A Bit More Detail

• anthro{dendum} hosts Alexia Maddox's essay on her experience doing ethnographic work on Darknet drug markets.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly writes about how the creative life, contrary to some imaginings, is not self-sustaining. It desperately needs external support--an outside job, perhaps.


• Bruce Dorminey writes about how the climate of Chile, especially the Atacama, is perfect for astronomy.


• JSTOR Daily shares a paper talking about how Alexander Pushkin, the 19th century Russian author, was demonstrably proud of his African ancestry.


• Language Hat links to a new article on rongorongo, the mysterious and undeciphered script of the Rapa Nui of Polynesian Easter Island.


• Lingua Franca, at the Chronicle, notes in passing the oddness of restrictions imposed by customs in Chile on taking ordinary books into the country.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes a bizarrely parochial article from the New York Times talking down to Los Angeles.


• The Map Room Blog links to some interesting articles, from The New York Times recently and from the Atlantic in 2012, about the art of gerrymandering.


• The NYR Daily looks at the import of the Nunes memo for Trump and Russian-American relations.


• Roads and Kingdoms considers the simple pleasures of a snack featuring canned fish by the beach in Mallorca.


• Drew Rowsome quite approves of this year's gay romance film Sebastian, set here in Toronto.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes that, contrary to predictions, most satellite galaxies orbit in the same plane as their hosts. This is a problem for dark matter.
Towleroad notes that some are lobbying Amazon not to locate its HQ2 in a city without human rights protections for LGBT people.

• blogTO notes the reluctance of the TTC to turn on the interactive LightSpell art at Pioneer Village station, even though it is now revealed to have cost $C 2 million (not $C 500 thousand).


• Connor Cislo notes at Bloomberg the growing importance of intellectual property as a source of income for the Japanese economy, especially in a time of an emergent trade deficit and an aging workforce.


• Liny Lamberink at Global News notes how the Chippewas of the Thames First Nation is using an innovative eco-home to attract tourists to their reserve.


• VICE interviews Craig Gillespie, director of the intriguing new film I, Tonya about 1900s figure skater Tonya Harding, talking about the film and the thought that went into it. I must see this one, I think.


• VICE reports PornHub data from Hawaii during last week's ballistic missile scare. It turns out porn watching collapsed by 77% during the crisis but then spiked by half after 9 o'clock.

• blogTO notes that Uniqlo will be giving away free thermal clothing tomorrow.


• James Bow shares his column about the importance of truth.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly shares with us her mid-winter walk.


• Centauri Dreams reports about cometary water.


• Dangerous Minds shares German cinema lobby cards from the 1960s.


• Language Hat talks about dropping apostrophes.


• Language Log reports about lexical searches on Google.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money reports on the latest from Trump.


• The NYRB Daily shares a review of an Iranian film on gender relations.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes the ongoing gas price protests in Mexico.


• Spacing links to some articles about affordable housing around the world.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes Germany's abolition of a law forbidding insults to foreign heads of state.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that stable Russian population figures cover up a wholesale collapse in the numbers of ethnic Russians, and looks at the shortages of skilled workers faced by defense industries.

I met the Bermans more than 10 years ago in a fiction-writing workshop. It was my first semester at Concordia University in Montreal, and I was always overdressed for those early fall days—evidence that not too long ago, I was accustomed to living under an African sun. Halfway through the semester, as an example of ethnic literature, my professor introduced our class to the short story collection Natasha and Other Stories. The writer, David Bezmozgis, was a rising young Canadian author, and the collection was his first successful published book (it was nominated for the Governor General’s Award, and went on to win the Toronto Book Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for First Book—it became a bestseller).

In the collection, the Bermans—husband and wife Roman and Bella and their son Mark—move to Toronto in 1980 from Latvia, then still an entity of the Soviet Union, to begin their lives as Canadian immigrants. They experiment with the English language, with the North American way of doing business (Roman struggles as a massage therapist, taking on odd temporary jobs he was not trained for), with love in the suburbs in a home they can eventually afford to purchase. They move forward balancing a deeply entrenched Russian identity with the expectations of integration—often with awkward and uncomfortable results.

Although the seven stories that live in Natasha and Other Stories revolve around their specific immigration and assimilation experience as a Jewish Russian family, I—a Muslim Arab from Morocco—connected with the earnest aspirations of its characters. I felt a warm sense of belonging, a sudden surge of hope. With the Bermans, I was less alone.

[. . .]

Having been “Americanized” during my pre-university years at the Rabat American School in Morocco did nothing to prepare me for the cultural dislocation I experienced when I first came to Canada. It was an illumination to my silly ignorance to discover that Canadians are actually not at all like Americans, and that moving to another country is not at all like travelling.

Growing up in Morocco, I was a conflicted teenager: I was naturally extroverted, but would often turn down social gatherings in favour of reading books from abroad in my room. Looking back now, I understand that I was an artist at heart awkwardly looking to forge an identity in the arts while aunts, uncles, and friends of the family would insist I get up at weddings and belly-dance like the rest of the women (I still don’t know how to belly-dance). I decided to forge a career in the world of words in an English-speaking country. My late father was thrilled that I wanted more than to find a good Moroccan husband.

• Bloomberg notes the upcoming meeting of North Korea's governing party, observes the absence of a groundswell in favour of Brexit in the United Kingdom, and notes NIMBYism can appear in many forms.


• CBC reports on the upcoming summit of North American leaders, notes Mike Duffy's first appearance in the Senate, reports on the likely huge toll of insurance payouts in Fort McMurray, and notes the dependence of many Syrian refugees on food banks in Canada.


• The Independent notes that Brexit might depend on the votes of Wales, which could be swayed either way by the fate of the Port Talbot steel plant.


• The Inter Press Service notes, in a photo essay, how Third World farmers are seeking a technological revolution for their industry.


• National Geographic notes how Atlantic City is coping with rising seas, mainly badly in ways which hurt the poor.


• Open Democracy considers the Argentine government's likely approach to geopolitics in the South Atlantic.


• Universe Today notes the possible discovery of a new particle and looks at how Ceres might, or might not, be terraformed.


• Wired looks at a new documentary on film projectionists and reports on the difficulties of fighting the Alberta wildfire.

The new Crouching Tiger has turned out to be toothless. When the sequel to the 2000 martial arts masterpiece was released in China two weeks ago, even the state media were blunt: "Sword of Destiny is out, but it'll only remind you that Ang Lee's original film was indeed a classic."

"It was extremely uncomfortable watching a group of ethnically Chinese performers speaking English and then being dubbed into Mandarin," said a programmer for Shanghai International Film Festival. "This kind of disharmony embodied the film's entire style; it was a complete and utter mess."

Filming in English, and overdubbing for Chinese audiences, was a quick fix to the most pressing question facing mainstream filmmakers today: how to please both the West and China. With the Chinese box office due to become the world's biggest next year, this is uncharted territory for everyone.

It is understandable that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny - reliant on Michelle Yeoh's bygone elegance to chaperone its flat-footed Ang Lee tribute act into this brave new world - opted for the easy route. It is essentially an old-school Hong Kong chop-socky flick with English dialogue (unsurprisingly, with its Western audience mostly on Netflix). But 15 years ago, Ang Lee made Yeoh and co-star Chow Yun-fat, both Cantonese speakers, recite Mandarin lines phonetically. That is just one sign of the commitment that made the original Crouching Tiger, Hollywood in origin, a pioneer in seeking out that elixir of 21st century cinema: combining East and West.

• Bad Astronomy shares a new photo of the area of the Vela supernova.


• blogTO notes Toronto has only one more month in which it can lodge its 2024 Olympics bid.


• The Dragon's Gaze reports on the apparent discovery of an exoplanet orbiting Canopus.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money is against Heinz.
  
• Discover's Seriously Science notes Internet search engine rankings can swing elections.


• Towleroad continues reporting over the Stonewall controversy.


• Window on Eurasia speculates as to reasons for Putin's escalation of fighting in Ukraine.