[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

[rfmcdonald]

• 80 Beats reports on how the Chukchansi tribe of California has used more than a million dollars' revenue from their on-reserve casinos to try to fund the revival of their language.


• The Burgh Diaspora comments on how Brazil and Mexico, even though they are similar in being upwardly mobile middle-income Latin American democracies, respectively enjoy and suffer from very different portrayals in the international media (Brazil as successfully social-democratic country of the future, Mexico as seat of horrific drug gang warfare).


• Eastern Approaches has two posts describing the contestation of the Second World War in post-Communist Europe, one from Hungary commenting on the rehabilitation of that country's dictator Admiral Horthy, the other in Lithuania with the provisional government that took over immediately after the Soviets were driven out by the Nazis in 1941.


• Geocurrents portrays Tunisia's Djerba island, an ethnolinguistically and religiously diverse and economically cosmopolitan island that despite terrorism still hosts annual visits by members of the departed Jewish community.


• GNXP's Razib Khan wonders, in light of a recent study suggesting human musical preferences are non-arbitrary, if classical music with its hierarchical associations is fading, if our (possibly emerging) "world of nearly free music and amateur dispersed production may return to the roots of our species, from the vaulted arches of aristocrats back down the earthier tastes of the commons".


• Language Log's Julie Sedivy comments on the role of greetings in commercial establishments in Montréal as markers of identity and language change.


• Torontoist's guest contributor Krista Simpson notes that Toronto artists are staging guerrilla takeovers of the city's remaining telephone booths as impromptu art galleries.