A Bit More Detail

• The Big Picture shares photos of a Shanghai neighbourhood that refuses to sell out to developers.

James Bow rates California rail.

• Centauri Dreams looks at the large dwarf planet 2007 OR10.


• Dangerous Minds notes a campaign by a 9/11 conspiracy theorist to raise funds to buy an airplane and a building.


• The Dragon's Gaze looks at the Kepler-223 system.


• Language Hat looks at an astonishingly thorough German-led effort to publish a dictionary of Latin.


• The NYRB Daily assesses the Iran nuclear deal.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer considers Brazil and argues that any treachery in Sykes-Picot was less in the deal and more in the assumptions behind it.


• Transit Toronto notes the return of GO Transit's seasonal trains to Niagara.


• Window on Eurasia notes Moscow's refusal to allow Circassians a memorial march.

• On Livejournal, bitterlawngnome shares some remarkable vintage print ads from the early 20th century.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes that robots installed the mirrors for the James Webb Space Telescope.


• The Dragon's Tales notes the abundant water ice on the surface of Pluto.


• Joe. My. God. and Towleroad note the imprisonment of Philadelphia gaybasher Kathryn Knott.


• Language Hat explores college girl fiction.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes Marco Rubio's encounter with a gay man in New Hampshire.


• Marginal Revolution notes the global market for super-butlers.


• Steve Munro considers how Smarttrack and GO will co-exist.


• Otto Pohl compares nation-building in Central Asia with that in the Middle East.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes a conference held in Moscow on Muslims and their space in that city.

Imagine standing in a Moscow graveyard late at night. You're alone, with no bars on your phone and desperately curious about Russian author Anton Chekov.

It's an unlikely horror movie scenario, but it's one Moscow is preparing for by introducing free Wi-Fi to three major cemeteries.

Visitors to Novodevichy, Troyekurovskoye, and Vagankovo cemeteries will have access to free Wi-Fi starting sometime next year, according to French news service Agence France-Presse.

These are the city's historic burial grounds, which collectively hold the remains of Soviet Union leader Nikita Khruschchev, writer Nikolai Gogol and author Anton Chekov.

• Anthropology.net notes the embarrassing discovery that one of the vertebrae believed to have been part of the skeleton of early hominid Lucy actually belonged to a baboon.


• Antipope Charlie Stross comes up with another worrisome explanation for the Great Filter.


• BlogTO visits the Toronto offices of photo community site 500px.


• Centauri Dreams features a guest essay from Ashley Baldwin about near- and medium-term search strategies and technologies for exoplanets.


• Crooked Timber examines problems with non-copyright strategies.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper noting oddities in the protoplanetary disk of AA Tauri.


• The Dragon's Tales considers how how to make enduring software.


• Mathew Ingram notes that Rolling Stone encountered ruin with the story of Jackie by wanting it to be true.


• Joe. My. God. notes a New York City artist who took pictures of people in adjacent condos won the privacy suit put against him.


• Language Hat looks at foreign influence in the French language.


• Language Log links to a study of Ronald Reagan's speeches that finds evidence of his progression to Alzheimer's during the presidency.


• Languages of the World considers the geopolitics of a military strike against the Iranian nuclear program.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money argues that Jonah Lehrer was not treated unfairly.


• Marginal Revolution approves of Larry Kramer's new GLBT-themed history of the United States.


• Justin Petrone at North contrasts Easter as celebrated in Estonian and Russian churches.


• Savage Minds features an essay in support of the BDS movement aimed against Israel.


• Spacing engages David Miller on the need of urbanites to have access to nature.


• Torontoist notes the popularity of a bill against GLBT conversion therapy at Queen's Park.


• Towleroad observes the beginning of an opera about Grindr.


• The Volokh Conspiracy takes issue with Gerry Trudeau's criticism of cartoons which satirize Islam.


• Window on Eurasia looks at a Tatar woman who kept Islam alive in Soviet Moscow, argues that the sheer size of Donbas means that Russia cannot support it, looks at the centrality of the Second World War in modern Russia, and suggests the weak Ukrainian state but strong civil society is the inverse of the Russian situation.

As little as 18 months ago, one could still count hundreds of people in the Moscow metro who were prepared to demonstrate their involvement in political protest. No one wears the famous white ribbons anymore. The imitation of political activity on social networks has triumphed over real political activity, once and for all. Russians still turn out to defend their economic rights, but no one protests against the illegitimacy of parliament. Does anyone actually still remember that the Russian Duma is illegitimate? The war in Ukraine and the economic crisis, it seems, have completely eclipsed the political protest we saw in 2011-2012.

So, who are those people who took to the streets, and have now just as unexpectedly disappeared?

Apparently, the former protesters aren’t sure themselves. The social composition of the failed 'snow revolution' has been variously described, but the terminological confusion that this created only goes to demonstrate the acute identity crisis of the protesters. Identification and self-identification were focused around two seemingly interchangeable terms: 'middle class' and 'creative class'. Members of the opposition themselves declared that the 2011-2012 protests were a movement of the creative class. Those who did not support the white ribbon wearers still talk of the opposition-minded in derogatory terms (kreakly – creatives) in the pro-Putin media and social networks.

Just like the 19th century Russian intelligentsia’s love for Marxism, in the 2000s, Russians became obsessed with the theory of the creative class.

The Russian translation of Richard Florida's 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class. And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life appeared in 2005. This concept soon became a source of inspiration for people who believed Russia possessed 'a capacity for innovation' and 'a knowledge-based economy', as well as those who believed that progress would be possible without actually changing the political system. The phrase itself quickly became fashionable: ‘creative class’ became part of everyone’s vocabulary (whether you believed in it or not). Yet discussions on topics such as 'Is there a creative class in Russia?' demonstrated first and foremost that the participants had not read Florida.

There was, of course, no creative class in Russia, or certainly not the phenomenon that Florida was writing about. For Florida, a creative class could only emerge if certain conditions – the ‘Three T’s’ – were met: talent (a talented, well-educated, and qualified population), technology (technological infrastructure is essential for the support of business), and tolerance (a diverse community guided by the principle of 'live and let live').

• Bad Astronomy notes the astoundingly successful imaging of the nascent HL Tauri system and its young planetary system.


• Centauri Dreams briefly notes some of the challenges of SETI, notably the possibility of very different life and intelligence.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining how exoplanetary systems are structured mathematically.


• Eastern Approaches notes political turmoil in Georgia.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money mocks Bank of Canada governor Stephen Peloz's proposal that the unemployed should work for free.


• John Moyer notes that the understanding of poverty in popular culture in North America is off. Poor people do not own chalets on the lakeside, as in one rom-com.


• Torontoist notes that the North by Northeast music festival will be setting up shopping on the grounds of the substantially empty MaRS research complex near Queen's Park.


• Window on Eurasia notes Crimean Tatar controversies in Russian life and looks at the effect of migration to Moscow.

Toronto has a very different transportation problem than other North American cities, one that is harder to cope with, and [former Vancouver transit planner Larry] Beasley calls this “the Moscow syndrome”. Beasley has worked in that city in its attempt to come to grips with rising transit demand and strangling congestion, but Moscow faces the result of 20 years during which nothing was invested in the system after the fall of the Soviet system. The transit network has very high daily ridership, the urban structure encourages walking and transit trips, but things are coming apart at the seams. A trip to the airport takes three hours in traffic, and crowd control measures are needed on the transit system. There is not enough money for any projects, and governments have been in a collective denial about the scope of the problem.

There are universal truths — transportation needs cannot be sustained just on automobiles. Auto investment leads to increased use, and in Moscow’s economic climate, to exponential growth. Failure to invest leads to a decline in transit’s attractiveness and falling riding, and the longer this persists, the harder it is to catch up. Moscow planners have no idea how to get control of the situation. The dysfunctional network makes the city less competitive and economic development incentives don’t work because they cannot overcome fundamental transportation problems.

Moscow offers a lesson to Toronto. We are not as far down this path, but the symptoms are there for anyone to see. Moscow’s experience confirms that this is not about choosing one funding source, but all that are available. The debate will be over timing and ordering of new revenues (some are easier to implement both organizationally and politically), what Beasley called a “choreography of spending”.

• 80 Beats reports that the countries of the Sahel, from Senegal on the Atlantic to Djibouti on the Indian Ocean, hope to hold back the Sahara by planting a greenbelt of trees from sea to sea.


• blogTO's Agatha Barc writes about the land transaction between the British Crown and the Mississauga First Nation of southern Ontario that saw the landmass of Toronto become sovereign British (eventually Canadian) territory.


• The Global Sociology Blog observes that although the United States spends about as much as Sweden or Denmark in social expenditures, the biases in American spending patterns towards the middle classes and the rich leaves the American poor much worse off than their Nordic counterparts.


• Laywers, Guns and Money's Charli Carpenter considers at length the question of whistle-blowers: What legal protections do they have, in domestic and international law? What's the difference between whistle-blowing and efforts at public embarrassment?


• Mark Simpson makes the argument (convincing, I think) that American men are less homophobic than ever before mainly because in any number of domains, from fashion to physique to identity, they're so once-stereotypically gay already that being homophobic just doesn't make any sense.


• In the middle of an interesting-written extended stay in Germany, Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen writes about how Germany's Turkish community is actually integrating pretty nicely, thank you very much; no Eurabia to be found there.


• Slap Upside the Head writes about a bed and breakfast in British Columbia shut down by its owners since they couldn't exclude same-sex couples. We've all heard stories like this, I think.


• Window on Eurasia reports on a recent survey of Muscovite realtors that confirms that ethnic neighbourhoods are coalescing in that Russian world city.