A Bit More Detail

• Adam Fish at anthro{dendum} shares a new take on the atmosphere, as a common good.


• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares a photo of Earth taken from a hundred million kilometres away by the OSIRIS-REx probe.


• The Crux tells the story of how the first exoplanets were found.


• D-Brief notes that life could be possible on a planet orbiting a supermassive black hole, assuming it could deal with the blueshifting.


• io9 looks at the latest bold move of Archie Comics.


• JSTOR Daily explores cleaning stations, where small fish clean larger ones.


• Dan Nexon at Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the role China seeks to play in a remade international order.


• The Map Room Blog looks at the new upcoming national atlas of Estonia.


• Marginal Revolution touches on the great ambition of Louis XIV for a global empire.


• Steve Baker of The Numerati shares photos from his recent trip to Spain.


• Anya Schiffrin at the NRY Daily explains how American journalist Varian Fry helped her family, and others, escape the Nazis.


• Drew Rowsome reviews the classic movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.


• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps shares a map looking at the barriers put up by the high-income world to people moving from outside.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel answers the complex question of how, exactly, the density of a black hole can be measured.


• John Scalzi at Whatever reviews Gemini Man. Was the high frame rate worth it?


• Window on Eurasia notes the deep hostility of Tuvins towards a large Russian population in Tuva.


• Arnold Zwicky considers the existential question of self-aware cartoon characters.

• Cody Delistraty considers the new field of dystopian realism--of dystopia as a real thing in contemporary lives--in popular culture.


• D-Brief notes how direct experiments in laboratories have helped geologists better understand the mantle of the Earth.


• Far Outliers shares a terribly sad anecdote of a young woman in China who killed herself, victim of social pressures which claim many more victims.


• Imageo notes how recent headlines about ocean temperature increases are misleading in that they did not represent the steady incremental improvements of science generally.


• Joe. My. God. notes the unexpectedly rapid shift of the location of the northern magnetic pole.


• JSTOR Daily links to a paper that links to the quietly subversive aesthetics and politics of the 1950s and 1960s surf movie.


• Language Hat links to an intriguing paper looking at the relationship between the size of an individual's Broca's area, in their brain, and the ways in which they can learn language.


• Language Log shares a poster from Taiwan trying to promote use of the Hakka language, currently a threatened language among traditional speakers.


• Dan Nexon at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the extreme secrecy of Trump regarding his Helsinki discussions with Putin, going so far as to confiscate his translator's notes.


• Justin Petrone at north! writes about the exhilarating and liberating joys of hope, of fantasy.


• The NYR Daily examines the new Alfonso Cuarón film, the autobiographical Roma.


• Drew Rowsome takes a look at the interesting show by Damien Atkins at Crow's Nest Theatre, We Are Not Alone.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel reports on what a report of the discovery of of the brightest quasar actually means.


• Window on Eurasia notes the historical cooperation, before Operation Barbarossa, between the Nazis' Gestapo and Stalin's NKVD.


• Arnold Zwicky shares a video examining Chavacano, the Spanish-based creole still spoken in the Philippines.

• David Price at {anthro}dendum considers, going through archival material from the 1950s, the number of radical anthropologists in the US as yet little known or unknown who were marginalized by the Red Scare.


• Centauri Dreams ruminates on a paper examining 'Oumuamua that considers radiation pressure as a factor in its speed. Might it work as--indeed, be?--a lightsail?


• D-Brief notes the various reasons why the Chinese proposal for an artificial moon of sorts, to illuminate cities at night, would not work very well at all.


• The Dragon's Tales touches on the perhaps hypocritical anger of Russia at the United States' departure from the INF treaty.


• Far Outliers notes the sharp divides among Nazi prisoners of war in a camp in Texas, notably between pro- and anti-Nazi prisoners.


• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing revisits the original sin of the Internet culture, its imagining of a split between an individual's virtual life and the remainder of their life.


• The Island Review welcomes, and interviews, its new editor C.C. O'Hanlon.


• JSTOR Daily explores the reasons for considering climate change to be a national security issue.
  
• Language Hat is enthused by the recent publication of a new dictionary of the extinct Anatolian languages of the Indo-European family.


• Language Log examines the existence of a distinctive, even mocked, southern French accent spoken in and around (among other cities) Toulouse.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the rise of fascism in Brazil with Bolsonaro.


• Roger Shuy at Lingua Franca writes about the power of correspondence, of written letters, to help language learners. (I concur.)


• At the LRB Blog, Jeremy Bernstein writes about anti-Semitism in the United States, in the 1930s and now.


• The NYR Daily examines the life of writer, and long-time exile from her native Portugal, Maria Gabriela Llansol.


• Haley Gray at Roads and Kingdoms reports on the life and work of Mark Maryboy, a Navajo land rights activist in Utah.


• Window on Eurasia looks at the Russian urban myth of blonde Baltic snipers from the Baltic States who had been enlisted into wars against Russia like that of Chechnya in the 1990s.


• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at the classic red phone booths of the United Kingdom, now almost all removed from the streets of the country and sent to a graveyard in a part of rural Yorkshire that has other claims to fame.

• Centauri Dreams celebrates the science behind Cassini.


• Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell is breaking from Harvard's Kennedy Centre over its revocation of an invitation to Chelsea Manning.


• The Crux points to the ways in which the legacy of Cassini will still be active.


• D-Brief notes that some tool-using macaques of Thailand are overfishing their environment.


• Hornet Stories notes the eulogy given by Hillary Clinton at the funeral of Edie Windsor.


• Inkfish notes one way to define separate bird species: ask the birds what they think. (Literally.)


• The LRB Blog notes the recent passing of Margot Hielscher, veteran German star and one-time crush of Goebbels.


• The NYR Daily notes the chilling effects on discourse in India of a string of murders of Indian journalists and writers.


• At the Planetary Science Blog, Emily Lakdawalla bids farewell to the noble Cassini probe.


• Roads and Kingdoms notes a breakfast in Bangladesh complicated by child marriage.


• Towleroad notes an Australian church cancelled an opposite-sex couple's wedding because the bride supports equality.


• Arnold Zwicky notes the marmots of, among other places, cosmopolitan and multilingual Swiss canton of Graubünden.

• 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.

• Anthropology.net notes the discovery of Australopithecus remains east of the Great Rift Valley.


• blogTO suggests that Toronto restaurants east of the Don face trouble in attracting customers.


• Patrick Cain maps gentrification over the past decade in Toronto and Vancouver.


• Geocurrents polls its readers as to what themes they would like the blog to examine.


• Joe. My. God. shares the new Pet Shop Boys tracks "Burn" and "Undertow".


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the problems of the right in the United States with being consistent in its rhetoric about abortion being murder.


• Marginal Revolution links to an interesting article suggesting that Soviet movies had fewer Americans villains than one might expect, partly because Nazis filled that niche but also because Americans were not seen as inherently threatening.


• Personal Reflections looks at the particular fiscal imbalances of Australian federalism.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer starts to examine the likely consequences of a Venezuelan defaullt.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes the ongoing litigation over the Star Trek fan production Axanar.


• Towleroad notes the first attempts to set up arranged same-sex marriages for people of Indian background.


• Transit Toronto notes a repair to a secondary entrance of Ossington station and the continued spread of Presto readers throughout the grid.


• Window on Eurasia suggests Russia is the chief beneficiary of an Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.

• Behind the Numbers' Carl Haub notes that several countries have seen their demographic transitions stall above replacement levels, notably post-Soviet countries but including outliers like Israel and Argentina.


• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling describes the reception given to Buffalo Bill and his Wild West show in belle époque Europe.


• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster goes into detail about the implication of the discovery of hydrogen peroxide on Europa's surface, and its implications for life in Europa's oceans.


• Crooked Timber's Chris Bertram argues that while Margaret Thatcher may have managed to Americanize the United Kingdom, she certainly didn't make it more egalitarian or meritocratic.


• Daniel Drezner wonders if the collapse of China's overextended financial sector could have implications for the future of the Chinese government.


• Eastern Approaches has three recent posts of note: one regarding political maneuvering around arrests in an increasingly autocratic Ukraine; one from Hungary describing the resignation of a deputy governor of the Bank of Hungary, Julia Király, over concerns that the Orbán government's populism could threaten the country's future; and one from the Czech Republic, about an almost pleasingly non-catastrophic transition from one president to another.


• False Steps' Paul Drye goes into detail about the orbital mirror proposed by some people in Nazi Germany. It would have worked, but just have been impractical.


• Geocurrents links to a map of endangered languages around the world.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes that official Argentine statistics might understate levels of poverty, but also notes that levels of poverty have improved markedly over the past decade. Why bad statistics, then?


• Torontoist blogs about a new tool library in the neighbourhood of Parkdale.


• A report from Towleroad: apparently it's possibly to identify who, in a same-sex relationship, is more likely to be a top than a bottom and vice versa, on average.

• The first link heads to Timothy Snyder's Eurozine article which argues that Europe's collective memory has failed to recognize that the mid-20th century's worst atrocities, Nazi or Soviet, occurred in the space stretching from Poland to Latvia to Ukraine.


• The second link goes to a Carlo Strenger's Comment is Free post arguing that religion remains popular worldwide because its counterintuitive narratives appeal to the young mind or is evolutionarily adaptive.

• At Alpha Sources, Claus Vistesen analyzes the ongoing economic mayhem in the Baltic States, especially in Latvia.


• Centauri Dreams reports on the first planet, a "cold Jupiter," discovered orbiting a very dim red dwarf star in the neighbourhood thanks to astrometry.


• Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell reports on a ludicrous paper which argues that problems with the Euro could precipitate interstate war, and Ingrid Robeyns examines the consequence of a guaranteed minimum income experiment in Namibia.


• False Positives' Ian Irving commemorates the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
  
• On the subject of Poland in the Second World War, Far Outliers blogs about how the Nazis and the Soviets both did their best to decapitate Polish society in the zones that they occupied.


• Gideon Rachman wonders if California's institutionalized gridlock will become a model for the world.


• Joe. My. God reports that gay men tend to do better in college than their heterosexual counterparts.


• Mark MacKinnon blogs about the peaceful democratic elections in Mongolia, which has seen the election of a president who belonged to a party that wasn't descended from the old Communist party.


• At Passing Strangeness, Paul Drye examines the stories of the East Asians who may well have been the first to visit Europe before the modern era.


• The Pagan Prattle reports on the belief that the Antichrist might be homosexual.


• Slap Upside the Head lets us know about the recent bill passed by the Alberta provincial legislature which allows parents to pull their children out of classes dealing with GLBT subjects. It would have to be Alberta.


• Strange Maps describes the barren island of Sable Island, a part of Canada hundreds of kilometres away from Nova Scotia, notable mainly for its herd of wild horses and the many ships wrecked on its adjacent underwater dunes.


• Towleroad reports on surviving photos of Stonewall taken just after the riots 40 years ago.


• Finally, Window on Eurasia reports that Moscow's backing away from the claim that Poland started the Second World War, and that efforts to impose a single literary language on the Mordvin might doom this small population.

Q: Even in World War II facing Nazi Germany, probably the greatest threat that America has ever faced –

RICE: Uh, with all due respect, Nazi Germany never attacked the homeland of the United States.

Q: No, but they bombed our allies –

RICE: No, just a second, just a second. Three-thousand Americans died in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

Q: 500,000 died in World War II –

RICE: Fighting a war in Europe.

Q: — and yet we did not torture the prisoners of war.

RICE: We didn’t torture anybody here either.