[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the frequency with which young red dwarf stars flare, massively, with negative implications for potential life on these stars’ planets.
• Centauri Dreams shares a proposal for probe expeditions to Pluto and Charon, and to the wider Kuiper belt beyond.
• D-Brief explains just how elephants manage to eat with their trunks.
• JSTOR Daily answers the question of just why so many American states–other subnational polities too, I bet–have straight-line borders.
• Language Hat links to a recent blog post examining the very specific forms of language used by the Roman emperor Justinian.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Paul Campos looks at where the whole concept of “political correctness” came from, and why. (Hint: It was not anti-racists who did this.)
• Geoffrey K. Pullum at Lingua Franca describes the circumstances behind his new book, _Linguistics: Why It Matters.
• At the LRB Blog, Caroline Eden writes about the shipwrecks of the Black Sea, preserved for centuries or even millennia by the sea’s oxygen-poor waters.
• Gabrielle Bellot writes at the NYR Daily about how she refuses to be made into an invisible trans woman.
• At the Speed River Journal, Van Waffle describes–with photos!–how he was lucky enough to find a wild growth of chicken of the woods, an edible bracket mushroom of the Ontario forests.
• Window on Eurasia suggests that the loss of Ukraine by the Russian Orthodox Church will contribute to that church being increasingly seen as a national one, limited by borders.