion over the Royalmount development, arguing that the city of Montréal needs to fight urban sprawl.


• Guardian Cities reports on the efforts of Barcelona to keep its street kiosks, home to a thriving culture, alive in the digital age.


• The New York Times reports on how the government of Estonia is trying to use pop culture to help bind the Russophone-majority city of Narva into the country.


• This Guardian Cities photo essay takes a look at how the Angolan capital of Luanda, after a long economic boom driven by oil, is rich but terribly unequal.

[NEWS] Five science links: He Jiankui clones, submoons, ayahuasca, planetary nebulas, black holes

• Chinese scientist He Jiankui, responsible for genetically engineering babies, is along with his team facing serious legal consequences from the Chinese government. SCMP reports.


• A new paper suggests that submoons, moons of a world that is itself a moon, are not only theoretically possible but imaginable in orbit of known worlds including the Moon, Callisto, and Titan. Where are these?


• Is ayahuasca becoming a drug of widespread and legitimate mainstream usage? VICE reports.


• Planetary nebulas, Universe Today reports, are visible for only ten thousand years before their beautiful gases dissipate.


• The interiors of black holes apparently continue to grow indefinitely. (The physics is complicated, as one might expect.) Nautilus has the article.

[NEWS] Five LGBTQ links: Fathers Project, Valentina, Winnipeg, cities, chemsex

• io9 reports on the Fathers Project, a new alternate history project imagining what might have become of queer people in North America if HIV had not existed.


• Them interviews Valentina, fresh off of RuPaul's Drag Race and now appearing in a TV version of the classic Rent.


• CBC reports on two people in Winnipeg who want to build a library there for queer people of colour.


• Guardian Cities takes a look at the question of how gay-friendly different cities are. Locals' opinions, not just public policies, matter.


• Tim McCaskell writes at NOW Toronto about the threat posed by the growing presence of chemsex in queer Toronto (and beyond, too).

[ISL] Five islands links: #PEI, Tonga, Greenland, Montréal, Brexit

• CBC Prince Edward Island reports on a poster showing the hundred largest islands in the world. (PEI is #96.)


• A broken undersea cable has disrupted Internet service throughout the Kingdom of Tonga, Motherboard reports.


• The melting of ice is southwestern Greenland is accelerating, CBC reports.


• CityLab notes controversy in Montréal regarding plans to redesign the insular Parc-Jean-Drapeau.


• Al Jazeera looks at the problems facing the inhabitants of the United Kingdom's overseas territories, almost all islands, faced with Brexit.