A Bit More Detail

• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait shares Johannes Kroeger's image of the median Earth.


• The Crux considers when human societies began to accumulate large numbers of aged people. Would there have been octogenarians in any Stone Age cultures, for instance?


• The Dragon's Tales considers Russia's strategy in Southeast Asia.


• Alexandra Samuel at JSTOR Daily notes that one way to fight against fake news is for people to broaden their friends networks beyond their ideological sympathizers.


• Language Log, noting a television clip from Algeria in which a person defend their native dialect versus standard Arabic, compares the language situation in the Arab world to that of China.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen explains how the Tervuren Central African museum in Brussels has not been decolonized.


• The Planetary Society Blog explores the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains why, in current physics, the multiverse must exist.


• Strange Company explores the strange disappearance, in the Arizona desert in 1952, of a young couple. Their plane was found and in perfect condition, but what happened to them?


• Strange Maps reports on the tragic migration of six Californian raptors, only one of which managed to make it to its destination.


• Towleroad reports on the appearance of actor and singer Ben Platt on The Ellen Show, talking about his career and coming out.


• Window on Eurasia notes the apparently widespread mutual dislike of Chechens and Muscovites.


• Arnold Zwicky considers the French Impressionist artists Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Suzanne Valadon, with images of their art.

• JSTOR Daily considers the extent to which the Great Migration of African-Americans was a forced migration, driven not just by poverty but by systemic anti-black violence.


• Even as the overall population of Japan continues to decline, the population of Tokyo continues to grow through net migration, Mainichi reports.


• This CityLab article takes look at the potential, actual and lost and potential, of immigration to save the declining Ohio city of Youngstown. Will it, and other cities in the American Rust Belt, be able to take advantage of entrepreneurial and professional immigrants?


• Window on Eurasia notes a somewhat alarmist take on Central Asian immigrant neighbourhoods in Moscow. That immigrant neighbourhoods can become largely self-contained can surprise no one.


• Guardian Cities notes how tensions between police and locals in the Bairro do Jamaico in Lisbon reveal problems of integration for African immigrants and their descendants.


• Carmen Arroyo at Inter Press Service writes about Pedro, a migrant from Oaxaca in Mexico who has lived in New York City for a dozen years without papers.


• CBC Prince Edward Island notes that immigration retention rates on PEI, while low, are rising, perhaps showing the formation of durable immigrant communities. Substantial international migration to Prince Edward Island is only just starting, after all.


• The industrial northern Ontario city of Sault Sainte-Marie, in the wake of the closure of the General Motors plant in the Toronto-area industrial city of Oshawa, was reported by Global News to have hopes to recruit former GM workers from Oshawa to live in that less expensive city.


• Atlas Obscura examines the communities being knitted together across the world by North American immigrants from the Caribbean of at least partial Hakka descent. The complex history of this diaspora fascinates me.

• Ridership on the Hamilton Street Railway is growing but still below projected numbers. Global News reports.


• Residents of the Lincolnshire city of Boston, one of the most pro-Brexit in the United Kingdom, fear Brexit might not happen. Global News reports.


• CityLab notes how the Spanish city of Valencia is doing its best to keep local bee populations thriving.


• Deutsche Welle takes a look at how residents of one village once on the fringes of Moscow have found their environment transformed by massive urbanization.


• Guardian Cities takes a look at the central position played by "Tollywood", the Telugu-speaking film industry's hub, in the fate of a globalizing Hyderabad.

• The City of Edmonton is considering the idea of intentionally creating a beach for sun-seekers on the North Saskatchewan River after last year's happy accident. Global News reports.


• There is controversy in Vancouver over the idea of investor immigrants gaining voting rights in the city. Global News reports.


• The Utah conurbation of St. George faces real problems of water scarcity. CityLab reports.


• The Estonian municipality of Kanepi has made the leaf of the cannabis plant its logo. CityLab reports.


• JSTOR Daily looks at the symbolism behind the vast and impressive Moscow subway system, here.

• Anthrodendum considers the difficulties of the anthropologist in the context of a world where their knowledges are monetized.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about two days she spent in Montréal, with photos.


• Crooked Timber starts a discussion about the justice, or lack thereof, in Harvard denying convicted murderer Michelle Jones entry into their doctoral program now that her sentence is over.


• D-Brief looks at the changing nature of the global disease burden, and its economic consequences.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that Equifax's terribly lax data protection should mark the endgame for them.


• The Map Room Blog considers the use of earth-observer satellites to predict future disease outbreaks (malaria, here, in Peru).


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes how quantum mechanics helps explain nuclear fusion in our sun.


• Window on Eurasia notes a report that Muscovites live on average 12 years longer than non-Muscovite Russians.

• Centauri Dreams shares, from JPL, the schedule for Cassini in its last days of existence. Goodbye, dear probe.


• Dangerous Minds shares some classic illustrations from a Persian book called Lights of Canopus.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting that gas giants can stabilize debris disks.


• Far Outliers shares excerpts from the diary of a Japanese soldier fighting in New Guinea in the Second World War.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the real suffering that high rents impose on the poor in American cities.


• The Map Room Blog shares some nice X-ray maps of New York City subway stations.


• The Planetary Society Blog shares more vintage Voyager photos of the outer solar system: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune ...


• Roads and Kingdoms tells of the marvelous cookies made on the dying Venetian island of Burano.


• Drew Rowsome considers, at length and with personal references, the differences between "art" and "porn". NSFW.


• Understanding Society considers the latest thinking on causal mechanisms in modern sociology.


• Window on Eurasia wonders if non-Russian languages in Russia are attacked out of anxiety over Russian's own decline, and speculates that if integration of mostly Muslim immigrants goes poorly in Moscow, the city could get locked in sectarian conflict.

• D-Brief notes the first-ever use of Einsteinian gravitational bending to examine the mass of a star.
  
• Language Log announces the start of an investigation into the evolving rhetoric of Donald Trump. Something is up.


• The LRB Blog reports from Tuareg Agadez in Niger, about rebellions and migrant-smuggling.


• Marginal Revolution wonders what is the rationale for the extreme cut-off imposed on Qatar.


• Maximos62 wonders about the impact of Indonesia's fires on not just wildlife but indigenous peoples.


• Personal Reflections notes the irrelevance of the United States' withdrawal from Paris, at least from an Australian position.


• Savage Minds points to a new anthropology podcast.


• Window on Eurasia

• Beyond the Beyond notes an image of a wooden model of Babbage's difference engine.


• James Bow talks about the soundtrack he has made for his new book.


• Centauri Dreams considers ways astronomers can detect photosynthesis on exoplanets and shares images of Fomalhaut's debris disk.


• Crooked Timber looks at fidget spinners in the context of discrimination against people with disabilities.


• D-Brief notes that Boyajian's Star began dimming over the weekend.


• Far Outliers reports on a 1917 trip by zeppelin to German East Africa.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money argues that there is good reason to be concerned about health issues for older presidential candidates.


• The NYRB Daily reports on Hungary's official war against Central European University.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes the origins of modern immigration to Russia in internal Soviet migration.


• Savage Minds shares an ethnographer's account of what it is like to look to see her people (the Sherpas of Nepal) described.


• Strange Maps shares a map speculating as to what the world will look like when it is 4 degrees warmer.


• The Volokh Conspiracy argues that the US Congress does not have authority over immigration.


• Window on Eurasia suggests Russia's population will be concentrated around Moscow, compares Chechnya's position vis-à-vis Russia to Puerto Rico's versus the United States, and looks at new Ukrainian legislation against Russian churches and Russian social networks.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell notes how Evelyn Waugh's writings on the Horn of Africa anticipate the "Friedman unit", the "a measurement of time defined as how long it will take until things are OK in Iraq".

• blogTO notes that Green Day will be headlining a festival in the Distillery District.


• Centauri Dreams looks at research into an interstellar solar sail.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes a study of brown dwarf populations.


• The Dragon's Tales looks at ancient Martian rivers and flood plains.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog looks at the protest of Colin Kaepernick.


• The Map Room Blog reports on a map exhibition at the Library of Congress.


• Marginal Revolution notes low murder rates among Haitian-Americans in Florida.


• The Planetary Society Blog examines the Dawn probe's low orbit scans of Ceres.


• Otto Pohl announces the beginning of his first semester in Kurdistan.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that it is a crime to talk about the Nazi-Soviet alliance versus Poland in Russia.


• Window on Eurasia looks at how North Caucasians in Moscow identify quickly as Muscovites.

Ilya Bogdanov evacuated his family from their cozy apartment in the heart of Moscow after spending two summers with clouds of dust and roaring construction machinery. For the rest of the warm weather, they will stay on the Baltic seaside in Latvia.

"We need a respite from urban improvement," the 44-year-old insurance analyst deadpanned.

Moscow is undergoing a massive reconstruction, amid an economic crisis caused by the slump in oil prices and Western sanctions imposed after Russian's incursions on Ukraine. The city was last subject to such a major revamp under Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in the 1960s, said Grigory Revzin, an urban development expert and a champion of the project even before Moscow hired his architecture firm.

Sidewalks are being widened and primped on all the major streets of the city center, with about 50 streets in reconstruction each summer. Beyond the center, more than 70 new metro stations are being built, at a cost of roughly $15 billion. Two additional circle lines, which connect the radial lines that cross in the city center as in London and Berlin, will complement the existing one, built in the 1950s.

In the past four years, the authorities have made over Moscow’s numerous parks and gentrified old industrial areas, turning them into slick hipster haunts that swarm with galleries, designer shops, startup offices, and co-working spaces for freelancers. They have considerably reduced traffic chaos by introducing paid parking across the city. Separately, a reconstruction of all major soccer stadiums in Moscow is under way for the World Football Cup to be hosted by Russia in 2018.