A Bit More Detail

• Bad Astronomer notes the latest news on interstellar comet 2/Borisov.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly emphasizes how every writer does need an editor.


• Centauri Dreams notes how the gas giant GJ 3512 b, half the mass of Jupiter orbiting a red dwarf star closely, is an oddly massive exoplanet.


• Gina Schouten at Crooked Timber looks at inter-generational clashes on parenting styles.


• D-Brief looks at the methods of agriculture that could conceivably sustain a populous human colony on Mars.


• Bruce Dorminey argues that we on Earth need something like Starfleet Academy, to help us advance into space.


• Colby King at the Everyday Sociology Blog looks at how the socio-spatial perspective helps us understand the development of cities.

Russell Arben Fox at In Media Res listens to the Paul McCartney album Flaming Pie.

• io9 looks at Proxima, a contemporary spaceflight film starring Eva Green.


• JSTOR Daily looks at how the intense relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia began in, and reflected, the era of Jim Crow.


• Language Hat notes a report suggesting that multilingualism helps ward off dementia.


• Language Log takes issue with the names of the mascots of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the emergence of a ninth woman complaining about being harassed by Al Franken.


• Marginal Revolution links to a new paper arguing that the Washington Consensus worked.


• The NYR Daily shares an Aubrey Nolan cartoon illustrating the evacuation of war children in the United Kingdom during the Second World War.


• At Out of Ambit, Diane Duane shares a nice collection of links for digital mapmakers.


• The Planetary Society Blog looks at how the European Space Agency supports the cause of planetary defense.


• Roads and Kingdoms interviews Kenyan writer Kevin Mwachiro at length.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel reports on how a mysterious fast radio burst helped illuminate an equally mysterious galactic halo.


• Strange Company reports on the mysterious and unsolved death in 1936 of Canadian student Thomas Moss in an Oxfordshire hayrick.


• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps notes how Mount Etna is a surpassingly rare decipoint.


• Understanding Society considers the thought of Kojève, after Hegel, on freedom.


• Window on Eurasia looks at the falling numbers of Russians, and of state support for Russian language and culture, in independent Central Asia.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell looks at how individual consumer responses are much less effective than concerted collective action in triggering change.


• Arnold Zwicky reports on some transgender fashion models.

• Le Devoir wonders if excessive tourism will make Vieux-Québec unlivable for locals.


• Sam Sklar at CityLab, native of the New Jersey community of Fort Lee, wonders when it will burst out from the shadow of New York City.


• The question of how Vancouver in the era of legalization will celebrate 4/20 remains actively contested. The National Post reports.


• CityLab reports on how the 2024 Paris Olympics may help regenerate Saint-Denis.


• The story about how resettled refugees helped revive the Italian town of Sutera, on the island of Sicily, needs to be better-known. VICE reports.

• In remembering Stan Lee, CityLab points to the evocative image of New York City that he and Marvel Comics created.


• Global News notes that Calgary is approaching the day of its referendum over the 2026 Winter Olympics. (Calgarians, vote against the idea.)


• Guardian Cities shares these images depicting what London would look like if any number of plans for new architectural wonders had come to pass.


• CityLab notes how community activity helped reclaim Zeedijk street in Amsterdam.


• Guardian Cities shares photos of the final days of the traditional fish market in the Senegalese capital of Dakar.

• Vice shares the photographs taken by Cheyenne Jackson of the declining, aging, northern Ontario town of Wawa. What future does it have?


• At MacLean's, Jason Markusoff looks at the diminishing support for the 2026 Olympics in Calgary. Is there any case for this?


• Guardian Cities reports on the Via Verde, the vertical gardens attached to the pillars of the Mexico City freeway system. Are they merely cosmetic?


• The continued efforts of the civic authorities in the Albanian capital of Tirana to improve life in this growing city are the subject of this Guardian Cities article.


• This SCMP article makes a compelling argument that the distinctiveness of Hong Kong, as a city not wholly of China, is inexorably declining.

• The rest of Saint John, New Brunswick, to have the provincial government authorize a study on municipal amalgamation has been turned down. Global News reports.
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• Some old cars from the Montréal Métro are going on display as part of two exhibits. Global News reports.


• Montréal ranks second in a ranking of the top cities for millennials, all things considered. (Toronto is in the top 10.) Global News reports.


• A crackdown on payday loan establishments in Hamilton has been followed by a request that banks and other traditional lenders please consider their payday clients. Global News reports.


• Quite honestly, the argument made here that Calgary is destined to host the 2026 Olympics is actually convincing. Global News reports.

• Kambiz Kamrani at Anthropology.net notes new findings suggesting that the creation of cave art by early humans is product of the same skills that let early humans use language.


• Davide Marchetti at Architectuul looks at some overlooked and neglected buildings in and around Rome.


• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait explains how Sirius was able to hide the brilliant Gaia 1 star cluster behind it.


• Centauri Dreams looks at new procedures for streamlining the verification of new exoplanet detections.


• Crooked Timber notes the remarkably successful and once-controversial eroticization of plant reproduction in the poems of Erasmus Darwin.


• Dangerous Minds notes how an errant Confederate flag on a single nearly derailed the career of Otis Redding.


• Detecting biosignatures from exoplanets, Bruce Dorminey notes, may require "fleets" of sensitive space-based telescopes.


• Far Outliers looks at persecution of non-Shi'ite Muslims in Safavid Iran.


• JSTOR Daily looks at the history of the enslavement of Native Americans in early colonial America, something often overlooked by later generations.


• This video shared by Language Log, featuring two Amazon Echos repeating texts to each other and showing how these iterations change over time, is oddly fascinating.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis is quite clear about the good sense of Will Wilkinson's point that controversy over "illegal" immigration is actually deeply connected to an exclusivist racism that imagines Hispanics to not be Americans.


• Lingua Franca, at the Chronicle of Higher Education, looks at the uses of the word "redemption", particularly in the context of the Olympics.


• The LRB Blog suggests Russiagate is becoming a matter of hysteria. I'm unconvinced, frankly.


• The Map Room Blog shares a map showing global sea level rise over the past decades.


• Marginal Revolution makes a case for Americans to learn foreign languages on principle. As a Canadian who recently visited a decidedly Hispanic New York, I would add that Spanish, at least, is one language quite potentially useful to Americans in their own country.


• Drew Rowsome writes about the striking photographs of Olivier Valsecchi.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes that, in the 2030s, gravitational wave observatories will be so sensitive that they will be able to detect black holes about to collide years in advance.


• Towleroad lists festival highlights for New Orleans all over the year.


• Window on Eurasia notes how recent changes to the Russian education system harming minority languages have inspired some Muslim populations to link their language to their religion.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell makes the case that Jeremy Corbyn, through his strength in the British House of Commons, is really the only potential Remainder who is in a position of power.

• David Shane Lowry at anthro{dendum} considers the extent to which implicit policies of eugenics, determining whose survival matters and whose do not, exist in the 21st century in an era of climate change.


• Kambiz Kamrani at Anthropology.net takes issue with the contention of Richard Goss that Neanderthals became extinct because they lacked the physical coordination necessary to be good hunters or good artists.


• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes that the Chixculub asteroid impactor 66 million years ago created a tectonic shock worldwide that made things worse, the effects of the impact winter being worsened by massive induced volcanic activity.


• D-Brief shares the story of a British man whose chronic pain was relieved by a swim in icy-cold winter waters.


• The Dragon's Tales reports that China may well be on track to building the first exoscale computer, first in the world.


• Hornet Stories notes that out Olympic athlete Eric Radford is the first to win a gold medal.


• JSTOR Daily engages with an old conundrum of economists: why are diamonds more expensive than water?


• Lawyers, Guns and Money examines how urban Native Americans tend to have insecure housing, being on the margins of the real estate market in cities and without options in their home reserves. This surely also is the case in Canada, too.


• Lucy McKeon at the NYR Daily writes about all the photographs she has never seen, images that she has only heard descriptions of.


• Drew Rowsome notes the reappearance of queer theatre festival Rhubarb at Buddies in Bad Times, with shows starting tomorrow.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes that the Trump administration's proposed budget for NASA in FY2019 will gut basic science programs.


• Window on Eurasia notes the emergence of a survivalist subculture in Russia, following somewhat the pattern of the United States.


• Arnold Zwicky starts from noting a sample of a rap song in a Mountain Dew commercial and goes interesting places in his latest meditations.

• At Antipope, Charlie Stross wonders--among other things--what the Trump Administration is getting done behind its public scandals.


• blogTO notes a protest in Toronto aiming to get the HBC to drop Ivanka Trump's line of fashion.


• Dangerous Minds reflects on a Talking Heads video compilation from the 1980s.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money reflects on a murderous attack against Indian immigrants in Kansas.


• The LRB Blog looks at "post-Internet art".


• Lovesick Cyborg notes an attack by a suicide robot against a Saudi warship.


• Strange Maps links to a map of corruption reports in France.


• Torontoist reports on Winter Stations.


• Understanding Society engages in a sociological examination of American polarization, tracing it to divides in race and income.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes the many good reasons behind the reluctance of cities around the world to host the Olympics.


• Window on Eurasia notes that where the Ingush have mourned their deportation under Stalin the unfree Chechens have not, reports that Latvians report their willingness to fight for their country, looks at what the spouses of the presidents of post-Soviet states are doing, and notes the widespread opposition in Belarus to paying a tax on "vagrancy."


• Arnold Zwicky looks at the linguistic markers of the British class system.

Italy suspended Rome’s bid for the 2024 Olympics on Tuesday, forced to pull the plug because of the staunch opposition of the city’s mayor.

Italian Olympic Committee president Giovanni Malago said that he had written to the IOC announcing the decision to “interrupt the candidacy.”

While the letter left open a small possibility for a revival of the bid if there is a change in city government, Malago didn’t hold out much hope.

“Today the game is over. But if someone decides that the game isn’t over it’s not up to us. But today we’re ending the game,” Malago told The Associated Press after his announcement at a news conference. “That’s it.”

The move comes after Rome’s city council voted last month to withdraw support of the bid on the recommendation of Mayor Virginia Raggi.

• News of Proxima Centauri b spread across the blogosphere yesterday, to Discover's D-Brief and Crux, to Joe. My. God., to the Planetary Society Blog, and to Centauri Dreams and The Dragon's Gaze.


• blogTO notes the impending opening of Toronto's first Uniqlo and suggests TTC buses may soon have a new colour scheme.


• The Dragon's Gaze discusses detecting exo-Titans and looks at the Kepler-539 system.


• Marginal Revolution notes Poland's pension obligations.


• The Map Room Blog looks at how empty maps are of use to colonialists.


• Steve Munro examines traffic on King Street.


• The NYR Daily looks at what an attic of ephemera reveals about early Islam.


• Otto Pohl announces his arrival in Kurdistan.


• The Russian Demographics Blog and Window on Eurasia note that more than half of Russia's medal-winners at the Olympics were not ethnically Russian, at least not wholly.


• Window on Eurasia looks at Ukraine's balance sheet 25 years after independence and considers if Belarus is on the way to becoming the next Ukraine.