A Bit More Detail

One of the many things that has been bothering me about the COVID-19 crisis is the way that the city of Toronto around me has been shutting down. Work and those strictures have gone, of course, but so have almost all of the other events of life. Stores are shut down; neighbourhoods are almost always barren of people; the sorts of events that I normally partake in have been sensibly cancelled. (Jane's Walk and TCAF are among the events that have been closed down, and I may never get a chance to see the Diane Arbus show at the AGO or the Winnie the Pooh exhibit at the ROM. I live in hope for the second category, and look forward to next year for the first.)

The great machineries of life of Toronto, human and mechanical, are grinding down. When will they start up again? What will be the background against which this revival will happen? What loss and suffering will there be in the background of this? More importantly, from my particular perspective, what loss and suffering will there be among the people I know, here in Toronto and around the world? I have some fears for myself, but more fears for others both known and unknown. (I am not fond of living in a situation where fatalities from a pandemic really can amount to low single-digit percentages of the global, and local, population.)

I cannot help but feel a sort of anticipatory grief at seeing my dear cosmopolis of Toronto shutting down. It is a cause of grief in itself, and it is a symbol of worse yet to come. I can also extrapolate easily enough from the specific case of Toronto to all the other great machines out there in the world, places I've lived in and places I've only visited and places I have yet to visit and the many many places I will never see. The pictures I saw earlier this week from Venice, that great first prototype of the cosmopolis, felt so wrong. One March, you have a living city; one March, you have a city clamped down on account of mass death. There are things Toronto can pick up from Venice, but I would prefer this not be one. But this isn't really under anyone's control, is it?

I am--I believe--keeping things in perspective. There will still be a world after this crisis is done, whenever it is done, one that will be recognizable. I just find it distressing that a proper perspective is not all that comforting. How, exactly, will things be skewed? This uncertainty is something that I do not like. Ending my 12-month Metropass, on account of the certainty that I will not be travelling much at all in April, at least, feels significant. How much more will my lived world shrink?

These past few days, I have been thinking of the classic song "Sous le ciel de Paris", a hymn of love to that metropolis written and performed just a few years after Paris risked destruction in the Second World War. Has a similar song been written for Toronto?

Watch on YouTube

(A day late, I know; I crashed after work yesterday.)

• Antipope's Charlie Stross has a thought experiment: If you were superwealthy and guaranteed to live a long health life, how would you try to deal with the consequence of economic inequality?


• Vikas Charma at Architectuul takes a look at the different factors that go into height in buildings.


• Bad Astronomy notes S5-HVS1, a star flung out of the Milky Way Galaxy by Sagittarius A* at 1755 kilometres per second.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly shares photos from two Manhattan walks of hers, taken in non-famous areas.


• Centauri Dreams looks at habitability for red dwarf exoplanets. Stellar activity matters.


• Maria Farrell at Crooked Timber shares words from a manifesto about data protection in the EU.


• Dangerous Minds shares photos from Los Angeles punks and mods and others in the 1980s.


• Bruce Dorminey notes a ESA report suggesting crew hibernation could make trips to Mars easier.


• Gizmodo notes that the Hayabusa2 probe of Japan is returning from asteroid Ryugu with a sample.


• Imageo shares photos of the disastrous fires in Australia from space.


• Information is Beautiful reports on winners of the Information is Beautiful Awards for 2019, for good infographics.


• JSTOR Daily explains how local television stations made the ironic viewing of bad movies a thing.


• Kotaku reports on the last days of Kawasaki Warehouse, an arcade in Japan patterned on the demolished Walled City of Kowloon.


• Language Hat notes how translation mistakes led to the star Beta Cygni gaining the Arabic name Albireo.


• Language Log reports on a unique Cantonese name of a restaurant in Hong Kong.


• Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money links to an analysis of his suggesting the military of India is increasingly hard-pressed to counterbalance China.


• The LRB Blog notes the catastrophe of Venice.


• Marginal Revolution notes a paper suggesting states would do well not to place their capitals too far away from major population centres.


• Justin Petrone at North! remarks on a set of old apple preserves.


• The NYR Daily looks at how the west and the east of the European Union are divided by different conceptions of national identity.


• Jim Belshaw at Personal Reflections reports from his town of Armidale as the smoke from the Australian wildfires surrounds all. The photos are shocking.


• Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society Blog lists some books about space suitable for children.


• Drew Rowsome reviews the Canadian film music stand, inspired by the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike.


• The Russian Demographics Blog shares a paper noting that, in Switzerland, parenthood does not make people happy.


• The Signal notes that 1.7 million phone book pages have been scanned into the records of the Library of Congress.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains the concept of multi-messenger astronomy and why it points the way forward for studies of astrophysics.


• Strange Maps looks at how a majority of students in the United States attend diverse schools, and where.


• Strange Company explores the mysterious death of Marc-Antoine Calas, whose death triggered the persecution of Huguenots and resulted in the mobilization of Enlightenment figures like Voltaire against the state. What happened?


• Towleroad hosts a critical, perhaps disappointed, review of the major gay play The Inheritance.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little looks at the power of individual people in political hierarchies.


• Window on Eurasia shares an opinion piece noting how many threats to the Russian language have come from its association with unpopular actions by Russia.


• Arnold Zwicky explores queens as various as Elizabeth I and Adore Delano.

Another links post is up over at Demography Matters!

• Skepticism about immigration in many traditional receiving countries appeared. Frances Woolley at the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative took issue with the argument of Andray Domise after an EKOS poll, that Canadians would not know much about the nature of migration flows. The Conversation observed how the rise of Vox in Spain means that country’s language on immigration is set to change towards greater skepticism. Elsewhere, the SCMP called on South Korea, facing pronounced population aging and workforce shrinkages, to become more open to immigrants and minorities.


• Cities facing challenges were a recurring theme. This Irish Examiner article, part of a series, considers how the Republic of Ireland’s second city of Cork can best break free from the dominance of Dublin to develop its own potential. Also on Ireland, the NYR Daily looked at how Brexit and a hardened border will hit the Northern Ireland city of Derry, with its Catholic majority and its location neighbouring the Republic. CityLab reported on black migration patterns in different American cities, noting gains in the South, is fascinating. As for the threat of Donald Trump to send undocumented immigrants to sanctuary cities in the United States has widely noted., at least one observer noted that sending undocumented immigrants to cities where they could connect with fellow diasporids and build secure lives might actually be a good solution.


• Declining rural settlements featured, too. The Guardian reported from the Castilian town of Sayatón, a disappearing town that has become a symbol of depopulating rural Spain. Global News, similarly, noted that the loss by the small Nova Scotia community of Blacks Harbour of its only grocery store presaged perhaps a future of decline. VICE, meanwhile, reported on the very relevant story about how resettled refugees helped revive the Italian town of Sutera, on the island of Sicily. (The Guardian, to its credit, mentioned how immigration played a role in keeping up numbers in Sayatón, though the second generation did not stay.)


• The position of Francophone minorities in Canada, meanwhile, also popped up at me.
• This TVO article about the forces facing the École secondaire Confédération in the southern Ontario city of Welland is a fascinating study of minority dynamics. A brief article touches on efforts in the Franco-Manitoban community of Winnipeg to provide temporary shelter for new Francophone immigrants. CBC reported, meanwhile, that Francophones in New Brunswick continue to face pressure, with their numbers despite overall population growth and with Francophones being much more likely to be bilingual than Anglophones. This last fact is a particularly notable issue inasmuch as New Brunswick's Francophones constitute the second-largest Francophone community outside of Québec, and have traditionally been more resistant to language shift and assimilation than the more numerous Franco-Ontarians.


• The Eurasia-focused links blog Window on Eurasia pointed to some issues. It considered if the new Russian policy of handing out passports to residents of the Donbas republics is related to a policy of trying to bolster the population of Russia, whether fictively or actually. (I'm skeptical there will be much change, myself: There has already been quite a lot of emigration from the Donbas republics to various destinations, and I suspect that more would see the sort of wholesale migration of entire families, even communities, that would add to Russian numbers but not necessarily alter population pyramids.) Migration within Russia was also touched upon, whether on in an attempt to explain the sharp drop in the ethnic Russian population of Tuva in the 1990s or in the argument of one Muslim community leader in the northern boomtown of Norilsk that a quarter of that city's population is of Muslim background.


• Eurasian concerns also featured. The Russian Demographics Blog observed, 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 various European states. As well, Marginal Revolution linked to a paper that examines the positions of Jews in the economies of eastern Europe as a “rural service minority”, and observed the substantial demographic shifts occurring in Kazakhstan since independence, with Kazakh majorities appearing throughout the country.
  
• JSTOR Daily considered if, between the drop in fertility that developing China was likely to undergo anyway and the continuing resentments of the Chinese, the one-child policy was worth it. I'm inclined to say no, based not least on the evidence of the rapid fall in East Asian fertility outside of China.


• What will Britons living in the EU-27 do, faced with Brexit? Bloomberg noted the challenge of British immigrant workers in Luxembourg faced with Brexit, as Politico Europe did their counterparts living in Brussels.


• Finally, at the Inter Press Service, A.D. Mackenzie wrote about an interesting exhibit at the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris on the contributions made by immigrants to popular music in Britain and France from the 1960s to the 1980s.