- Why not build a public beach in the Montréal neighbourhood of Lachine? Global News considers.
- The Vietnamese cuisine of New Orleans does look good. VICE reports.
- CityLab describes an effort to build a smart city in Berlin, in Siemensstadt. I wish Berliners better outcomes than what Toronto seems to be getting in the Port Lands.
- Guardian Cities reports on what seems to me to be a terrible plan to flood the ancient settlement of Hasankeyf in Turkey for dams.
- Saša Petricic at CBC looks at how the political consensus in Hong Kong has broken down, perhaps irretrievably.
[BLOG] Some Friday links
Sep. 20th, 2019 12:13 pm- Architectuul profiles architectural photographer Lorenzo Zandri, here.
- Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait notes a new study suggesting red dwarf stars, by far the most common stars in the universe, have plenty of planets.
- The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly shares 11 tips for interviewers, reminding me of what I did for anthropology fieldwork.
- Centauri Dreams notes how water ice ejected from Enceladus makes the inner moons of Saturn brilliant.
- The Crux looks at the increasingly complicated question of when the first humans reached North America.
- D-Brief notes a new discovery suggesting the hearts of humans, unlike the hearts of other closely related primates, evolved to require endurance activities to remain healthy.
- Dangerous Minds shares with its readers the overlooked 1969 satire Putney Swope.
- The Dragon's Tales notes that the WFIRST infrared telescope has passed its first design review.
- Gizmodo notes how drought in Spain has revealed the megalithic Dolmen of Guadalperal for the first time in six decades.
- io9 looks at the amazing Jonathan Hickman run on the X-Men so far, one that has established the mutants as eye-catching and deeply alien.
- Joe. My. God. notes that the Pentagon has admitted that 2017 UFO videos do, in fact, depict some unidentified objects in the air.
- JSTOR Daily looks at the origin of the equestrian horseback statue in ancient Rome.
- Language Log shares a bilingual English/German pun from Berlin.
- Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money reflects on the legacy of Thomas Jefferson at Jefferson's grave.
- Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution looks at a new book arguing, contra Pinker perhaps, that the modern era is one of heightened violence.
- The New APPS Blog seeks to reconcile the philosophy of Hobbes with that of Foucault on biopower.
- Strange Company shares news clippings from 1970s Ohio about a pesky UFO.
- Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains why the idea of shooting garbage from Earth into the sun does not work.
- Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps explains the appearance of Brasilia on a 1920s German map: It turns out the capital was nearly realized then.
- Towleroad notes that Pete Buttigieg has taken to avoiding reading LGBTQ media because he dislikes their criticism of his gayness.
- Arnold Zwicky looks at diners and changing menus and slavery.
[BLOG] Some Saturday links
Sep. 14th, 2019 05:18 pm- Architectuul shares photos from a bike tour of Berlin.
- Bad Astronomer Phil Plait reports on new evidence that exocomets are raining on star Beta Pictoris.
- Larry Klaes at Centauri Dreams reviews the two late 1970s SF films Alien and Star Trek I, products of the same era.
- D-Brief reports on Hubble studies of the star clusters of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
- Bruce Dorminey shares Gemini telescope images of interstellar comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov).
- The Dragon's Tales shares video of Space X's Starhopper test flight.
- Far Outliers notes the import of the 13th century Norman king of England calling himself Edward after an Anglo-Saxon king.
- Gizmodo notes that not only can rats learn to play hide and seek, they seem to enjoy it.
- io9 notes the fantastic high camp of Mister Sinister in the new Jonathan Hickman X-Men run, borrowing a note from Kieron Gillen's portrayal of the character.
- Joe. My. God. notes that Guiliani's soon-to-be ex-wife says he has descended from 911 hero to a liar.
- Language Log looks at the recent ridiculous suggestion that English, among other languages, descends from Chinese.
- The LRB Blog looks at the brief history of commemorating the V2 attacks on London.
- Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the practice in Saskatchewan of sterilizing First Nations women against their consent.
- Marginal Revolution suggests that farmers in Brazil might be getting a partly unfair treatment. (Partly.)
- The Planetary Society Blog explains why C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) matters.
- Window on Eurasia notes that, for the first time, immigrants from Turkmenistan in Belarus outnumber immigrants from Ukraine.
[BLOG] Some Thursday links
Aug. 29th, 2019 10:04 am- The Buzz shares a TIFF reading list, here.
- Centauri Dreams notes the growing sensitivity of radial velocity techniques in finding weird exoplanet HR 5183 b, here.
- The Crux reports on circumgalactic gas and the death of galaxies.
- Dead Things notes the import of the discovery of the oldest known Australopithecine skull.
- Dangerous Minds reports on pioneering 1930s queer artist Hannah Gluckstein, also known as Gluck.
- Gizmodo notes that, for an unnamed reason, DARPA needs a large secure underground testing facility for tomorrow.
- JSTOR Daily looks at how Jim Crow laws affected Mexican immigrants in the early 20th century US.
- Language Hat looks at a new project to study Irish texts and language over centuries.
- Language Log shares some Chinglish signs from a top university in China.
- Lawyers, Guns and Money shares an interview with Jeffrey Melnick suggesting Charles Manson was substantially a convenient boogeyman.
- Marginal Revolution shares a paper suggesting marijuana legalization is linked to declining crime rates.
- Susan Neiman at the NYR Daily tells how she began her life as a white woman in Atlanta and is ending it as a Jewish woman in Berlin.
- The Planetary Society Blog looks at Hayabusa2 at Ryugu.
- Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel celebrated the 230th anniversary of Enceladus, the Saturn moon that might harbour life.
- Window on Eurasia notes how global warming is harming the rivers of Siberia, causing many to run short.
[BLOG] Some Sunday links
Jun. 2nd, 2019 01:07 pm- D-Brief reports on the abundance of plastic waste found buried in the beaches of the Cocos Islands.
- Joe. My. God. notes that the US has imposed tariffs against India.
- JSTOR Daily looks at the strange history of phrenology.
- Lawyers, Guns and Money takes note of the Trump Administration's honouring of Arthur Laffer.
- The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer looks at the electricity price crisis that might determine who gets to be elected president of Argentina.
- Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains how the Pauli Exclusion Principle makes matter possible.
- Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy argues against importing the principles of the Berlin Wall to the US-Mexico border.
- Window on Eurasia shares concerns that Russia is trying to expand its influence in the east of Belarus.
- CBC Hamilton reports on the options of the City of Hamilton faced with its having hired a prominent former white supremacist.
- CBC Ottawa reports that flood levels on the Ottawa River have reached record highs.
- The Montreal Gazette considers possible solutions to crowding on the Montréal subway, including new cars and special buses.
- Kingston is preparing for flooding, the city seeing a threat only in certain waterfront districts. Global News reports.
- Vancouver is applying a zoning freeze in a future mass transit corridor. Global News reports.
- CityLab looks at how the post-war dream of mass transit and densification for the Ohio city of Toledo never came about, and how it might now.
- Guardian Cities looks at construction proposals for New York City that never were.
- CityLab looks at how the California ghost town of Bodie is kept in good shape for tourists.
- Vox notes that just over one in ten thousand people in San Francisco is a billionaire.
- Leonid Bershidsky at Bloomberg considers why productivity in Berlin lags behind that in other European capital cities. Could it be that the young workers of Berlin are not devoted to earning income?
- La Presse considers some different strategies to keep rue Saint-Denis in Montréal a healthy thoroughfare and neighbourhood.
- Atlas Obscura explains how the upstate New York town of Hobart made itself as a home for a used book store cluster.
- Guardian Cities explains why anti-gentrirfication activists in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin are fighting to keep their local Aldi, to continue to have low-cost food locally.
- Window on Eurasia notes a poll of immigrant workers in St. Petersburg that finds most quite like their new home.
- CityLab looks at Polish architect Jadwiga Grabowska-Hawrylak, whose brutalism played a key role in the reconstruction of the Poland city of Wroclaw from the ruins of old German Breslau.
- CBC Ottawa reports on the complaint of an Ottawa condo-owner that his tenant is renting the unit out via Airbnb.
- CBC Montreal notes that a rent advocacy agency in the neighbourhood of Saint-Henri is being driven out of its offices by rent increases.
- VICE reports on how a Miami trailer park and its residents are set to be driven out of their home by luxury housing.
- CityLab reports on a Mexico City market, the Sonora Market, specializing in goods for religious believers.
- Reuters notes a street protest by rent activists in Berlin calling for the nationalizing of the housing stock.
[BLOG] Some Saturday links
Mar. 30th, 2019 12:45 pm- Architectuul profiles the construction of the Modern Berlin Temple built to a design by Mies van der Rohe in 1968.
- Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the beauty of galaxy M61.
- D-Brief notes new evidence that Mars sustained rivers on its surface at a surprising late date.
- Gizmodo notes a theory that the oddly shaped ring moons of Saturn might be product of a collision.
- Hornet Stories suggests/u> that recent raids on gay bars in New Orleans might be driven by internecine politics within the LGBTQ community.
- Joe. My. God. notes that a court in the Cayman Islands has recently legalized same-sex marriage there.
- JSTOR Daily looks at the origins of the Chipko activists of 1960s and 1970s India, whose tree-hugging helped save forests there.
- Language Log notes the story of Beau Jessep, who got rich off of a business creating English names for Chinese children.
- Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money, looking at the introduction of public healthcare in Saskatchewan and wider Canada, notes the great institutional differences that do not make that a close model for public healthcare in the US now.
- Marginal Revolution links to a paper examining the close relationship over time between population growth and economic and technological change.
- Roads and Kingdoms interviews documentary filmmaker Nadir Bouhmouch about a Amazigh community's resistance to an intrusive mine on their territory.
- The Russian Demographics Blog notes, correctly, that one reason why Ukrainians are more prone to emigration to Europe and points beyond than Russians is that Ukraine has long been included, in whole or in part, in European states.
- Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes that we still do not know why antimatter does not dominate in our universe.
- Understanding Society features a guest post from Indian sociologist V.K. Ramachandran talking about two visits four decades apart to one of his subjects.
- Vintage Space makes a compelling case for people not to be afraid of nuclear rockets in space, like the vintage never-deployed NERVA.
- Window on Eurasia takes issue with the bilingual radio programs aired in Russian republics, which subtly undermine local non-Russian languages.
- Arnold Zwicky starts with lilacs, which include hybrids tolerant of the California climate, and goes on to explore lavender in all of its glories, queer and otherwise.
- MTLBlog reports from each borough of Montréal to see what a monthly rent of $C 1000 can get a hopeful tenant. The results will shock you, especially if you are used to Toronto rents (or higher!).
- The Alberta city of Lethbridge hopes, coming the 2020 census, its population will finally reach the mark of one hundred thousand residents. Global News reports.
- The northern Canadian town of Tuktoyaktuk is literally falling into the Arctic Ocean, as the ground crumbles while the sea rises. The National Post reports.
- The aging of the population of taxi drivers of Hong Kong leaves open the question of who, or what, will take their place. Bloomberg reports.
- CityLab reports on the remarkable ambition of the new transit plan of Berlin.
- Sean Marshall at TVO notes the limited, if real, potential of a new ride-sharing app to bridge the transit gap between Kitchener-Waterloo, Guelph, and Hamilton in the west of the Golden Horseshoe.
- CBC Montreal notes delays in the renovation of the Biodôme.
- CityLab notes that in Portland, Maine, volunteering can help one get access to affordable housing, literally.
- CityLab notes how the government of Berlin is set to intervene directly in the housing market to ensure affordability.
- Guardian Cities looks at how Seoul is set to redevelop the districts once at the heart of the South Korean economic miracle.
Some more population-related links popped up over the past week.
- CBC Toronto reported on this year’s iteration of Winter Stations. A public art festival held on the Lake Ontario shorefront in the east-end Toronto neighbourhood of The Beaches, Winter Stations this year will be based around the theme of migration.
- JSTOR Daily noted how the interracial marriages of serving members of the US military led to the liberalization of immigration law in the United States in the 1960s. With hundreds of thousands of interracial marriages of serving members of the American military to Asian women, there was simply no domestic constituency in the United States
- Ozy reported on how Dayton, Ohio, has managed to thrive in integrating its immigrant populations.
- Amro Ali, writing at Open Democracy, makes a case for the emergence of Berlin as a capital for Arab exiles fleeing the Middle East and North America in the aftermath of the failure of the Arab revolutions. The analogy he strikes to Paris in the 1970s, a city that offered similar shelter to Latin American refugees at that time, resonates.
- Alex Boyd at The Island Review details, with prose and photos, his visit to the isolated islands of St. Kilda, inhabited from prehistoric times but abandoned in 1930.
- VICE looks at the plight of people who, as convicted criminals, were deported to the Tonga where they held citizenship. How do they live in a homeland they may have no experience of? The relative lack of opportunity in Tonga that drove their family's earlier migration in the first place is a major challenge.
- Window on Eurasia notes how, in many post-Soviet countries including the Baltic States and Ukraine, ethnic Russians are assimilating into local majority ethnic groups. (The examples of the industrial Donbas and Crimea, I would suggest, are exceptional. In the case of the Donbas, 2014 might well have been the latest point at which a pro-Russian separatist movement was possible.)
- CBC Montreal reports on how, and why, an Anglican church in Montréal will be hosting a circus.
- Ozy reports on how Dayton, Ohio, has managed to thrive in integrating its immigrant populations.
- CityLab notes how the Tate Modern gallery in London won a lawsuit against neighbours who complained gallery-goers could see inside their homes.
- Linda Lim at Bloomberg explains why Singapore is not a useful model for the post-Brexit United Kingdom.
- Amro Ali, writing at Open Democracy, makes a case for the emergence of Berlin as a capital for Arab exiles.
- CBC Hamilton recently reported on a new Facebook group intended to help Torontonians find their footing in neighbouring Hamilton.
- Will the new designs of the Montreal Alouettes be enough to reverse the CFL team's dwindling fanbase? Global News considers.
- CityLab points to the overlooked architectural heritage of Queens, in New York City.
- Guardian Cities reports on plans to rehabilitate roadside grandstands in Berlin abandoned for nearly a century.
- Georgia Straight reports on a proposal for supposedly affordable rental housing in Vancouver that is no such thing. Below-market rates are not enough when prices are so high already.
- The Conversation notes the dangers facing LGBTQ students and staff in Catholic schools in Canada.
- Deutsche Welle shares the story of how the Soviet Union in the 1970s hosted a delegation of visiting gay activists from Berlin.
- The Guardian reports on how LGBTQ people in Australia have found it difficult, even unsafe, to enjoy that country's beach culture.
- VICE shares photos from New York City's Paradise Garage, taken in the 1970s.
- Hornet Stories takes an extended look at the reasons, good and bad, for the decline of gay bars.
- At MacLean's, Meaghan Campbell reports on how the devastating crash of the Humboldt Broncos has hit that small Saskatchewan farm town.
- Hamilton police announces the arrest of local anarchist Peter Hopperton in connection with the actions of a crowd bent on vandalism on that city's Locke Street. CBC has it.
- Queen's University is participating in a summit with the city of Kingston on how students and long-term residents can be accommodated in the changing city. Global News reports.
- Attacks by right-wing groups in the Berlin district of Neukölln make many locals worried. DW reports.
- The small Chinese centre of Sidangkou, in the area of Tianjin, has become a world centre of saxophone production. The New York Times reports.
- What does the impending demolition of the venerable Union Carbide tower, at 270 Park Avenue, to make way for a new ultratall skyscraper say about changing New York City? New York reports.
- The South China Morning Post observes how the cities of Shenzhen and Guangzhou, though still behind Hong Kong, are starting to advance past it as a result of these cities' sustained investment in innovative technologies.
- Aldi in Berlin will apparently build affordable student housing on top of at least some of its new discount food stores in Berlin. Bloomberg reports.
- This VICE article looking at the lives of lonely people in Amsterdam, many newcomers, is affecting.
- The Crisis Group looks at how Syrian refugees, of diverse ethnicities and religions, are finding a new home in the multiethnic Istanbul neighbourhood of Sultangazi.
- Hornet Stories tells of Leo Koury, a mobster who apparently kickstarted gay nigthclub life in the Virginia city of Richmond.
- VICE shares an article on an exhibit at a Berlin museum looking at the history and sociology of cruising in public washrooms.
- VICE features a tour of Man's Country, a long-established Chicago bathhouse now closing after four decades.
- Hornet Stories points to the Instagram account of Mike Balaban, "bammer47", whose account is full of LGBTQ-relevant photos of personal and general relevance.
- Khaleb El Khatib at VICE interviews some "instagays", gay (or bi, or queer) Instagram users whose photos (including selfies) attract huge followings. What do we get out of them? What do they get out of it?
[BLOG] Some Wednesday links
Jan. 10th, 2018 01:04 pm- 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.
- Max Mertens at NOW Toronto takes a look at the storied history of the Sam the Record Man sign.
- The Local Germany Kreports on how the fate of Berlin's techno nightclubs is a matter of general concern across the political spectrum.
- Der Spiegel has released audiotapes of that paper's interview with Morrissey, revealing his denials of racism and victim-blaming to be false.
- Bjork's new album Utopia, that artist's reaction to the Anthropocene, sounds like it will be fantastic.
- Carl Wilson's examination of the stylistic and musical evolution of the indie scene in Canada over the past decade, from the collective towards Soundcloud, is fascinating. The Globe and Mail has it.