[BLOG] Some Monday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Bag News Notes features multiple interesting brief photo essays: one about the downloadable gun; one about the woman miraculously rescued from the wreckage of the factory in Bangladesh; one about how modernism, done right, can be quite beautiful.


• At Beyond the Beyond, Bruce Sterling links to a critique of the English words and terms used by European Union officials and to a description of the post-democratic "info-state".


• Crooked Timber commemorates the conviction of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Mott by noting that Ronald Reagan spoke highly of him.


• At A Fistful of Euros, Edward Hugh introduces the work of a blogger who suggests that, between emigration and the consequences of a low birth rate, Portugal's economy is set to crater.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley considers Edward Hugh's suggestion that some countries might face state failure as depopulation proceeds.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen seems to like Feedly as an alternative to Google Reader.


• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín blogs about the way in people transgressed identities--national, occupational, and so on--can be quite commonsensical while others who don't get this can be stuck.


• Savage Minds interviews journalist and anthropologist Sarah Kendzior about experience in her two professions.


• Strange Maps links to a map of chimpanzee and bonobo populations in central Africa, divided not only by their behaviour (the first violent, the second sexual) but by the Congo River.


• Une heure de peine's Denis Colombi tackles the idea that French emigrants are refugees fleeing a hostile environment at home, as opposed to being mobile professionals in a global workplace.


• The Volokh Conspiracy's Ilya Somin argues that judicial rulings legalizing same-sex marriage have not harmed same-sex marriage at the ballot box.


• Window on Eurasia touches on the ethnic divisions among Russian Buddhists--Kalmyks, Tuvans, Buryats--that is preventing the establishment of a Buddhist sanctuary in Moscow.