A Bit More Detail

• Michael Cuby at them praises the musicianship of St. Vincent.


• Queerty notes that the new Madonna video, for the song "I Rise", will feature multiple drag queens.


• The Signal looks at how the Library of Congress is preserving, and indexing, its archives of traditional Irish music.


• Zbigniew Wojnowski writes at Open Democracy about how Ukrainian popular music has evolved from the 1980s on, facing all sorts of cultural and political issues as Ukraine itself has changed hugely.


• CBC looks at how pop music these days has become increasingly globalized, major hits incorporating languages other than English and stars often initially unknown to North American audiences.

• Them notes the transphobia involved in novelist E.J. Levy's apparent determination to note define 19th century doctor James Barry as a trans man in an upcoming novel.


• Hornet Stories notes the long history of support of Madonna for LGBTQ people and causes, from the 1980s on.


• Them tells the story of trans writer voice actor Maddie Blaustein, perhaps most famous for voicing the character of Meowth from Pokémon.


• VICE reports from Wilton Manors, the Florida town where all the government officials are LGBTQ.


• The coming-out of YouTube star Lilly Singh as bisexual is huge news, for South Asians and the wider community. (How To Be A Bawse is a great book.) VICE Congratulations! has it.

• Spin shares the news, from fan Kelsey Zimmerman, that the singer of "Goodbye Horses", Q Lazzarus, is alive and well in Staten Island after three decades of silence.


• Hornet Stories raves over Jake Shears' self-titled solo debut album.


• Joe. My. God. shares the story, as he has every year since 2006, "Ricky Loves Madonna", remembering an early victim of HIV/AIDS and his Madonna fandom.


• Daryl Deino at Queerty writes about how Madonna, with her early opposition to homophobia and her engagement with HIV/AIDS, may have saved his life.


• Hornet Stories describes, and shows, the set of 20 Lego minifigures that Michigan artist Sam Hatmaker has designed for Madonna's 60th birthday today.

• NOW Toronto shared a feature of theirs from 1989 on the Tragically Hip, featuring a Gord Downie interview, here.


• Barry Walters argues Madonna's early 1990s experiments, like the album Erotica and the book Sex, are underrated, here at Rolling Stone.


• Noisey interviews the biographer of Joni Mitchell and makes the point that she is peerless.

• 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 the ten weirdest houses in Toronto.


• Centauri Dreams takes issue with the science of Kim Stanley Robinson's new novel Aurora.


• Crooked Timber notes the ongoing controversy regarding the dismissal of Steven Salaita.


• The Dragon's Gaze reports on the imaging of exoplanet 51 Eridani b.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Madonna is abandoning Russia for its homophobia.


• The Power and the Money notes Douglas Muir's argument that dictatorship, as a system of government, has not become less common.

At first, fans politely applauded the Roma performers sharing a stage with Madonna. Then the pop star condemned widespread discrimination against Roma, or Gypsies, and the cheers gave way to jeers.

The sharp mood-change that swept the crowd of 60,000, who had packed a park for Wednesday night's concert, underscores how prejudice against Roma remains deeply entrenched across Eastern Europe. Despite long-standing efforts to stamp out rampant bias, human rights advocates say Roma probably suffer more humiliation and endure more discrimination than any other group on the continent.\

[. . .]

Romania has the largest number of Roma in the region. Some say the population could be as high as two million, although official data put it at 500,000.

Until the 19th century, Romanian Gypsies were slaves, and they've gotten a mixed response ever since. While discrimination is widespread, many Eastern Europeans are enthusiastic about Gypsy music and dance, which they embrace as part of the region's cultural heritage. That explains why the Roma musicians and a dancer who had briefly joined Madonna onstage got enthusiastic applause. And it also may explain why some in the crowd turned on Madonna when she paused during the two-hour show — a stop on her worldwide “Sticky and Sweet” tour — to touch on their plight.

“It has been brought to my attention ... that there is a lot of discrimination against Romanies and Gypsies in general in Eastern Europe,” she said. “It made me feel very sad.”

Thousands booed and jeered her.

A few cheered when she added: “We don't believe in discrimination ... we believe in freedom and equal rights for everyone.”

But she got more boos when she mentioned discrimination against homosexuals and others.

“I jeered her because it seemed false what she was telling us. What business does she have telling us these things?” said Ionut Dinu, 23.