[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Architectuul writes about the exciting possibility of using living organisms, like fungi, as custom-designed construction materials.
• Bad Astronomy looks at first-generation stars, the first stars in the universe which exploded and scattered heavy elements into the wider universe.
• Caitlin Kelly writes at the Broadside Blog, as an outsider and an observer, about the American fascination with guns.
• The Toronto Public Library’s Buzz lists some top memoirs.
• Centauri Dreams considers the vexed issue of oxygen in the oceans of Europa. There may well not be enough oxygen to sustain complex life, though perhaps life imported from Earth might be able to thrive with suitable preparation.
• The Crux looks at the well-established practice, not only among humans but other animals, of using natural substances as medicines.
• D-Brief looks at the NASA Dart mission, which will try to deflect the tiny moon of asteroid Didymos in an effort to test asteroid-diversion techniques.
• io9 reports George R.R. Martin’s belief that Gandalf could beat Dumbledore. I can buy that, actually.
• JSTOR Daily takes a look at the local reactions to Woodstock.
• Language Hat looks at the language in a 19th century short story by Nikolai Leskov, concerned with the difficulties of religious conversion for a people whose language does not encompass the concepts of Christianity.
• Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money links to a book review of his examining the Marshall mission to Nationalist China after the Second World War.
• Marginal Revolution links to survey results suggesting that, contrary to the Brexit narratives, Britons have actually been getting happier over the past two decades.
• The NYR Daily reports on an exhibition of the universe of transgressive writer Kathy Acker in London.
• Drew Rowsome reviews the innovative new staging of the queer Canadian classic Lilies at Buddies in Bad Times.
• Towleroad reports on the progress of Pete Buttigieg.
• Window on Eurasia notes that Russia and Ukraine are becoming increasingly separated by their very different approaches to their shared Soviet past.
• Arnold Zwicky looks at the latest evolutions of English.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Centauri Dreams notes a strange corridor of ice beneath the surface of Titan, a possible legacy of an active cryovolcanic past.
• D-Brief notes one study suggesting that, properly designed, air conditioners could convert carbon dioxide in the air into carbon fuels.
• Dead Things reports on the discovery of an unusual human skull three hundred thousand years old in China, at Hualongdong in the southeast.
• Gizmodo notes the identification of a jawbone 160 thousand years old, found in Tibet, with the Denisovans. That neatly explains why the Denisovans were adapted to Tibet-like environments.
• JSTOR Daily examines Ruth Page, a ballerina who integrated dance with poetry.
• Language Hat shares a critique of a John McWhorter comment about kidspeak.
• Victor Mair at Language Log shares a well-researched video on the Mongolian language of Genghis Khan.
• Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how Donald Trump, in his defiance of investigative findings, is worse than Richard Nixon.
• James Butler at the LRB Blog writes about the bombing of London gay bar Admiral Duncan two decades ago, relating it movingly to wider alt-right movements and to his own early coming out.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen notes a recent review article making the case for open borders, disproving many of the claims made by opponents.
• Paul Mason at the NYR Daily explains why the critique by Hannah Arendt of totalitarianism and fascism can fall short, not least in explaining our times.
• Corey S. Powell at Out There explains how, and why, the Moon is starting to get serious attention as a place for long-term settlement, even.
• Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society Blog explores the fund that she had in helping design a set of scientifically-accurate building blocks inspired by the worlds of our solar system.
• Drew Rowsome reports on the new restaging of the classic queer drama Lilies at Buddies in Bad Times by Walter Borden, this one with a new racially sensitive casting.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers the massive boom of diversity at the time of the Cambrian Explosion.
• Towleroad features the remarkable front cover of the new issue of Time, featuring Pete Buttigieg together with his husband Chasten.
• Window on Eurasia considers if the new Russian policy of handing out passports to residents of the Donbas republics is related to a policy of trying to bolster the population of Russia, whether fictively or actually.
• Arnold Zwicky considers the various flowers of May Day.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait considers the possibility that interstellar objects like ‘Oumuamua might help planets consdense in young systems.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly explains the genesis of news stories.
• Centauri Dreams explores a remarkable thesis of somehow intelligent, living even, mobile stars.
• Citizen Science Blog reports on an ingenious effort by scientists to make use of crowdsourcing to identify venerable trees in a forest.
• The Crux takes a look at the idea of rewilding.
• D-Brief takes a look at how active auroras can lead to satellite orbits decaying prematurely.
• Bruce Dorminey reports on a new finding suggesting that the suspected exomoon given the name Kepler-162b I does not exist.
• JSTOR Daily takes a look at the incident that led to the concept of Stockholm syndrome.
• Language Log takes a look at the idea of someone having more than one native language. Is it even possible?
• Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at how trade war with the EU is hurting the bourbon industry of the United States.
• The LRB Blog reports on the aftermath in Peru of the startling suicide of former president Alan Garcia.
• Marginal Revolution links to a paper suggesting that rising health care costs have hurt the American savings rate and the wider American economy.
• Russell Darnley takes a look at the innovative fish weirs of the Aborigines on Australia’s Darling River.
• The NYR Daily takes a look at Russian Doll and the new era of television.
• The Planetary Society Blog notes the formal end of the Mars rover expeditions. Spirit and Opportunity can rest easy.
• Drew Rowsome praises Out, a one-man show at Buddies in Bad Times exploring what it was like to be out in the late 1970s.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes that a search for dark matter has revealed evidence of the radioactive decay of pretty but not perfectly stable isotope xenon-124.
• Window on Eurasia considers the likely impact of new Ukrainian president Volodymir Zelensky on Ukrainian autocephaly.
• Arnold Zwicky celebrated the penguin drawings of Sandra Boynton, starting from her World Penguin Day image from the 25th of April.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at the evidence for the massive collision that left exoplanet Kepler 107c an astoundingly dense body.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly tells her readers the secrets of the success of her relationship with her husband, Jose.
• Centauri Dreams notes what the New Horizons probe has found out, of Ultima Thule and of Pluto, by looking back.
• The Crux shares the obituaries of scientists from NASA for the Opportunity rover.
• D-Brief reports that NASA has declared the Opportunity rover’s mission officially complete.
• Dead Things introduces its readers to Mnyamawamtuka, a titanosaur from Tanzania a hundred million years ago.
• Drew Ex Machina shares a stunning photo of Tropical Cyclone Gita, taken from the ISS in 2018.
• Far Outliers notes how the Indian Army helped save the British army’s positions from collapse in the fall of 1914.
• Joe. My. God. notes a Christian group in the United States trying to encourage a boycott of supposedly leftist candy manufacturers like Hershey’s.
• JSTOR Daily looks at why covenant marriage failed to become popular.
• Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money explains the hatred for new Congressperson Ilham Omar.
• The Planetary Society Blog links to ten interesting podcasts relating to exploration, of Earth and of space.
• Drew Rowsome interviews Tobias Herzberg about Feygele, his show in the Rhubarb festival at Buddies in Bad Times.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps looks at the evidence, presented by (among others) Geneviève von Petzinger, suggesting that forty thousand years ago cave artists around the world may have shared a common language of symbols.
• Window on Eurasia suggests that the policies of Putin are contributing to a growing sense of nationalism in Belarus.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Crooked Timber takes a look at “abusive legalism”.
• D-Brief looks at unusual Type 1A supernova ASASSN-18bt, which exhibited an odd early burst of light.
• The Dragon’s Tales reports on a Dutch government report that Russia has developed a new cruise missile in violation of the INF treaty.
• Drew Ex Machina takes a look at the latest thought on habitable moons.
• Far Outliers notes how Korean, Taiwanese, and Okinawan prisoners in American prisoner of war camps for Imperial Japanese soldiers distinguished themselves (or not) from their ethnic Japanese counterparts.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing considers the metaphor of the cave in the digital era. Do data scientists truly understand the online world?
• JSTOR Daily looks at the different estimates as to the size of the legal cannabis market in Canada.
• Language Log links to a podcast that takes a look at the Philadelphia dialect of English.
• Out There makes the argument that Cubesats are perfectly suited to conducting surveys of asteroids.
• Drew Rowsome reviews the one-man show Obaaberima, performed by Tawiah Ben M’Carthy, currently playing at Buddies in Bad Times.
• Window on Eurasia notes a demographer’s argument that any future population growth in Russia will need to be driven by immigration.

[PHOTO] Naked Heart 2018 report (@nakedheartfest, #nakedheart)

I spent most of this weekend just past attending the latest iteration of the Naked Heart literary festival, organized by Glad Day Bookshop and run out of several venues in Church and Wellesley including the 562 Church Street event space and the Buddies in Bad Times theatre.

The sessions I picked this year tended more towards an exploration of the mechanics of writing for publication, with a few readings.

• My first session Saturday morning was The Writer’s Hustle, a panel discussion with three other writers exploring how they make writing work for them as a chosen career despite its dismal economics. (Day jobs, among other things, are necessary.)
• Unruly Vision: Writing Unruly Bodies in Fiction was a very enjoying workshop led by Sanchari Sur, who led several dozen writers towards useful strategies for creating and envisioning characters.
• Queer est un mot français! was a very enjoyable reading by three Francophone Ontarian authors, Amélie Dumoulin, Pierre-Luc Landry, and Sylvie Bérard, at Glad Day. This was the first time such a French-language session had been organized for Naked Heart; I hope for more in the future.
• Terrence Abrahams led an informative session, Subject Line: Submission, on looking for potential publishing magazines, on strategies to adopt.
• Spectrums of Sanity: Mental Health and the Writer was another panel discussion at Buddies in Bad Times, with five authors talking about how they took care of themselves as they wrote.
• What’s Love Got To Do With It? was an enjoyable panel discussion at 562 Church, with four different authors talking about the way love has been represented in literature in relationship to queer lives. Why not have happy endings?
• Grit Lit was an excellent late-evening series of readings by ten authors at Glad Day, reading passages from their works. These were always direct and raw, never crude.
• Sunday morning, my first session was The Author Foundry: The Un-Artistic Aspects of Your Submission Package at Buddies. Author Sheryl Wright did an incredible job explaining the mechanics of hunting for publishers and the finer details of the literary genre of the submission, details which need to be paid attention to if a work is to have a chance of success.
• Policing the Body – Resistance and Renewal was a great panel discussion looking at the ways in which queer bodies are targeted by a hostile world. How can people fight back?
• Celebrating Marvellous Grounds: Queer of Colour Histories of Toronto was a launch session for two books put out by the Marvellous Grounds collective. I enjoyed the readings of some of the different contributing authors, telling stories about the past and present of Toronto from an angles that I needed to see.
• My final session was First Person – Ethics & Experience, a panel of five writers held at Glad Day. These five all talked about the ways in which they balanced their commitment as writers to the exploration of their truths with their responsibilities to their communities to fairly represent them.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly writes about eight of her favourite places, most but not all still around for others to enjoy.
• Centauri Dreams responds to the vast ancient proto-supercluster Hyperion, dating to a point in time just 2.3 billion years after the Big Bang.
• The Crux considers the advent of light in the very early universe, with the emergence of the first supermassive stars just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
• D-Brief notes the discovery of the youngest pulsar yet found in our galaxy, Kes 75 just 19 thousand light-years away and five hundred years old.
• JSTOR Daily takes a look at the history of explorer James Cook’s ship, the HMS Endeavour.
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution links to his latest Bloomberg View column about Saudi Arabia, about how the very weakness of the Saudi state makes Saudi Arabia appeal to the United States as a partner in a way that a solider Iran cannot.
• Matthew Phelan at the NYR Daily writes about the menace of ecofascism, of a sort of localist environmentalism that crosses over into nationalism and even militant xenophobia.
• Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society Blog shares images of the newly-launched BepiColombo probe to Mercury, including some selfies.
• Drew Rowsome reports on A Night at the Bronze, a live version of the fame Buffy episode “Once More With Feeling” that will be staged Hallowe’en night at Buddies in Bad Times.
• Strange Company reports on the mysterious 1910 murder of actor Weldon Atherstone.
• Window on Eurasia notes how Moldova’s Orthodox Christians are torn between rival national churches based in Romania and Russia.

[NEWS] Five LGBT links: Eric Radford, politics, Buddies in Bad Times, Pride House, app racism

• The story of how Eric Radford overcame a childhood in small-town Ontario to become an out winner of Olympic gold is inspiring. The Toronto Star has it.
• CBC looks at how some LGBTQ people interested in political office have gone through training sessions, to prepare.
• NOW Toronto reports on Buddies in Bad Times’ program for emerging queer theatre creators.
• Global News reports from Pyeongchang, where Canada is maintaining a Pride House for LGBTQ athletes.
• VICE considers the issue of racial discrimination on dating apps. Is enough being done by the makers to deal with this?

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• 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.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly talks about two days recently spent in Washington D.C. I would like to go there myself, I think, and for more than a quick bus transfer in the night.
• Crooked Timber considers what the upper classes of the United States are getting from the new tax cuts.
• Daily JSTOR considers the ethics of having the art of Banksy displayed in the occupied West Bank. Is it ethical?
• Far Outliers notes the impact of missionary organizations on the US Peace Corps.
• The Frailest Thing’s Michael Sacasas notes that the “we” used in talk about technology does not include everyone, that it is a selective “we.”
• Imageo shares satellite imagery of the Arctic suggesting this winter in North America will be a harsh one.
• Language Hat links to an article noting the dialect of English that refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos have developed.
• The LRB Blog shares a report of a visit to the Estonian National Museum, and a reflection on the mythology of nationhood.
• Marginal Revolution links to a paper claiming legalized abortion, not birth control, played the leading role in the emancipation of American women.
• The NYR Daily notes the cult of personality surrounding Obama.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer wonders what happened to the Afro-Argentines, numerous until the 19th century.
• Drew Rowsome notes a reading of the classic gay Canadian play Fortune and Men’s Eyes, scheduled for the 11th at Buddies in Bad Times.
• Window on Eurasia links to a scholarly examination of the Soviet annexation of once-independent Tannu Tuva, back in 1944.