[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait considers the real possibility that extrasolar visitor 'Oumuamua may have been ejected from the system of a dying star.


• Centauri Dreams notes new efforts to determine brown dwarf demographics.


• Crooked Timber shares some research on the rise and fall of Keynesianism after the financial crisis.


• Hornet Stories shares a decidedly NSFW article about gay sex in Berlin.


• JSTOR Daily notes the surprisingly high frequency of interspecies sex in the wild.


• Language Hat notes new efforts to promote the status of the Luxembourgish language in the grand duchy.


• The LRB Blog notes how a chess tournament hosted in Saudi Arabia has failed badly from the PR perspective.


• What role does the novelist have in a world where the television serial is moving in on the territory of literature? The NYR Daily considers.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw reflects on John Lyons' book Balcony over Jerusalem, the controversy over the book, and the Middle East generally.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes the ominous import of the decent drone attack in Syria against Russian forces.


• Drew Rowsome praises the 2016 play Mustard, currently playing again at the Tarragon, as a modern-day classic.


• Spacing features a review of a fantastic-sounding book about the architecture of Las Vegas.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel considers the impact of the very rapid rotation of pulsars about their very shape.