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  • The town of Innisfil is looking forward to some very futuristic developments. Global News reports.

  • Jeremy Deaton at CityLab reports on how, buffered by the Great Lakes, Buffalo NY may end gaining from climate change.

  • The Ottawa chain Bridgehead Coffee has been sold to national chain Second Cup. Global News reports.

  • Many of the more eye-raising installations in the Gay Village of Montréal have since been removed. CTV News reports.

  • Warming huts for homeless people in Winnipeg were torn down because the builders did not follow procedures. Global News reports.

  • Open Democracy looks at innovative new public governance of the city budget in Amsterdam, here.

  • Singapore, located in a well-positioned Southeast Asia and with working government, may take over from Hong Kong. Bloomberg View makes the case.

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  • Architectuul looks at the Portuguese architectural cooperative Ateliermob, here.

  • Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at how white dwarf WD J091405.30+191412.25 is literally vapourizing a planet in close orbit.

  • Caitlin Kelly at the Broadside Blog explains
  • Centauri Dreams looks at the slowing of the solar wind far from the Sun.

  • John Holbo at Crooked Timber considers the gap between ideals and actuals in the context of conspiracies and politics.

  • The Dragon's Tales reports on how the ESA is trying to solve a problem with the parachutes of the ExoMars probe.

  • Far Outliers reports on what Harry Truman thought about politicians.

  • Gizmodo reports on a new method for identifying potential Earth-like worlds.

  • io9 pays tribute to legendary writer, of Star Trek and much else, D.C. Fontana.

  • The Island Review reports on the football team of the Chagos Islands.

  • Joe. My. God. reports that gay Olympian Gus Kenworthy will compete for the United Kingdom in 2020.

  • JSTOR Daily looks at how early English imperialists saw America and empire through the lens of Ireland.

  • Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money does not like Pete Buttigieg.

  • The LRB Blog looks at the London Bridge terrorist attack.

  • The Map Room Blog shares a map of Prince William Sound, in Alaska, that is already out of date because of global warming.

  • Marginal Revolution questions if Cuba, in the Philippines, is the most typical city in the world.

  • The NYR Daily looks at gun violence among Arab Israelis.

  • The Planetary Society Blog considers what needs to be researched next on Mars.

  • Roads and Kingdoms tells the story of Sister Gracy, a Salesian nun at work in South Sudan.

  • The Russian Demographics Blog shares a paper noting continued population growth expected in much of Europe, and the impact of this growth on the environment.

  • Strange Maps shares a map of fried chicken restaurants in London.

  • Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains why a 70 solar mass black hole is not unexpected.

  • John Scalzi at Whatever gives his further thoughts on the Pixel 4.

  • Window on Eurasia notes that, last year, 37 thousand Russians died of HIV/AIDS.

  • Arnold Zwicky starts from a consideration of the 1948 film Kind Hearts and Coronets.

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  • Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait shares a stunning photo taken by a friend of the Pleiades star cluster.

  • The Buzz, at the Toronto Public Library, shares a collection of books suitable for World Vegan Month, here.

  • Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber considers, with an eye towards China and the Uighurs, how panopticon attempts can stray badly on account of--among other things--false assumptions.

  • Gizmodo considers how antimatter could end up providing interesting information about the unseen universe.

  • Joe. My. God. reports from New York City, where new HIV cases are dropping sharply on account of PrEP.

  • JSTOR Daily shares a vintage early review of Darwin's Origin of Species.

  • Language Hat examines the origins of the semicolon, in Venice in 1494.

  • Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money shares a critical report of the new Jill Lepore book These Truths.

  • The LRB Blog reports from the Museum of Corruption in Kyiv, devoted to the corruption of the ancient regime in Ukraine.

  • Marginal Revolution shares a new history of the Lakota.

  • The NYR Daily looks at the photography of Duane Michals.

  • The Russian Demographics Blog looks at population trends in Russia, still below 1991 totals in current frontiers.

  • Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains why some of the lightest elements, like lithium, are so rare.

  • Window on Eurasia shares the opinion of a Russian historian that Eastern Europe is back as a geopolitical zone.

  • Arnold Zwicky considers Jacques Transue in the light of other pop culture figures and trends.

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(A day late, I know; I crashed after work yesterday.)


  • Antipope's Charlie Stross has a thought experiment: If you were superwealthy and guaranteed to live a long health life, how would you try to deal with the consequence of economic inequality?

  • Vikas Charma at Architectuul takes a look at the different factors that go into height in buildings.

  • Bad Astronomy notes S5-HVS1, a star flung out of the Milky Way Galaxy by Sagittarius A* at 1755 kilometres per second.

  • The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly shares photos from two Manhattan walks of hers, taken in non-famous areas.

  • Centauri Dreams looks at habitability for red dwarf exoplanets. Stellar activity matters.

  • Maria Farrell at Crooked Timber shares words from a manifesto about data protection in the EU.

  • Dangerous Minds shares photos from Los Angeles punks and mods and others in the 1980s.

  • Bruce Dorminey notes a ESA report suggesting crew hibernation could make trips to Mars easier.

  • Gizmodo notes that the Hayabusa2 probe of Japan is returning from asteroid Ryugu with a sample.

  • Imageo shares photos of the disastrous fires in Australia from space.

  • Information is Beautiful reports on winners of the Information is Beautiful Awards for 2019, for good infographics.

  • JSTOR Daily explains how local television stations made the ironic viewing of bad movies a thing.

  • Kotaku reports on the last days of Kawasaki Warehouse, an arcade in Japan patterned on the demolished Walled City of Kowloon.

  • Language Hat notes how translation mistakes led to the star Beta Cygni gaining the Arabic name Albireo.

  • Language Log reports on a unique Cantonese name of a restaurant in Hong Kong.

  • Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money links to an analysis of his suggesting the military of India is increasingly hard-pressed to counterbalance China.

  • The LRB Blog notes the catastrophe of Venice.

  • Marginal Revolution notes a paper suggesting states would do well not to place their capitals too far away from major population centres.

  • Justin Petrone at North! remarks on a set of old apple preserves.

  • The NYR Daily looks at how the west and the east of the European Union are divided by different conceptions of national identity.

  • Jim Belshaw at Personal Reflections reports from his town of Armidale as the smoke from the Australian wildfires surrounds all. The photos are shocking.

  • Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society Blog lists some books about space suitable for children.

  • Drew Rowsome reviews the Canadian film music stand, inspired by the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike.

  • The Russian Demographics Blog shares a paper noting that, in Switzerland, parenthood does not make people happy.

  • The Signal notes that 1.7 million phone book pages have been scanned into the records of the Library of Congress.

  • Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains the concept of multi-messenger astronomy and why it points the way forward for studies of astrophysics.

  • Strange Maps looks at how a majority of students in the United States attend diverse schools, and where.

  • Strange Company explores the mysterious death of Marc-Antoine Calas, whose death triggered the persecution of Huguenots and resulted in the mobilization of Enlightenment figures like Voltaire against the state. What happened?

  • Towleroad hosts a critical, perhaps disappointed, review of the major gay play The Inheritance.

  • Understanding Society's Daniel Little looks at the power of individual people in political hierarchies.

  • Window on Eurasia shares an opinion piece noting how many threats to the Russian language have come from its association with unpopular actions by Russia.

  • Arnold Zwicky explores queens as various as Elizabeth I and Adore Delano.

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  • Adam Fish at anthro{dendum} compares different sorts of public bathing around the world, from Native America to Norden to Japan.

  • Charlie Stross at Antipope is unimpressed by the person writing the script for our timeline.

  • Architectuul reports on an architectural conference in Lisbon.

  • Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares stunning photos of the eruption of the Raikoke volcano in Kamchatka.

  • Centauri Dreams looks at what the Voyager spacecraft have returned about the edge of the solar system.

  • John Quiggin at Crooked Timber takes issue with the idea of bipartisanship if it means compromising on reality, allegorically.

  • The Crux counts the number of people who have died in outer space.

  • D-Brief notes that the Andromeda Galaxy has swallowed up multiple dwarf galaxies over the eons.

  • Dead Things notes the identification of the first raptor species from Southeast Asia, Siamraptor suwati.

  • The Dragon's Tales notes a paper tracing the origins of interstellar comet 2/Borisov from the general area of Kruger 60.

  • Karen Sternheimer at the Everyday Sociology Blog writes about the privilege allowing people access to affordable dental care.

  • Gizmodo tells how Alexei Leonov survived the first spacewalk.

  • io9 looks at the remarkable new status quo for the X-Men created by Jonathan Hickman.

  • Selma Franssen at the Island Review writes about the threats facing the seabirds of the Shetlands.

  • JSTOR Daily looks at what led Richard Nixon to make so many breaks from the American consensus on China in the Cold War.

  • Language Log notes an undergraduate course at Yale using the Voynich Manuscript as an aid in the study of language.

  • Abigail Nussbaum at Lawyers, Guns and Money explains her recent experience of the socialized health care system of Israel for Americans.

  • The LRB Blog looks at how badly the Fukuyama prediction of an end to history has aged.

  • The Map Room Blog shares a few maps of the new Ottawa LRT route.

  • Marginal Revolution notes a paper establishing a link between Chinese industries undermining their counterparts in Mexico and Mexican social ills including crime.

  • Sean Marshall reports from Ottawa about what the Confederation Line looks like.

  • Adam Shatz at the NYR Daily looks at the power of improvisation in music.

  • Roads and Kingdoms looks at South Williamsburg Jewish deli Gottlieb's.

  • Drew Rowsome reviews the new Patti Smith book, Year of the Monkey.

  • The Russian Demographics Blog shares a paper looking as the factors leading into transnational movements.

  • Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel considers the question of the direction(s) in which order in the universe was generated.

  • Window on Eurasia shares a report noting the very minor flows of migration from China to Russia.

  • Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell looks at the politics in the British riding of Keighley.

  • Arnold Zwicky looks at some penguin socks.

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  • The Ottawa Citizen reports on the first week of the Confederation Line LRT.

  • The New Brunswick city of Moncton now has new affordable housing--20 units--for vulnerable people. Global News reports.

  • CityLab looks at one photographer's perspective of the New York City skyline, changed by the 9/11 attacks.

  • An alleyway in Calgary is being transformed by art. Global News reports.

  • Birth tourism might become an election issue in the British Columbia city of Richmond. Global News reports.

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  • MacLean's reports from the GTA suburban city of Milton, a key battleground in the federal election.

  • Hamilton police continues to be caught up in controversy over its handling of Pride. Global News reports.

  • CityLab profiles new murals being created in New York City's Harlem, on 125th street, here.

  • Guardian Cities considers some ambitious plans for remodeling Mexico City, with vast new neighbourhoods and airports, which never came off.

  • Atlas Obscura looks at a notable library of books and other documents in the Yiddish language, housed out of a decrepit bus terminal in Tel Aviv.

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  • MTL Blog looks at the proposal for a sleeper train connecting Montréal and New York City. (Can Toronto get one too, please?)

  • Lauren Pelley reports for CBC about how climate change leads, through increased pollen production, to worse allergies for residents of cities in Canada.

  • Guardian Cities reports that the fires in Alaska, too, outside of Anchorage, are things that dwellers of cities will have to get used to.

  • The heat island effect, CityLab warns, will be a major threat to life in the cities of India.

  • CityLab does an interesting crowdsourced map, tracing the boundaries of the American Midwest.

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  • Rising real estate prices in Toronto are driving similar increases in communities far from the GTA like Belleville. The Toronto Star reports.

  • VICE reports on how good food can lead the rehabilitation of Flint, Michigan.

  • Kingston will take three years to build its latest bridge. Global News reports.

  • Beaches like NYC's Rockaway Beach are facing pressures from climate change and from gentrification, CityLab reports.

  • Many of the homeless camped in Vancouver's Oppenheimer Park are being rehoused, as part of a slow-moving campaign. Global News reports.

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  • CBC Hamilton reports on the options of the City of Hamilton faced with its having hired a prominent former white supremacist.

  • CBC Ottawa reports that flood levels on the Ottawa River have reached record highs.

  • The Montreal Gazette considers possible solutions to crowding on the Montréal subway, including new cars and special buses.

  • Kingston is preparing for flooding, the city seeing a threat only in certain waterfront districts. Global News reports.

  • Vancouver is applying a zoning freeze in a future mass transit corridor. Global News reports.

  • CityLab looks at how the post-war dream of mass transit and densification for the Ohio city of Toledo never came about, and how it might now.

  • Guardian Cities looks at construction proposals for New York City that never were.

  • CityLab looks at how the California ghost town of Bodie is kept in good shape for tourists.

  • Vox notes that just over one in ten thousand people in San Francisco is a billionaire.

  • Leonid Bershidsky at Bloomberg considers why productivity in Berlin lags behind that in other European capital cities. Could it be that the young workers of Berlin are not devoted to earning income?

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  • La Presse considers some different strategies to keep rue Saint-Denis in Montréal a healthy thoroughfare and neighbourhood.

  • Atlas Obscura explains how the upstate New York town of Hobart made itself as a home for a used book store cluster.

  • Guardian Cities explains why anti-gentrirfication activists in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin are fighting to keep their local Aldi, to continue to have low-cost food locally.

  • Window on Eurasia notes a poll of immigrant workers in St. Petersburg that finds most quite like their new home.

  • CityLab looks at Polish architect Jadwiga Grabowska-Hawrylak, whose brutalism played a key role in the reconstruction of the Poland city of Wroclaw from the ruins of old German Breslau.

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  • The National Observer notes that Montréal authorities have warned against people going to flooded areas to take selfies.

  • CityLab notes the plans of Columbia University in Manhattan to become a new much denser neighbourhood, and the concerns of non-university neighbours.

  • Feargus O'Sullivan notes at CityLab how congested Brussels is gradually becoming car-free.

  • Ozy llooks at the underground nightclubs and music halls of the young people of Baghdad.

  • Sean Marshall, reporting from his recent trip to Japan, explores post-war the streetcar system of Hiroshima with photos of his own.

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VIA Rail's $C 23 one-way ticket to Niagara Falls makes use of the convenient Maple Leaf train that crosses the Canadian-American border at Niagara Falls. When the train arrives at the Niagara Falls station, the passengers who had intended to go to Niagara Falls disembark along with the VIA Rail crews, while the Amtrak crews who take the Maple Leaf across the border get on.

Disembarked #ontario #niagarafalls #niagara #rail #viarail #amtrak #train
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  • Bloomberg notes that, while New York City is gaining jobs, it is losing residents because of its housing crisis.

  • CityLab takes a look at patterns of crime and race and violence in greater Pittsburgh.

  • La Presse notes that Montréal, picking up from neighbouring Laval, has started a process of public consultations to try to come up with a common image of the metropolis' future.

  • Guardian Cities notes that fashion giant Bestseller plans on building its skyscraper headquarters, 320 metres tall, in the rural Denmark town of Brande.

  • This Irish Examiner article, part of a series, considers how the Republic of Ireland's second city of Cork can best break free from the dominance of Dublin to develop its own potential.

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  • Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the many galaxies in the night sky caught mid-collision.

  • Centauri Dreams reports on the plan of China to send a probe to explore near-Earth co-orbital asteroid 2016 HO3 and comet 133P.

  • Gizmodo reports, with photos, on the progress of the Chang'e 4 and the Yutu 2 rover, on the far side of the Moon.

  • Joe. My. God. notes that Bill de Blasio hopes to ban new steel-and-glass skyscrapers in New York City, part of his plan to make the metropolis carbon-neutral.

  • JSTOR Daily notes a critique of the BBC documentary Planet Earth, arguing the series was less concerned with representing the environment and more with displaying HD television technology.

  • Language Hat notes the oddities of the name of St. Marx Cemetery in Vienna. How did "Mark" get so amusingly changed?

  • Language Log looks at how terms for horse-riding might be shared among Indo-European languages and in ancient Chinese.

  • Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the grounds for the workers of New York's Tenement Museum to unionize.

  • The NYR Daily notes the efforts of Barnard College Ancient Drama, at Columbia University, to revive Greek drama in its full with music and dance, starting with a Euripedes performance.

  • Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel shares some iconic images of the Earth from space for Earth Day.

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  • Queerty profiles the new permanent exhibition in Miami of mid-20th century photographer George Daniell, whose works often including queer subjects date back to the 1940s.

  • Mike Miksche writes at Slate about the import of the Black Party in New York City in 1989, for partying gay and bi men in the era of AIDS.

  • This extended interview with Troye Sivan at The Guardian exposes a lot of this out star.

  • This VICE interview with Contrapoints star Natalie Wynn makes me want to start watching her, now, on YouTube.

  • John Aravosis is quite right to argue, at The Daily Beast, that arguing Pete Buttigieg is not gay enough is ridiculous.

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  • La Presse interviews one owner of a calèche, an iconic horse-and-carriage from Montréal, who claims that an impending ban will be devastating.

  • blogTO notes the possibility, in the early 2020s, of a new passenger rail route connecting Toronto to Detroit.

  • CityLab takes a look at The Shed, the performing arts centre in the controversial Manhattan development of Hudson Yards.

  • Bloomberg makes the argument for India to create a purpose-built financial centre for Mumbai.

  • Stu Neatby at The Guardian looks at the shortage of rental housing in the growing Charlottetown PE suburb of Stratford.

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  • Bad Astronomer Phil Plait reports on the massive cloud of material detected around the active galaxy Cygnus A.

  • The Crux suggests our contemporary problems with wisdom teeth represent not a failure of evolution but rather a failure on our post-Neolithic parts to eat hard foods which stimulate the jaw growth capable of supporting wisdom teeth.

  • D-Brief notes how the astronomers involved in a planetary effort to image a black hole are preparing to make an announcement next week.

  • Gizmodo notes how the debris field created in orbit by India testing an anti-satellite weapon threatens the ISS.

  • Joe. My. God. notes that at least some hotels owned by the Sultan of Brunei are deleting their social media profiles following protests over Brunei's violent anti-gay laws.

  • JSTOR Daily considers if, between the drop in fertility that developing China was likely to undergo anyway and the continuing resentments of the Chinese, the one-child policy was worth it.

  • Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money uses a recent New York Times profile to note the sheer influence of Rupert Murdoch worldwide.

  • The Map Room Blog notes a new exhibition, at the shop of a Manhattan rare book dealer, of a collection of vintage maps of New York City from its foundation, sharing some photos, even.

  • Marginal Revolution remarks on the rapid growth of Native American numbers in the United States over the past century.

  • The NYR Daily shares a report from Debbie Bookchin in North Syria arguing that the West needs to help Rojava.

  • Roads and Kingdoms provides some tips for first-time visitors to the capital of Uruguay, Montevideo.

  • The Russian Demographics Blog notes the continuing growth in numbers of dead from HIV infection in Russia, with Siberia being a new hotspot.

  • Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains how the Event Horizon Telescope project will image a black hole's event horizon, and what questions exist around the project.

  • Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps shares an Anish Kapoor map demonstrating the Brexit divides in the United Kingdom.

  • Daniel Little at Understanding Society considers the study of ethical disasters in capitalism, looking at OxyContin as an example.

  • Window on Eurasia notes continued threats, and continued protests to these threats, surrounding Lake Baikal in Siberia.

  • Arnold Zwicky has fun with a cartoon that plays on a pun between the words chants and chance.

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  • Police in Hamilton explain why unauthorized marijuana shops are not easy to shut down. Theirs is a city of laws. Global News reports.

  • The small Nova Scotia community of Blacks Harbour has lost its only grocery store, presaging perhaps a future of decline. Global News reports.

  • New York City is getting congestions pricing for traffic setting a precedent for other cities. VICE reports.

  • Roads and Kingdoms is providing some tips to the Australian surfing resort of Byron Bay.

  • Bloomberg notes the plight of British immigrant workers in Luxembourg faced with Brexit.

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