A Bit More Detail

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares stunning photos of the Triangulum galaxy.


• The Crux notes how innovative planning and recovery missions helped many NASA missions, like the Hubble and Kepler telescopes, improve over time.


• Sea stars on the Pacific coast of North America, D-Brief notes, are starting to die out en masse.


• David Finger at the Finger Post shows his readers his recent visit to the Incan ruins at Ollantaytambo, in Peru.


• Gizmodo notes how astronomers accidentally found the dwarf spheroidal galaxy Bedin I a mere 30 million light years away.


• JSTOR Daily notes the new evidence supporting the arguments of W.E.B. Dubois that black resistance under slavery helped the Confederacy lose the US Civil War.


• Language Hat notes the discovery of a new trilingual inscription in Iran, one combining the Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian languages.


• Language Log notes the impending death of the Arabic dialect of old Mosul, and notes what its speakers are said to talk like birds.


• Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns, and Money thinks that if Cary Booker does not win the Democratic nomination for 2020, he will at least push the discourse leftwards.


• Marginal Revolution notes new evidence that the post-1492 depopulation of the Americas led directly to the global cooling of the Little Ice Age.


• Neuroskeptic considers the ways in which emergence, at different levels, could be a property of the human brain.


• The NYR Daily features an excerpt from the new Édouard Louis book, Who Killed My Father, talking about the evolution relationship with his father over time.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw muses on the potential for a revival of print journalism in Australia.


• Roads and Kingdoms interviews journalist Jason Rezaian on the subject of his new book about his long imprisonment in Iran.


• Drew Rowsome writes about how censorship, on Facebook and on Blogspot, harms his writing and his ability to contribute to his communities.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel writes about how galaxy clusters lead to the premature death of stellar formation in their component galaxies.


• Window on Eurasia notes a new poll from Ukraine suggesting most Orthodox Christians there identify with the new Ukrainian national church, not the Russian one.


• Arnold Zwicky talks about language, editing, and error.

• The scale of the cuts by the Ontario government to the Ontario Arts Council, including those directed towards Indigenous artists, is appalling. Global News reports.


• The provinces of Alberta and Québec are feuding over the latter province's opposition to new pipeline construction, Albertans trying to lead a boycott. CTV News reports.


• Quartz notes, with reference to Brexit, that if the Oui had won the 1995 referendum on Québec independence Jean Chrétien would have held a second referendum to confirm the result.


• CBC hosts an opinion piece by Monte Solberg talking about western Canadian alienation.


• China-based social app WeChat has been limiting the articles its Canadian users can access on the Huawei crisis. The Toronto Star reports.

• This older JSTOR Daily link suggests that, used properly, Facebook can actually be good for its users, helping them maintain vital social connections.


• Alexandra Samuel's suggestion, at JSTOR Daily, that Facebook revived the classical epistolary friendship has some sense to it. I would be inclined to place an emphasis on E-mail over more modern social messaging systems.


• Drew Rowsome wrote a couple of months ago about how Facebook can make it difficult to post certain kinds of content without risking getting his ability to share this content limited.


• Farah Mohammed wrote at JSTOR Daily about the rise and fall of the blog, now in 2017 scarcely as important as it was a decade ago. Social media just does not support the sorts of long extended posts I like, it seems.


• Josephine Livingstone at The New Republic bids farewell to The Awl, an interesting online magazine that now looks as if it represented an earlier, failed model of journalism. (What is the working one? Ha.)

The company, LiveJournal, shows an error message to users inside Russia who try to read a blog maintained by prominent activist and politician Alexei Navalny, a vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Navalny uses the service to post about Putin, the Russian government and politics. Users in other countries can read Navalny’s blog without seeing the error message.

[. . .]

An early social media pioneer, LiveJournal was once popular in the United States but is now dwarfed by sites like Tumblr and Wordpress. The site does retain a smaller, dedicated following among Americans users, including George R.R. Martin, author of A Game of Thrones, who regularly posts on his LiveJournal blog. In Russia, LiveJournal is the most popular blogging platform – so popular, in fact, that the Russian name for LiveJournal has become synonymous with "blogging.”

LiveJournal has a history of being blocked by Russian authorities, and may be self-censoring to minimize the parts of their site that are unavailable inside Russia. The entire service was blocked in parts of Russia at least twice as a result of regional court decisions meant to block individual users. On March 13 of this year, Navalny’s blog, along with three Russian news sites, were officially ordered to be blocked by Russia’s telecom agency at the request of Russia’s Prosecutor General.

When it was blocked by the government, users inside some Russian cities trying to visit the banned LiveJournal site would have seen an error message from their Internet provider, saying that the page was not accessible.

But in the current case, the error message appears to come from LiveJournal itself, at a LiveJournal URL and on a page that includes the company’s logo and design. The error reads, “The page is blocked due to the decision of authorities in your area.” The error message is in English, though Navalny’s blog is in Russian. Attempts to reach Navalny’s blog from a U.S. Internet connection were successful.

A bill that will equate popular bloggers with mass media [Global Voices report] has passed Russia's lower house of parliament, the Duma. All that remains now are the rather perfunctory steps of passing the Federation Council, and approval by President Vladimir Putin. It now appears a fait accompli that starting with August 1, 2014 Russian bloggers with over 3,000 daily unique readers will be required to register in the same way an online newspaper does. However, some RuNet giants are already fighting back, proving ahead of time that enforcing such a law will be a logistical nightmare.

Earlier, Yandex.ru, Russia's most powerful search engine, stopped ranking blogs [Global Voices report] on its website. Now, on April 23 Dmitry Pilipenko, head of LiveJournal Russia, posted [ru] the following news in his LJ blog:

Starting today, all blog and community profiles where the number of subscribers ["friends" -ed.] is larger than two and a half thousand, will display 2,500+ instead of the actual number of users who are “Friends of”. The actual number will be available only to owners of blogs or the moderators of communities.

I must add that these changes only affect those users who use the Cyrillic services of LiveJournal.

The rating of users and communities, which was formed based on page-views, will also stop.

The above changes are based on plans to take measures to optimize the service. All coincidences are accidental.

Russia's most famous blogger (or as he describes himself: “corruption fighter, son, husband, father”) has been forced to move away from LiveJournal, the popular blogging platform that launched him to fame in the first place. As a result of government mandated censorship [Global Voices report], and notwithstanding attempts to counteract such censorship [Global Voices report], Alexey Navalny's team has started a new standalone blog, navalny.com [ru]. Because Navalny is still under house arrest, the blog is technically run by his wife. According to the first post [ru], this blog is an attempt to create a clean slate with Russia's Internet regulators, who claim that Navalny's old blog contains calls for unlawful rallies. At this point, Navalny's LiveJournal account [ru] has stopped updating with original content — it simply links to new posts on navalny.com.

Scene one: New festival in the Gulf invites internationally celebrated writer from Canada to help launch. Famous author accepts.

Scene two: Outraged British author Geraldine Bedell tells U.K. press that after she and her publisher, Penguin U.K., were invited to launch her book The Gulf Between Us at the festival, the invitation was withdrawn, she was persona non grata, and her book was banned. All, apparently, because one of the characters was a gay sheikh.

Scene three: Atwood sends a letter to festival director Isobel Abulhoul regretfully bowing out of her highly anticipated appearance for an onstage interview, explaining that as vice-president of International Pen, an organization that fights censorship, she cannot be part of this event in the light of what has happened.

But then events took a bizarre turn. It became apparent to Atwood that the situation was not at all what it appeared. First of all, this allegedly banned book had not even been published yet. Second, there was no evidence Bedell or her book had ever been invited in the first place, so the invitation could hardly have been cancelled.

Atwood was confused and troubled. Had she been spun? Having spent years fighting literary censorship, had she hastily leapt onto the wrong side – defending an alleged victim who had no case, while helping to sabotage a festival that deserved support?

Others might have been tempted to look the other way, or just wait for this controversy to go away. Not Atwood. Instead she cast herself as detective, determined to find out what really happened and why. This involved day after day of endless emails and phone calls, and writing an article for The Guardian (London) satirizing herself as "Anti-Censor Woman."

Well, what really happened, she found, was that the festival did what festivals often do. It decided not to invite the author and her book, as in "Thanks, dear, and good luck, but this is not for us."

So this incident hardly ranked with those notorious cases in which Nazis burned books, religious fanatics issued death threats, heretics were put on the rack, and tyrants tortured and jailed writers whose opinions didn't suit them.