A Bit More Detail

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly writes about the importance of seeing the world from new angles.


• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber suggests that, worldwide, coal is becoming increasingly closely associated with corruption.


• D-Brief looks at a study drawing on Twitter that suggests people will quickly get used to changing weather in the era of climate change.


• Jonathan Wynn at the Everyday Sociology Blog writes about a family trip during which he spent time listening to sociology-related podcasts.


• Far Outliers notes the life-determining intensity of exam time for young people in Calcutta.


• io9 notes that, finally, the classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Once More, With Feeling" is being released on vinyl.


• JSTOR Daily looks at how medieval Europe regulated the sex trade.


• Language Hat looks at how anthropologists have stopped using "hominid" and started using "hominin", and why.


• Language Log considers the difficulty of talking about "Sinophone" given the unrepresented linguistic diversity included in the umbrella of "Chinese".


• Marginal Revolution suggests there are conflicts between NIMBYism and supporting open immigration policies.


• At Out There, Corey S. Powell interviews astronomer Slava Turyshev about the possibility not only of interstellar travel but of exploiting the Solar Gravity Lens, 550 AU away.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 9 mission.


• Towleroad notes that Marvel Comics is planning to make its lead character in the Eternals gay.


• Daniel Little at Understanding Society examines how the human body and its physical capacities are represented in sociology.


• Window on Eurasia notes the growth of the Volga Tatar population of Moscow, something hidden by the high degree of assimilation of many of its members.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell notes, in connection to Huawei, the broad powers allotted to the British government under existing security and communications laws.


• Arnold Zwicky looks at anteaters and antedaters.

• them interviews Troy Lee Hudson, the engineer working on NASA's InSight Mars who has gone viral as #ScienceDaddy, letting him talk about Mars and about being an out scientist.


• Stefanie Duguay at The Conversation writes about how the new Tumblr ban on NSFW content will harm young LGBTQ people, by depriving them of community and information.


• Rinaldo Walcott at Daily Xtra makes the case for downsizing Pride Toronto to better fit community needs and desires.


• The Canadian federal government has created a new Canada Pride Citation, available to present and past LGBTQ employees of the federal government, including many who were persecuted for their sexual orientation. Global News reports.


• them reports on how gentrification in the leather community in San Francisco impacts the wider city.

• This story about the assault of a photographer for the Toronto Sun by protesters highlights something alarming. The Toronto Star reports.


• NOW Toronto highlights the role played by the Toronto Sun in putting forth an alt-right-tinged view of the Danforth shooting.


• Natalia Manzucco at NOW Toronto looks at the continuing issues, economic and otherwise, surrounding "Vegandale".


• Fentanyl is killing people in Toronto, including teenagers. Toronto Life reports.


• The Toronto Public Library is inviting people on Twitter to collaborate in writing a book. Global News reports.


• Will the Silver Dollar Room return, in any form? The Toronto Star reports.

• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait notes the continuing maps and naming of the Pluto system.


• Centauri Dreams considers one method to detect photosynthesis on Earth-like worlds of red dwarf stars.


• D-Brief notes the discovery of Octlantis, a permanent community of octopi located off the coast of Australia.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes Earth-like world can co-exist with a Jovian in a circumstellar habitable zone.


• Hornet Stories notes that Morrissey is now in Twitter. (This will not go well.


• Language Log notes the kanji tattoo of one American neo-Nazi.


• The LRB Blog notes how the English town of Tewksbury is still recovering from massive flooding a decade later.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the improbable life of Barry Sadler, he of "The Ballad of the Green Berets".


• The Map Room Blog shares this terrifying map examining the rain footprint of Hurricane Irma.


• Spacing reviews a fascinating dual biography of architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson.


• Window on Eurasia notes an call to restore to maps the old Chinese name for former Chinese Tuva, Uryankhai.

• Bloomberg looks at the recent surge of Chinese investment in Southeast Asia.


• Culture.pl looks at why Nietzsche falsely claimed Polish ancestry.


• Foreign Policy suggests that this is a new age of German prominence in the West.


• The New Yorker finds Amazon's new brick-and-mortar bookstores lacking.


• The Toronto Star shares claims that learning a second language provides mental benefits.


• Universe Today notes the discovery of potentially habitable super-Earth Gliese 625 b.


• Vice's Motherboard notes how the popularization of ayahuasca-driven spirit quests has actually hurt traditional users.


• Vox notes the latest Russia-Ukraine history fight on Twitter.

The replies to Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne on Twitter are not for the faint of heart.

The tweets at Wynne predominantly express anger about her record and most stay within the bounds of fair comment, not crossing the line into personal abuse. Such calls as "Resign!" "You're incompetent!" and "Worst premier ever!" are now simply part of the deal for a politician in the era of social media.

But Wynne also draws a significant number of abusive, sexist and homophobic tweets. [. . .]

The comments on Wynne's Facebook page are equally nasty, but her communications team filters out posts that contain the most abusive words so the public can't view them.

A member of the premier's staff showed CBC News nearly 40 Facebook posts filtered out from just the past week, including ones calling Wynne a "wrinkly bitch" (by a Facebook user named George Onock) a "subhuman, dirty dyke" (Frank Yurkowski) and a "lying cheating c--t."

• Al Jazeera looks at the rejection of political Islam by Tunisia's Ennahda party.


• The Australian Broadcasting Corporation notes the ambition of Zambia to become a major food-exporting country.


• Bloomberg notes the negative impact of booming immigration on the New Zealand economy, observes Ireland's efforts to attract financial jobs from London-based companies worried by Brxit, reports on the elimination of Brazil's sovereign wealth fund, and notes a lawsuit lodged by Huawei against Samsung over royalties.


• Bloomberg View notes that Russia can at least find domestic investors, and worries about the politicization of the Israeli military.


• CBC reports on the Syrian refugee who has become a popular barber in Newfoundland's Corner Brooks, notes the sad news of Gord Downie's cancer, and wonders what will happen to Venezuela.


• Daily Xtra writes about the need for explicit protection of trans rights in Canadian human rights codes.


• MacLean's notes Uber's struggles to remain in Québec.


• National Geographic notes Brazilian efforts to protect an Amazonian tribe.


• The National Post reports about Trudeau's taking a day off on his Japan trip to spend time with his wife there.


• Open Democracy wonders what will become of the SNP in a changing Scotland.


• The Toronto Star looks at payday lenders.


• Wired examines Twitter's recent changes.

• Bloomberg notes Petrobras' dismissal of rumours it is threatened by the impeachment, observes that many Europeans expect a chain reaction of departures if the United Kingdom leaves, notes that a return to high economic growth in Israel will require including the Palestinian minority, and
  looks at Panamanian efforts to convince the world that the country is not a tax haven.


• The Globe and Mail remembers Mi'kMaq teacher Elsie Basque, and looks at how Mongolia is trying to adapt to the new economy.


• Bloomberg View states the obvious, noting that an expected event is not a wild swan.


• CBC notes Rachel Notley's tour of Fort McMurray.


• The Inter Press Service notes the denial of everything about the Rohingya.


• MacLean's looks at further confusion in Brazil.


• Open Democracy notes a push for land reform in Paraguay and looks at the devastation of Scotland's Labour Party.


• Wired notes the dependence of intelligence agencies on Twitter, proved by Twitter shutting an intermediary down.

Faithful followers of Twitter believe that Jack Dorsey, one of the social network’s founders, is the only person capable of turning around the struggling firm. Mr Dorsey (pictured below, during a recent Old Testament beard experiment) returned as its boss last year, taking over from Dick Costolo, who had led the company during a chaotic round of executive departures and strategic changes. True believers hope Mr Dorsey will be a reincarnation of the late Steve Jobs, who returned from exile to restore Apple to greatness.

So far, however, Mr Dorsey has yet to perform miracles. On February 10th Twitter reported lacklustre earnings for the first full quarter that he has been back in charge. It now has 320m monthly users, no more than it had in the previous quarter, and it is unlikely to turn a profit until 2019.

When Twitter went public in 2013, some believed it could become larger than Facebook, an older rival. Mr Costolo promised to build the “largest daily audience in the world”. Its prospects looked bright. Unlike Facebook, which began as a service on desktop computers, Twitter has always been popular on mobile devices, so it did not have to cope with a difficult transition.

However, it has become clear that Twitter will never become the giant it was supposed to be. The pace at which it is adding users has slowed far sooner than it did at Facebook (see chart). Mark Zuckerberg’s outfit, which now has 1.6 billion monthly users, has grown swiftly by buying potential competitors such as Instagram, a photo-sharing site. One sign of Twitter’s ill health is that its number of users in America has stayed flat, at around 70m, for a full year, suggesting that it is approaching a ceiling in the world’s most important advertising market.

It wasn’t that long ago that I—and many other people I know—would have argued that Twitter was more than just another social network. I would have told you that Twitter was more like a utility, a service so fundamental that I could imagine a scenario in which it was literally underwritten. Twitter needed to exist. A stream of those hundred-and-forty-character tweets was how you found the most crucial, critical, and thought-provoking stories of the moment.

[. . .]

But cracks in Twitter’s façade had been showing already. Changes to the product made it hard to follow conversations or narratives. A lack of rigor in verifying reliable sources made information suspect or confusing. More troubling was the growing wave of harassment and abuse that users of the service were dealing with—a quagmire epitomized by the roving flocks of hateful, misogynistic, and well-organized “Gamergate” communities that flooded people’s feeds with hate speech and threats. The company seemed to be wholly unprepared to handle mob violence, with few tools at its disposal to moderate or quell uprisings. Even its beloved celebrity users couldn’t be protected. In August of 2014, Robin Williams’s daughter, Zelda, was driven off the service after a series of vicious attacks.

Of course, getting noisy isn’t the only problem Twitter has today, though it seems to be one of the more pronounced symptoms of a company that has lost its direction, or, more worryingly (and perhaps more accurately), never had much direction to begin with. After a summer of turmoil and indecision—a summer spent largely rudderless after the resignation of the C.E.O., Dick Costolo—the company reappointed its co-founder, the Silicon Valley wunderkind Jack Dorsey, and signalled that, perhaps for the first time in a long time, Twitter could find its focus.

That focus would have to come fast. In the yearlong stretch leading up to Dorsey’s return, the number of active users on Twitter only grew by eleven per cent. Even more troubling was the service’s penetration in the U.S.: it remained completely flat for the first three quarters of 2015. Facebook has surpassed the company by orders of magnitude, but it’s hardly Twitter’s only foe. Instagram, WhatsApp, and even WeChat all now have more individual users than Twitter does. Snapchat has almost caught Twitter, too.

In Facebook’s case, the company has demonstrated its mastery of product focus and long-term commitment to user experience. While Mark Zuckerberg’s empire sent users sloshing to and fro on the seas of privacy invasion in its early years, the past five years have seen the company come to dominate and define the concept of a social conversation. If users get abusive on Facebook, they’re dealt with. If someone wants to wage a campaign of noise and intrusion, the repercussions are varied and plentiful. You may not agree with Zuckerberg’s “one identity” concept, but the fact that people have to register their real names has certainly made Facebook a much safer space in which to engage. That’s to say nothing of its mobile and ad offerings, which the company has finally paired elegantly, allowing Facebook to take an even larger bite of mobile-ad dollars. The company closed its latest quarter with revenue up a whopping fifty-one per cent year over year.

Meanwhile, a series of mediocre product changes at Twitter (such as the much-hyped but ultimately confusing Moments feature), a stagnant user base, and a massive executive brain drain have called into question whether Twitter can survive as a business. In the past week, the company has lost its vice-president of media, V.P. of product (to Instagram, natch), its head of the growing video service Vine (to Google), its V.P. of engineering, and its H.R. head. Unsurprisingly, the company’s stock has lost about fifty per cent of its value over the past three months.

But what should worry Twitter isn’t the value of its stock. (USA Today reported that, given its cash reserves, the service could run for another four hundred and twelve years with current losses.) What should worry Twitter is irrelevance, and there is growing data to suggest that that is where the company is headed. If Twitter’s real-time feed is its most powerful asset (and it is), it’s not difficult to see a future in which Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, or even a newcomer like Peach (yes, I am citing Peach) focus enough on real-time news that they obviate the need for Twitter’s narrow, noisy, and oft-changing ideas about social interaction. Considering the fact that Kevin Weil, the head of product, left the company to join Instagram, it’s easy to imagine that service mutating or bifurcating into a speedier, more social platform for sharing links and having conversations. And, for many users—particularly young users, according to a recent survey—Snapchat is already their most important destination. We live in the Age of the Upgrade, and the generation raised on the Internet is the most fickle of brand champions: it loves something passionately, until it doesn’t. Then it moves on.