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Feb. 20th, 2019
[BLOG] Some Wednesday links
Feb. 20th, 2019 12:01 pm- Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares a photo taken by the Lunar Reconnaissane Observer looking straight down on Chang'e-4.
- The Crux shares an argument for preserving the Apollo landing areas as part of the common heritage of humanity.
- D-Brief, looking at ancient evidence from Sri Lanka, suggests human beings evolved as hunters of smaller primates like monkeys.
- JSTOR Daily notes the evidence suggesting the limited potential of wildlife to adapt to heat waves.
- Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the racial tonedeafness of Bernie Sanders.
- The LRB Blog takes a look at qanats, the ingenious Persian underground irritation system that has spread worldwide.
- Marginal Revolution considers what Singapore will do with its sovereign investment fund, estimated to be worth at least a half-trillion US dollars.
- Window on Eurasia considers the effects that a merger of Belarus with Russia might have on Russia's own federal units.
- Arnold Zwicky notes the fun that others have had with puns on Vladimir and Estragon.
Some more population-related links popped up over the past week.
- CBC Toronto reported on this year’s iteration of Winter Stations. A public art festival held on the Lake Ontario shorefront in the east-end Toronto neighbourhood of The Beaches, Winter Stations this year will be based around the theme of migration.
- JSTOR Daily noted how the interracial marriages of serving members of the US military led to the liberalization of immigration law in the United States in the 1960s. With hundreds of thousands of interracial marriages of serving members of the American military to Asian women, there was simply no domestic constituency in the United States
- Ozy reported on how Dayton, Ohio, has managed to thrive in integrating its immigrant populations.
- Amro Ali, writing at Open Democracy, makes a case for the emergence of Berlin as a capital for Arab exiles fleeing the Middle East and North America in the aftermath of the failure of the Arab revolutions. The analogy he strikes to Paris in the 1970s, a city that offered similar shelter to Latin American refugees at that time, resonates.
- Alex Boyd at The Island Review details, with prose and photos, his visit to the isolated islands of St. Kilda, inhabited from prehistoric times but abandoned in 1930.
- VICE looks at the plight of people who, as convicted criminals, were deported to the Tonga where they held citizenship. How do they live in a homeland they may have no experience of? The relative lack of opportunity in Tonga that drove their family's earlier migration in the first place is a major challenge.
- Window on Eurasia notes how, in many post-Soviet countries including the Baltic States and Ukraine, ethnic Russians are assimilating into local majority ethnic groups. (The examples of the industrial Donbas and Crimea, I would suggest, are exceptional. In the case of the Donbas, 2014 might well have been the latest point at which a pro-Russian separatist movement was possible.)
- Cameron MacLeod at Spacing considers the poor record of the province of Ontario with supporting the TTC.
- Steve Munro, writing at NOW Toronto, looks at how the cost of the TTC to the provincial government is inevitably set to climb hugely.
- blogTO shares a list of five things Toronto can learn from Vienna.
- A second arcade bar is set to open in Toronto, Zed 80 on the Danforth. blogTO reports.
- Urban Toronto notes that the latest iteration of the Toronto of the Future conference is set for the end of June.
Tags:
- CBC reports on how Ottawa is storing its ever-growing mountain of snow removed from its streets.
- The city of Kingston, Ontario, is facing a growing shortage of family doctors despite it being a regional hub. Global News reports.
- The centenary of anti-Chinese riots in Halifax has just passed. (Would you believe I never learned of these at school?) Global News reports.
- VICE tells the story of how most people can, or cannot, afford to live in an ever-pricier city of Chicago.
- The SCMP reports on the "Greater Bay Area" plan just announced by China, an integration of the Pearl River area into a single global powerhouse. How will Hong Kong fit into this?
- Is the culture of the Canadian navy that much of an obstacle to the retention of personnel? Global News reports.
- That Chemi Lhamo, a Tibetan-Canadian student who was elected student president of the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus, has come under attacks coordinated through Chinese social media on account of her heritage is disturbing. CBC reports.
- A successful Nova Scotia chocolatier founded by Syrian refugees is set to take on new refugee hires. The National Post reports.
- Pankaj Mishra writing at The New York Times is, perhaps unkind but not wrong, in suggesting that the bad habits of Britain's imperial elites are finally rebounding on Britain in this mismanaged Brexit.
- Andrew Gallagher writes at Slugger O'Toole about the impossibility of Ireland ever having good boundaries through any imaginable partition.
- Hornet Stories looks at the queer history of the Wild West.
- Gwen Benaway writes movingly at Daily Xtra about the great harm transphobia continues to cause her, about how it continues to worsen her life and the lives of other trans people.
- This study suggesting that gay men, in political party systems like those of Europe where homophobia is not a polarizing force, often vote for bigoted right-wingers of one strand or another is not a surprise. Sadly.
- This Elizabeth Dias article at the New York Times examining the struggles and joys of gay priests of the Catholic Church, some few being out in this article, is moving.
- Joseph Osmundson writes movingly at Guernica Magazine about how, for him as a queer man growing into adulthood, the world of literature provided a much-needed knowledge of the past and his future. This resonates for me.