A Bit More Detail

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes that mysterious Boyajian's Star has nearly two dozen identified analogues, like HD 139139.


• James Bow reports from his con trip to Portland.


• Caitlin Kelly at the Broadside Blog notes the particular pleasure of having old friends, people with long baselines on us.


• Centauri Dreams describes a proposed mission to interstellar comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov).


• The Crux notes how feeding cows seaweed could sharply reduce their methane production.


• D-Brief notes that comet C/2019 Q4 is decidedly red.


• Bruce Dorminey notes a claim that water-rich exoplanet K2-18b might well have more water than Earth.


• Gizmodo reports on a claim that Loki, biggest volcano on Io, is set to explode in a massive eruption.


• io9 notes that Warner Brothers is planning a Funko Pop movie.


• Joe. My. God. notes the claim of Donald Trump that he is ready for war with Iran.


• JSTOR Daily looks at how people in early modern Europe thought they could treat wounds with magic.


• Language Hat considers how "I tip my hat" might, translated, sound funny to a speaker of Canadian French.


• Language Log considers how speakers of Korean, and other languages, can find word spacing a challenge.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the partisan politics of the US Supreme Court.


• At the NYR Daily, Naomi Klein makes a case for the political and environmental necessity of a Green New Deal.


• Peter Watts takes apart a recent argument proclaiming the existence of free will.


• Peter Rukavina tells how travelling by rail or air from Prince Edward Island to points of the mainland can not only be terribly inconvenient, but environmentally worse than car travel. PEI does need better rail connections.


• The Russian Demographics Blog examines how different countries in Europe will conduct their census in 2020.


• Window on Eurasia shares the arguments of a geographer who makes the point that China has a larger effective territory than Russia (or Canada).


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell looks at a 1971 prediction by J.G. Ballard about demagoguery and guilt, something that now looks reasonably accurate.


• Arnold Zwicky considers models of segregation of cartoon characters from normal ones in comics.

• 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 Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly considers old friends.


• Centauri Dreams considers the search for extraterrestrial civilizations using infrared astronomy, concentrating on Dyson spheres and the like.


• The Dragon's Gaze has two links to papers looking at unusual brown dwarfs.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on the flora of late Permian Antarctica.


• Language Log notes a potentially problematic effort at Bangladesh to put hundreds of thousands of Bengali words online with Google, ready for translators. What of quality control, Victor Mair asks?


• Lawyers, Guns and Money comments on the Burmese slaves in the Thai fisheries and looks at the desperate last efforts of Confederates to persist.


• Marginal Revolution suggests that air conditioning really didn't drive much interstate migration in the United States.


• The Planetary Society Blog observes discoveries and anticipation for more at Ceres and Pluto.


• Savage Minds looks to the example of Lesotho to point out that giving people land title by no means necessarily helps them out of poverty.


• Torontoist looks at the Prism music video prize.

The use of the word bro is reaching epidemic levels. Now, after The Fast and the Furious and How I Met Your Mother and Breaking Bad, if a show contains more than one male character, they will, at some point, call each other by that name. Online, where cliché is rechristened meme, bro is a natural epithet: "Come at me, bro," or "Don't tase me, bro." Among writers who are trying to be funny, the word has morphed into a series of fused words—comic portmanteaus (portmanbros, if you insist) that have launched a full-on brocabulary: brogrammers, for young male computer programmers; brostep, a white-male version of dubstep; and curlbros, for bros who spend too much time on their biceps. Subject to intense semantic distortion and fluctuation, the word bro is slippery, but one feature of its use and abuse remains constant: the underlying contempt for male friendship it implies.

That contempt is everywhere. The friendships between women in popular culture are the source and choicest fruit of their maturity. At the end of Frances Ha, Frances glimpses her old friend across a crowded room. "Who are you making eyes at?" somebody asks. "That's Sophie. She's my best friend." Theirs was the film's true love story all along. Insofar as a television show is about women, it's about the meaningfulness of friendship—Sex and the City, Girls, Broad City, etc. For men, it's just the opposite. Male friendship on any given sitcom, or in any given Judd Apatow movie, is a retreat into thoughtlessness, crudity. The Big Lebowski hilariously painted male friendship as an extended and colossal fuckup. The Hangover movies turned it into a series of epic degradations. But the standard buddy movie of the moment, a movie like 22 Jump Street, is defined by a single word: dumb. That's why the greatest buddy movie of them all is Dumb and Dumber (although it may well be surpassed by its sequel this fall, Dumb and Dumber To). Men get together onscreen to be idiots with one another. To mature as a female person is to mature into female friendships. To mature as a male person is to mature out of male friendships.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the culture that has given rise to the word bro is a culture in which male friendship is in crisis. American men are more likely not only to be lonely but also to deny their loneliness.For twenty-five years, Niobe Way, professor of applied psychology at New York University and the author of 2011's Deep Secrets: Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, has peered into the chasm under boys and young men and found that emptiness to be at the heart of what we call the "boy crisis." "We have all these boys, with so much to give, so much love, so much for them to offer the world," she says. For Way, the transition from boyhood into manhood is a transition into isolation. Becoming a man means leaving behind your family and your friends and striking out on your own, and therefore growing up means shedding connections. Way's research shows that the male suicide rate correlates precisely with the loss of friendships. At age nine, the suicide rates are the same for girls and boys. Between ten and fourteen, boys are twice as likely to kill themselves. Between fifteen and nineteen, they are four times as likely. From twenty to twenty-four, five times.

Bert and Ernie are best friends. They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves.

Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics (as most Sesame Street Muppets™ do), they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.