[NEWS] Seven #Halloween links: Toronto, Fisher Rare Book Library, haunted houses, 1978, fear

• NOW Toronto shares photos from a Hallowe’en dress party held this weekend at the Toronto Reference Library.
• CBC Toronto highlights an exhibit at the Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto looking at monsters, De Monstris.
• The Crux takes a look at different Hallowe’en traditions around the world.
• Dangerous Minds reports on Hallowe’en back in 1978, when the Ramones were dressed up for a show in Virginia.
• JSTOR Daily takes a look at whether or not homeowners looking to sell their property have to inform buyers if the house is haunted.
• Jamie Bradburn takes a look back in time, at Toronto’s Hallowe’en in 1978 as reported in the papers.
• Gerald Walton at The Conversation writes about fear, and about constructive ways to harness fear to engender positive change.

[ISL] Five islands links: Ile-des-Soeurs, Barbados, Islay, Greenland, Seychelles (#islands)

• La Presse notes that ongoing contruction is making traffic to and from the heavily populated Ile-des-Soeurs, just off Montréal, very difficult.
• IPS News notes that Barbados is hoping to diversify beyond its traditional sugar cane agriculture to start tapping fisheries in the adjacent Atlantic.
• The Island Review shares the reports of Marg Greenwood around the Scottish island of Islay.
• Are the oldest fossils in the world, imprints in Greenland rocks billions of years old, actually fossils? CBC reports.
• The Inter Press Services notes that the Seychelles have issued some bonds in support of new fisheries projects.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Wawa, Calgary, Mexico City, Tirana, Hong Kong

• 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.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: Lawrence Heights, waterfront, Distillery District, Chinatown

• Christopher Hume at the Toronto Star notes how the ongoing attempt to revitalize Lawrence Heights will try to plug that neighbourhood back into the wider city of Toronto.
• Urban Toronto notes efforts by condo designers to make the Sugar Beach towers suitable for families.
• Ontario Place would be a perfect place for a swimming pier, wouldn’t it? CBC reports.
• Daily Hive notes that the Distillery District will soon house the Collège Boreal.
• blogTO notes a classic Chinatown building on Spadina Avenue that has been given a terrible makeover.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber praises Candice Delmas’ new book on the duty of resistance to injustice.
• D-Brief looks at how the designers of robots took lessons from wasps in designing a new robotic swarm that can pull relatively massive objects in flight.
• Dead Things notes new evidence that the now-extinct elephant birds of Madagascar were nocturnal.
• Far Outliers notes how the reeducation of Japanese prisoners of war by Chinese Communists helped influence American policy towards Japan, imagining a Japan that could be reformed away from imperialism.
• At the Island Review, Alex Ingram profiles–with photos–some of the many different people who are the lone guardians of different small isolated islands removed from the British mainland.
• JSTOR Daily notes how asteroids can preserve records of the distant past of the solar system.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money has contempt for Pence’s use of Messianic Jews to stand in for the wider, non-Christian, Jewish community.
• At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen considers the consequence that a decline of art galleries might have on the wider field of modern art.
• The NYR Daily considers the lessons that Thucydides, writing about Athens, might have for the United States now.
• Anjali Kumar at Roads and Kingdoms writes about a meal of technically illegal craft beer served with raw shrimp in Bangkok.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel illustrates the six different ways a start can end up in a supernova.
• Window on Eurasia notes that official Russian efforts to reach out to the Russian diaspora do not extend to non-Russian minorities’ own diasporas, like that of the Circassians of the North Caucasus.
• Arnold Zwicky, starting by noting the passing of Dorcas, she who invented green bean casserole, looks at different pre-prepared foodstuffs.

[PHOTO] Four photos from the Dufferin Grove vigil

Yesterday evening at 7, I went to the Toronto Community Vigil for the victims of the recent Pittsburgh mass shooting at Dufferin Grove Park, organized by If Not Now Toronto. It was a necessary act of solidarity, gathered under the powerful yellow glow of the streetlights of Havelock Street on the eastern edge of the park and the dimmer glow of house lights in the neighbourhood beyond, a gathering-together of mourning for the dead–in Pittsburgh, in Kentucky, in Gaza–and a statement of the need to join together to resist the alt-right and white nationalism. I’m still afraid of the way the world is evolving, but I don’t think I feel quite so alone.

[NEWS] Five first nations links: tobacco, yaupon tea, Kahnawake cannabis, Cree fiddling, Indigenous

• D-Brief notes evidence that indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest smoked tobacco long before Europeans arrived.
• Atlas Obscura looks at “yaupon tea”, a caffeinated beverage brewed from the leaves and stems of the cassina plant of the southeastern United States popular among indigeous peoples but mysteriously neglected in recent years.
• The Mohawk reserve of Kahnawake is facing a referendum over whether or not to legalize the sale of cannabis products. CTV reports.
• Cree fiddler Byron Jonah is the first person to win a new fiddling award of Eeyou Istchee, the Cree region in northern Québec. CBC reports.
• Mathieu Landriault at The Conversation looks at how, in the Justin Trudeau era, the term “Aboriginal” has been replaced by “Indigenous”.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Montréal, Atlanta, Greenville, Sutera, Hong Kong

• Québec premier François Legault might well be convinced to support the Pink Line subway route favoured by Montréal mayor Valérie Plante. Global News reports.
• Guardian Cities reports on the popularity of the new soccer team of Atlanta in this perhaps unlikely locale.
• The North Carolina city of Greenville is trying to work towards settling its racist past with a new park, CityLab reports.
• Lorenzo Tondo at The Guardian reports on how new immigrants might save his father’s native village of Sutera in Sicily, but only if they are allowed to.
• Bloomberg View notes that a bridge alone will not be enough to bind Hong Kong to the emergent Pearl River megalopolis.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: John Tory, planetarium, condos, Liberty Village, Edward VIII

• Toronto has been unified around John Tory, May Warren argues at the Toronto Star, largely because of Doug Ford.
• Urban Toronto notes an exciting University of Toronto proposal for a new planetarium downtown. I would definitely go for that!
• Urban Toronto notes</u. that excavation has begun for Panda Condominiums, at the former site of the World’s Biggest Book Store.
• blgoTO notes a Liberty Village intersection with massive new projects on every corner.
• Jamie Bradburn looks at the scant traces of King Edward VIII in Toronto, at Yonge and Eglinton and at Exhibition Place.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• 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.