[BLOG] Some Saturday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Centauri Dreams considers, in the light of potential climate change extinction, the definitions of habitable exoplanets. Do we assume life to be too flexible?


• D-Brief notes that the Dawn probe found evidence of organic compounds, amorphous carbon, on the surface of Ceres.


• Lauren Madden at the Everyday Sociology Blog urges people to resist the impulse to misclassify the causes of mass shootings as senseless randomness.


• Hornet Stories takes a look at Jobriath, the man who for a brief time in the mid-1970s was an out queer rock god, on what would have been his birthday.


• Imageo notes that anthropogenic climate change risks plunging the global climate back to the heat and high sea levels of 50 million years ago, to the Eocene.


• JSTOR Daily notes how the fairy tale stereotype of the passive female character was created by moral reformers following the Protestant Reformation.


• Language Hat notes the Ao language, created by utopian early 20th century dreamers from Lithuania's Jewish community as a universal method of communication.


• Mark Liberman at Language Log notes the emergence and evolution of the word "biomarker" over the past half-century.


• Simon Balto at Lawyers, Guns and Money writes about a frightening encounter on a night out with his partner with an aggressive person who kept calling him a "snowflake". What does this, the embrace of this word as a supposed critique, say about racism and conservatism in the United States now?


• The LRB Blog notes the prosecution of the Stansted 15 for blocking a deportation of refugees on terrorism. What does this say about the administration of justice and borders in the United Kingdom now?


• Marginal Revolution notes that, in China, scientists convicted of fraud will face serious hits to their social credit ratings.


• The NYR Daily takes a look at the "toxic femininity" of women on the American far right.


• Roads and Kingdoms looks at the struggle of Mayan peoples in Guatemala to secure their land claims in the face of commercial agriculture.


• Daniel Little at Understanding Society takes a look at how government enacts policy, not doing so as a unified whole at all.


• Window on Eurasia notes the deep hostility of Lukashenko in Belarus to any talk of deep integration with Russia, something he sees as tantamount to Belarus' annexation into Russia.


• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at the remarkable steel-banded sculpture of Fernando Suárez Reguera, and of sculptors like him.