A Bit More Detail

• CityLab is a great news source looking at different urban phenomena within individual cities and uniting cities. CityLab hosts Sam Weber's article looking at the many problems facing North Korean defectors as they try to assimilate into ultra-sophisticated Seoul.


• The Conversation CA hosts Stephen Scherer's article explaining the importance of sequencing the genomes of Canadian animals.


• The Discourse is a new Canadian media start-up promising in-depth coverage on Canadian issues. Before the recent Ontario election, they started a hashtag, #GTADiscourse, to see what people in the GTA underserved by the media were concerned about.


• The Guardian Cities takes a look at urban issues around the world. I liked this Mireille Silcoff article explaining the import of 1 July to the inhabitants of Montréal: It's moving day!


• Steve Benjamins hosts Village, a new subscriber-only newsletter focusing on Toronto. I liked this article about a Seaton Village beekeeper, here.


• The venerable hard-left Canadian news site Rabble has plenty of thought-provoking articles, like Barâa Arar's essay explaining their fear of what a Doug Ford government in Ontario might do.


• American queer magazine Them has plenty of great articles. I liked this one confirming that Tessa Thompson, Valkyrie in Thor and Janelle Monáe's rumoured girlfriend, is out as bi.


• Toronto website and discussion forum Urban Toronto reports on a massive mural set to grace the Parkside Student Residences at Jarvis and Carlton.

• Aziz Poonawalla's City of Brass, a blog dealing with Islam and minority issues, is newly added. His most recent post there, drawing from the Chicago Dyke March Jewish flag event to that intersectionality is too limited a concept, makes an interesting argument.


• LGBTQ-themed blog Unicorn Booty is a group blog that covers many queer issues. I would recommend one recent post reporting on the erasure of the nature of the Pulse massacre in Orlando by Trump (and others).

• To the news section, I'm adding the Canadian news website National Observer, which has interesting longer articles analyzing Canadian events. Of their recent articles, I would recommend Lorimer Shenher's "LGBTQ officers need to pick the right target", which argues that LGBTQ police officers should step back and consider the import of the police, as an organization, to many queer people.


• To the blog section, I'm adding Strange Company, a great blog that assembles links of interesting and odd things around the world, in the past and present, and takes the occasional longer look at particular events. This link, examining the history of one Reverend Griffiths who was something of a ghostbuster in 19th century Wales, is a good example of the latter category of post.

As of a few days ago, the IP addresses for blogging service LiveJournal have moved to 81.19.74.*, a block that lookup services locate in Moscow, Russia. Now users -- especially those who do not trust the Russian government -- are leaving the platform and advising others to leave.

For years, the online blogging community LiveJournal -- popular in Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine -- has served as a key communications platform for Russian dissidents (the Committee to Protect Journalists earlier this month called on Russian authorities to release a LiveJournal user who has been sentenced to 2 years in prison for a critical blog post). Even after Russian company SUP bought it from California-based Six Apart in 2007 (previously), the fact that SUP continued to run the servers in the US meant that users felt relatively safe; a 2009 press release specifically said that LiveJournal, Inc.* would continue to run technical operations and servers in the United States (and claimed that 5.7 million LiveJournal users were Russia-based).

[. . .]

Tracerouting livejournal.com now points to a Moscow location and an ISP operated by Rambler Internet Holding LLC, the company that also owns SUP. (Former LiveJournal user Gary McGath says that a few days ago, he checked the IP location of livejournal.com, and it was in San Francisco.) LiveJournal's official news posts do not mention the change; users have begun to ask questions there and on their own journals.