A Bit More Detail

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes how variable gravity is on irregular asteroid Bennu.


• Bruce Dorminey reports on how the European Southern Observatory has charted the Magellanic Clouds in unprecedented detail.


• The Dragon's Tales shares a collection of links looking at the Precambrian Earth.


• Andrew LePage at Drew Ex Machina reports on the late 1950s race to send probes to the Moon.


• Gizmodo shares some stunning astronomy photos.


• JSTOR Daily reports on the saltwater roads, the routes that slaves in Florida used to escape to the free Bahamas.


• Language Log looks at some examples of bad English from Japan. How did they come about?


• Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money rejects the idea of honouring people like Condoleezza Rice.


• Marginal Revolution considers the idea of free will in light of neurology.


• Corey S Powell at Out There interviews James Lovelock on his new book Novacene, in which Lovelock imagines the future world and Gaia taken over by AI.


• Window on Eurasia notes the water shortages faced by downstream countries in Central Asia.

• This r/imaginarymaps map imagines an early medieval France that became not a notional kingdom but rather a decentralized empire, a Holy Roman Empire of the French Nation.


• This r/imaginarymaps map imagines a greater Austria that includes Slovenia.


• A Greater Slovenia, encompassing lands from Austria, Italy, and even Hungary, is the subject of this r/imaginarymaps map.


• Could an Austria divided in the Cold War be divided like this r/imaginarymaps map?
  
• This r/imaginarymaps map shows a Japanese Empire that survived until 1956, encompassing much of the Russian Far East as well as Manchuria and Korea.

• 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.

• Ryan Anderson at Anthrodendum takes a look at how the threat posed to coastal properties by sea level rise reveals much about how human beings assign value.


• A BCer in Toronto's Jeff Jedras writes about the food at a Newfoundlander party in Ottawa.


• D-Brief considers how past ice ages might have been caused by the shifting poles.


• Karen Sternheimer at the Everyday Sociology Blog takes a look at the work of Michelle Pannor Silver, looking at how retirement can influence the identities of individuals.


• Far Outliers notes that, in its first major wars, Japan treated prisoners of war well.


• JSTOR Daily examines a paper that takes a look at how the X-Men have achieved such resonance in pop culture, such power as symbols of minorities' persecution and survival.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money is critical of the effusive press coverage of Mitt Romney, new Republican senator.


• Geoffrey Pullum at Lingua Franca shares, for other English speakers, a lexicon of specialized words from the United Kingdom regarding Brexit.


• At the LRB Blog, Hyo Yoon Kang takes a look at a series of legal hearings investigating the possibility of assigning legal responsibility for global warming to "carbon majors" like big oil.


• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution shares his argument that the history of the 21st century United States might look like that of the 19th century, with progress despite political disarray.


• The NYR Daily shares the arguments of scholar of populism, Jan-Werner Müller, looking at what Cold War liberalism has to say now.


• Peter Rukavina shares the story of his two visits to relatives around the Croatian city of Kutina, with photos.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel looks at how astronomers solved the mystery of the "Zone of Avoidance", the portions of space blotted out by the dense plane of our galaxy.


• Window on Eurasia reports from a conference on minority languages where speakers complain about Russian government pressures against their languages.


• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at tea, starting with tea-time aphorisms and going further afield.

• Adam Fish at Anthro{dendum} takes a look at the roles of drones in capitalism, here.


• Bad Astronomy talks about the discovery of a nascent planet in orbit of young star PDS 70.


• Centauri Dreams notes what the discovery of a Charon eclipsing its partner Pluto meant, for those worlds and for astronomy generally.


• D-Brief notes a demographic study of Italian centenarians suggesting that, after reaching the age of 105, human mortality rates seem to plateau. Does this indicate the potential for further life expectancy increases?


• Dead Things shares the result of a genetics study of silkworms. Where did these anchors of the Silk Road come from?


• Jonathan Wynn at the Everyday Sociology Blog considers the role of the side hustle in creative professions.


• Far Outliers reports on the time, in the 1930s, when some people in Second Republic Poland thought that the country should acquire overseas colonies.


• Hornet Stories reports on how, in earlier centuries, the English word "pinke" meant a shade of yellow.


• JSTOR Daily reports on how, nearly two decades later, Sex and the City is still an influential and important piece of pop culture.


• Language Hat links to Keith Gessen's account, in The New Yorker, about how he came to teach his young son Russian.


• Lingua Franca, at the Chronicle of Higher Education, reports on the decent and strongly Cuban Spanish spoken by Ernest Hemingway.


• The NYR Daily looks at the mystique surrounding testosterone, the powerful masculinizing hormone.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer shares his thoughts on the election, in Mexico, of left-leaning populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Worst-case scenarios aren't likely to materialize in the short and medium terms, at least.


• Vintage Space notes how, at the height of the Cold War, some hoped to demonstrate American strength by nuking the Moon. (Really.)


• Window on Eurasia links to an essayist who suggests that Russia should look to America as much as to Europe for models of society.

• This report from the Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso noting the sheer scale of emigration in parts of rural Albania, proceeding to the point of depopulating entire territories, tells a remarkable story.


• This opinion suggesting that, due to the breakdown of the economy of Venezuela, we will soon see a refugee crisis rivaling Syria's seems frighteningly plausible.


• Politico Europe notes that, in the case of Latvia, where emigration has helped bring the country's population down below two million, there are serious concerns.


• OZY tells the unexpected story of hundreds of young Namibian children who, during apartheid, were raised in safety in Communist East Germany.


• Many Chinese are fleeing the pollution of Beijing and other major cities for new lives in the cleaner environments in the southern province of Yunnan. The Guardian reports.

• Kambiz Kamrani at Anthropology.net notes that lidar scanning has revealed that the pre-Columbian city of Angamuco, in western Mexico, is much bigger than previously thought.


• James Bow makes an excellent case for the revitalization of VIA Rail as a passenger service for longer-haul trips around Ontario.


• D-Brief notes neurological evidence suggesting why people react so badly to perceived injustices.


• The Dragon's Tales takes a look at the list of countries embracing thorough roboticization.


• Andrew LePage at Drew Ex Machina takes a look at the most powerful launch vehicles, both Soviet and American, to date.


• Far Outliers considers Safavid Iran as an imperfect gunpowder empire.


• Despite the explanation, I fail to see how LGBTQ people could benefit from a cryptocurrency all our own. What would be the point, especially in homophobic environments where spending it would involve outing ourselves? Hornet Stories shares the idea.


• Imageo notes that sea ice off Alaska has actually begun contracting this winter, not started growing.


• JSTOR Daily notes how the production and consumption of lace, and lace products, was highly politicized for the Victorians.


• Language Hat makes a case for the importance of translation as a political act, bridging boundaries.


• Language Log takes a look at the pronunciation and mispronunciation of city names, starting with PyeongChang.


• This critical Erik Loomis obituary of Billy Graham, noting the preacher's many faults, is what Graham deserves. From Lawyers, Guns and Money, here.


• Bernard Porter at the LRB Blog is critical of the easy claims that Corbyn was a knowing agent of Communist Czechoslovakia.


• The Map Room Blog shares this map from r/mapporn, imagining a United States organized into states as proportionally imbalanced in population as the provinces of Canada?


• Marginal Revolution rightly fears a possible restart to the civil war in Congo.


• Neuroskeptic reports on a controversial psychological study in Ghana that saw the investigation of "prayer camps", where mentally ill are kept chain, as a form of treatment.


• The NYR Daily makes the case that the Congolese should be allowed to enjoy some measure of peace from foreign interference, whether from the West or from African neighbous (Rwanda, particularly).


• At the Planetary Society Blog, Emily Lakdawalla looks at the many things that can go wrong with sample return missions.


• Rocky Planet notes that the eruption of Indonesian volcano Sinabung can be easily seen from space.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes how the New Horizons Pluto photos show a world marked by its subsurface oceans.


• Window on Eurasia notes that, although fertility rates among non-Russians have generally fallen to the level of Russians, demographic momentum and Russian emigration drive continue demographic shifts.


• Livio Di Matteo at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative charts the balance of federal versus provincial government expenditure in Canada, finding a notable shift towards the provinces in recent decades.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell makes the case, through the example of the fire standards that led to Grenfell Tower, that John Major was more radical than Margaret Thatcher in allowing core functions of the state to be privatized.


• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at some alcoholic drinks with outré names.

• Anthropology.net notes that the discovery of an ancient Homo sapiens jawbone in Israel pushes back the history of our species by quite a bit.


• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares stunning photos of spiral galaxy NGC 1398.


• Centauri Dreams considers the ways in which the highly reflective surface of Europa might be misleading to probes seeking to land on its surface.


• The Dragon's Tales rounds up more information about extrasolar visitor 'Oumuamua.


• Far Outliers considers the staggering losses, human and territorial and strategic, of Finland in the Winter War.


• Hornet Stories notes preliminary plans to set up an original sequel to Call Me Be Your Name later in the 1980s, in the era of AIDS.


• Russell Arben Fox at In Media Res considers if Wichita will be able to elect a Wichitan as governor of Kansas, for the first time in a while.


• io9 takes a look at the interesting ways in which Star Wars and Star Trek have been subverting traditional audience assumptions about these franchises.


• JSTOR Daily links to a paper examining what decision-makers in North Vietnam were thinking on the eve of the Tet offensive, fifty years ago.


• The LRB Blog takes a look at a new book examining the 1984 IRA assassination attempt against Margaret Thatcher.


• The Map Room Blog links to an article examining how school districts, not just electoral districts, can be products of gerrymandering.


• Marginal Revolution seeks suggestions for good books to explain Canada to non-Canadians, and comes up with a shortlist of its own.


• Kenan Malik at the NYR Daily takes a look at contemporary efforts to justify the British Empire as good for its subjects. Who is doing this, and why?

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly calls on journalists to stand up to Trump.


• Centauri Dreams looks at exocomets.


• Language Log shares an ad from the 1920s using the most vintage language imaginable.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money talks about globalization as a mechanism for concentrating wealth at the top of the elite.


• The LRB Blog talks about the ghosts of the Cold War in the contemporary world.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen argues that Germany has its own responsibility in transatlantic relations.


• The New APPS Blog looks at the importance of administrative law.


• The NYRB Daily celebrates John Berger.


• Savage Minds proposes a read-in of Michel Foucault in protest of Trump's inauguration on the 20th.


• Towleroad reports on the latest statistics on the proportions of LGBT people in the United States.


• Window on Eurasia looks at the continuing depopulation of the Russian Far East and examines the shift to indigenous naming practices in Kyrgyzstan.

It is not hard to see why Trump might choose Putin as his fantasy friend. Putin is the real world version of the person Trump pretends to be on television. Trump’s financial success (such as it is) has been as a New York real estate speculator, a world of private deal-making that can seem rough and tough—until you compare it to the Russia of the 1990s that ultimately produced the Putin regime. Trump presents himself as the maker of a financial empire who is willing to break all the rules, whereas that is what Putin in fact is. Thus far Trump can only verbally abuse his opponents at rallies, whereas Putin’s opponents are assassinated. Thus far Trump can only have his campaign manager rough up journalists he doesn’t like. In Russia some of the best journalists are in fact murdered.

President Putin, who is an intelligent and penetrating judge of men, especially men with masculinity issues, has quickly drawn the correct conclusion. In the past he has done well for himself by recruiting among politicians who exhibit greater vanity than decency, such as Silvio Berlusconi and Gerhard Schröder. The premise of Russian foreign policy to the West is that the rule of law is one big joke; the practice of Russian foreign policy is to find prominent people in the West who agree. Moscow has found such people throughout Europe; until the rise of Trump the idea of an American who would volunteer to be a Kremlin client would have seemed unlikely. Trump represents an unprecedented standard of American servility, and should therefore be cultivated as a future Russian client.

Restaurant owner Dominykas Ceckauskas said Saturday the presumptive U.S. Republican presidential nominee and the Russian president both have huge egos "and they seem to get along pretty well."

He said the image is "an ironic view of what can be expected."

Local artist Mindaugas Bonanu created the wheat paste poster for the eatery in the capital Vilnius on Friday. It's on the outside of the Keule Ruke restaurant— Lithuanian for "Smoking Pig" — along with the text "Make Everything Great Again" — a play on Trump's slogan "Make America Great Again."

Ceckauskas said the poster was a nod to a 1979 photograph of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev kissing East German ally Erich Honecker on the mouth — once a customary greeting between Socialist leaders. The iconic shot was later painted on the Berlin Wall.