A Bit More Detail

• Bad Astronomy notes a new detailed study suggesting that asteroid Hygeia is round. Does this mean it is a dwarf planet?


• The Buzz notes that the Toronto Public Library has a free booklet on the birds of Toronto available at its branches.


• Crooked Timber looks forward to a future, thanks to Trump, without the World Trade Organization.


• D-Brief notes how the kelp forests off California were hurt by unseasonal heat and disease.


• Bruce Dorminey notes an impending collision of supergalactic clusters.


• Karen Sternheimer at the Everyday Sociology Blog looks at how judgement can complicate collective action.


• Language Hat looks at the different definitions of the word "mobile".

Language Log looks at the deep influence of the Persian language upon Marathi.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=44807

• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how, if anything, climate scientists make conservative claims about their predictions.


• Marginal Revolution wonders if planned power outages are a good way to deal with the threat of wildfires in California.


• The NYR Daily looks at the ethnic cleansing being enabled by Turkey in Kurdish Syria.


• Corey S. Powell at Out There interviews archeologist Arthur Lin about his use of space-based technologies to discovery traces of the past.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer looks at the staggering inequality in Chile, driver of the recent protests.


• At Roads and Kingdoms, Anthony Elghossain reports from the scene of the mass protests in Lebanon.


• Drew Rowsome tells how his balcony garden fared this year.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel looks at stellar generations in the universe. (Our sun is a third-generation star.)


• Strange Company looks at the murder of a girl five years old in Indiana in 1898. Was the neighbor boy twelve years old accused of the crime the culprit?


• Denis Colombi at Une heure de peine takes a look at social mobility in France.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little considers economic historians and their study of capitalism.


• Window on Eurasia looks at the pro-Russian policies of the Moldova enclave of Gagauzia, and draws recommendations for Ukraine re: the Donbas.

• D-Brief considers the possibility that human food when eaten by bears, by shortening their hibernation periods, might contribute to their premature aging.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog considers the political power of sports and of music.


• Far Outliers notes the rising bourgeoisie of Calcutta in the 1990s.


• Steve Roby at The Fifteenth makes the case for Discovery as worthy of being considered Star Trek, not least because it is doing something new.


• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing notes how our tendency to track our lives through data can become dystopian.


• JSTOR Daily notes that Illinois is starting to become home to resident populations of bald eagles.


• Language Log takes a look at Ubykh.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes a Trumpist Canadian border guard.


• The New APPS Blog notes how helicopter parenting is linked to rising levels of inequality.


• The NYR Daily considers Jasper Johns.


• At Out of Ambit, Diane Duane considers the rhythms and cycles of life generally and of being a writer specifically.


• Otto Pohl looks at how people from the different German communities of southeast Europe were, at the end of the Second World War, taken to the Soviet Union as forced labourers.


• Steve Maynard writes at Spacing, in the aftermath of the death of Jackie Shane, about the erasure and recovery of non-white queer history in Toronto.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains what would happen if someone fell into a blackhole.


• Window on Eurasia notes that the number of immigrants to Russia are falling, with Ukrainians diminishing particularly in number while Central Asian numbers remain more resistant to the trend.


• Arnold Zwicky notes the telling omission of sexual orientation as a protected category re: hate crimes.

• D-Brief notes that CRISPR is being used to edit the genes of pigs, the better to protect them against disease.


• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing argues that silence on social networks is often not an option, that membership might compel one to speak. I wonder: That was not my experience with E-mail lists.


• Joe. My. God. notes that social network Gab, favoured by the alt-right, disclaims any responsibility for giving the synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh a platform.


• JSTOR Daily notes the massive, unprecedented, and environmentally disruptive growth of great mats of sargassum seaweed in the Caribbean.


• Language Hat notes the poster's problems grappling with Doeteyevsky's complex novel The Devils, a messy novel product of messy times.


• Language Log notes the use of pinyin on Wikipedia to annotate Chinese words.


• Marginal Revolution links to a paper noting that data mining is not all-powerful if one is only mining noise.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes that, finally, we are making enough antimatter to be able to figure out whether antimatter is governed by gravity or antigravity.


• At the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin talks about how he was threatened on Facebook by mail bomber Cesar Sayoc.


• Window on Eurasia notes the 1947 deportation of more than a hundred thousand Ukrainians from the west of their country to Siberia and Kazakhstan.


• Arnold Zwicky ruminates about late October holidays and their food, Hallowe'en not being the only one.

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at enormous, explosive Wolf-Rayet stars, and at WR 124 in particular.
  
• The Big Picture shares heart-rending photos of Rohingya refugees fleeing Burma.


• Centauri Dreams considers the potential of near-future robotic asteroid mining.


• D-Brief notes the discovery of vast cave systems on the Moon, potential homes for settlers.


• Hornet Stories exposes young children to Madonna's hit songs and videos of the 1980s. She still has it.


• Inkfish notes that a beluga raised in captivity among dolphins has picked up elements of their speech.


• Language Hat notes a dubious claim that a stelae containing Luwian hieroglyphic script, from ancient Anatolia, has been translated.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money considers the question of preserving brutalist buildings.


• The LRB Blog considers how Brexit, intended to enhance British sovereignty and power, will weaken both.


• The Map Room Blog notes that the moons and planets of the solar system have been added to Google Maps.


• The NYR Daily considers how the Burmese government is carefully creating a case for Rohingya genocide.


• The Power and Money's Noel Maurer concludes, regretfully, that the market for suborbital travel is just not there.


• Visiting a shrimp festival in Louisiana, Roads and Kingdoms considers how the fisheries work with the oil industry (or not).


• Towleroad reports on the apparent abduction in Chechnya of singer Zelimkhan Bakayev, part of the anti-gay pogrom there.


• Window on Eurasia notes that rebuilding Kaliningrad as a Russian military outpost will be expensive.

• blogTO lists some interesting things to do and see in Toronto's American neighbour, Buffalo.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly strongly defends contemporary journalism as essential for understanding the world.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money rightly takes issue with the claim identity politics hinders the US left. Remember New Deal coalitions?


• Marginal Revolution notes just how expensive it is to run Harvard.


• Otto Pohl notes the upcoming 76th anniversary of the Soviet deportation of the Volga Germans.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer reports on the remarkably fluent code-switching between English and French of some Washington D.C. subway riders.


• Strange Maps notes rival food and fabric maps of India and Pakistan.


• Tricia Wood at Torontoist argues that, for environmental and economic reasons, Ontario needs high-speed rail.


• Window on Eurasia suggests Tatarstan has done a poor job of defending its sovereignty from the Russian government.

• Centauri Dreams looks at the SPECULOOS red dwarf observation program.


• The Crux examines VX nerve agent, the chemical apparently used to assassinate the half-brother of North Korea's ruler.


• Dangerous Minds shares photos of the inhabitants of the Tokyo night, like gangsters and prostitutes and drag queens.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money examines Donald Trump's tepid and belated denunciation of anti-Semitism.


• Language Log looks at the story of the Wenzhounese, a Chinese group notable for its diaspora in Italy.


• The LRB Blog looks at the by-elections in the British ridings of Stoke and Copeland and notes the problems of labour.


• The Map Room Blog shares a post-Brexit map of the European Union with an independent Scotland.


• Marginal Revolution reports that a border tax would be a poor idea for the United States and Mexico.


• The NYRB Daily looks at the art of the medieval Tibetan kingdom of Guge.


• Otto Pohl notes the 73rd anniversary of Stalin's deportation of the Chechens and the Ingush.


• Supernova Condensate points out that Venus is actually the most Earth-like planet we know of. Why do we not explore it more?


• Towleroad notes Depeche Mode's denunciation of the alt-right and Richard Spencer.


• Whatever's John Scalzi considers the question of feeling empathy for horrible people.


• Window on Eurasia notes the thousands of Russian citizens involved with ISIS and examines the militarization of Kaliningrad.

• blogTO celebrates High Park.


• Marginal Revolution celebrates the life and achievements of Benedict Anderson.


• Out of Ambit's Diane Duane shares a beautiful map of the Atlantic seaboard of the United States that she hand-drew in 1980.


• Towleroad discusses the mechanics of a same-sex couple's wedding.


• Transit Toronto notes upcoming meetings to discuss the future of transit in the Toronto area.


• Window on Eurasia looks at anti-Americanism in the Russian elite and suggests Ukraine should recognize the expulsion of Circassians and other Caucasians.

• blogTO notes that, this summer, there will be a play in Toronto about Target Canada's demise set in an old Target store.


• Dangerous Minds shares photos of women using boxy early 1980s office computers.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to one paper suggesting most super-Earths are mini-Neptunes and to another noting the odd disk of L1455 IRS1.


• The Dragon's Tales looks at the huge problem of corporate debt in China.


• Joe. My. God. notes a new Indonesian ban on "effeminate" men from television.


• Language Hat notes German/Polish ethnolinguistic tensions in late medieval Poland.


• The Map Room Blog shares a link to posters of the New York subway.


• The Planetary Society Blog introduces readers to the new Lightsail 2 cubesat.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer looks at the terrible housing shortage in the coastal United States, especially the most desirable areas of said.


• Torontoist notes York University's construction of new dorms.


• Window on Eurasia notes that the continuation of Western sanctions against Russia depends on Ukraine's continued reforms.


• Arnold Zwicky takes issue with Wordpress' categorization system, from a linguistic perspective.

Conspiracy theories are no stranger to resourceful leaders. They can consolidate political power, cultivate the image of an external enemy and reduce their responsibility for the nation's ills. And in the ex-Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, conspiracy theories help keep incumbent president Ilham Aliyev in power.

According to these conspiracies, Azerbaijan has two main enemies: the Armenian lobby and the jealous west. As the former is often said to finance the latter, these two enemies become one: an omnipresent and all-powerful ‘Armenian lobby’. This powerful structure has become a commonly used weapon in the hands of the authoritarian leadership of Azerbaijan to crack down on dissent. By referring to all of its critics both at home and abroad as Armenian, pro-Armenian, and representing Armenian interests, the authorities have created a quick conspiracy formula for muzzling independent voices by labelling them as traitors.

In Azerbaijan, Armenia wasn’t always used as a political tool—at least, not as much as today. Between 1988 and 1994, the two countries fought a bitter war over the mountainous area of Nagorno Karabakh. The ceasefire that ended the conflict in 1994 failed to maintain a buffer zone.

Casualties on the front line continue to this day, and the failure to reach an agreement between the two states to this day leaves the territory administered as an unrecognised state under Armenian protection. Thousands of civilians have been displaced. Warlike rhetoric has significantly increased over the years and, these days, it is the rubber stamped government policy in both Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The three main capital cities of the region have their own distinct histories. A century ago, neither Tbilisi (Tiflis), Baku, nor Yerevan had a majority population of Georgians, Azerbaijanis, or Armenians, respectively. Tbilisi can lay claim to being the capital of the Caucasus, but its Georgian character has been much more intermittent. For five hundred years it was an Arab town, while the older city of Mtskheta was the old Georgian capital. Then, in the medieval period, the city was taken over by the Armenian merchant class. They were the biggest community in the nineteenth century and finally left en masse only in the 1960s. Famous Tbilisi Armenians have included the world chess champion Tigran Petrosian and the filmmaker Sergei Parajanov. Baku became a cosmopolitan city with many different ethnic groups from the late nineteenth century. Russian became its lingua franca. Garry Kasparov, the Jewish Armenian world chess champion, who was born in Baku but is unable to return there because of his Armenian roots, describes his nationality as “Bakuvian” (Bakinets in Russian). Baku only turned into a strongly Azerbaijani city with the end of the Soviet Union, the Nagorny Karabakh war, and the mass emigration of other national groups.

By contrast, up until the First World War, Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, had a Persian flavor and a Muslim majority population. Its major landmark was a blue-tiled mosque, and there was no big church. Von Haxthausen wrote, “In Tiflis, Europe and Asia may be said to meet, and the town has a divided aspect; but Erivan is a purely Asiatic city: everything is Oriental, except a few newly-built Russian houses, and occasionally Russian uniforms in the streets.” More Armenians lived in Tiflis, Baku, Shusha, and Van. Yerevan became an Armenian city only after the mass flight of Armenians from the Ottoman Empire and of Azerbaijanis from eastern Armenia in 1915–18.