[BLOG] Some Friday links

(A day late, I know; I crashed after work yesterday.)

• Antipope’s Charlie Stross has a thought experiment: If you were superwealthy and guaranteed to live a long health life, how would you try to deal with the consequence of economic inequality?
• Vikas Charma at Architectuul takes a look at the different factors that go into height in buildings.
• Bad Astronomy notes S5-HVS1, a star flung out of the Milky Way Galaxy by Sagittarius A* at 1755 kilometres per second.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly shares photos from two Manhattan walks of hers, taken in non-famous areas.
• Centauri Dreams looks at habitability for red dwarf exoplanets. Stellar activity matters.
• Maria Farrell at Crooked Timber shares words from a manifesto about data protection in the EU.
• Dangerous Minds shares photos from Los Angeles punks and mods and others in the 1980s.
• Bruce Dorminey notes a ESA report suggesting crew hibernation could make trips to Mars easier.
• Gizmodo notes that the Hayabusa2 probe of Japan is returning from asteroid Ryugu with a sample.
• Imageo shares photos of the disastrous fires in Australia from space.
• Information is Beautiful reports on winners of the Information is Beautiful Awards for 2019, for good infographics.
• JSTOR Daily explains how local television stations made the ironic viewing of bad movies a thing.
• Kotaku reports on the last days of Kawasaki Warehouse, an arcade in Japan patterned on the demolished Walled City of Kowloon.
• Language Hat notes how translation mistakes led to the star Beta Cygni gaining the Arabic name Albireo.
• Language Log reports on a unique Cantonese name of a restaurant in Hong Kong.
• Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money links to an analysis of his suggesting the military of India is increasingly hard-pressed to counterbalance China.
• The LRB Blog notes the catastrophe of Venice.
• Marginal Revolution notes a paper suggesting states would do well not to place their capitals too far away from major population centres.
• Justin Petrone at North! remarks on a set of old apple preserves.
• The NYR Daily looks at how the west and the east of the European Union are divided by different conceptions of national identity.
• Jim Belshaw at Personal Reflections reports from his town of Armidale as the smoke from the Australian wildfires surrounds all. The photos are shocking.
• Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society Blog lists some books about space suitable for children.
• Drew Rowsome reviews the Canadian film music Stand!, inspired by the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike.
• The Russian Demographics Blog shares a paper noting that, in Switzerland, parenthood does not make people happy.
• The Signal notes that 1.7 million phone book pages have been scanned into the records of the Library of Congress.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains the concept of multi-messenger astronomy and why it points the way forward for studies of astrophysics.
• Strange Maps looks at how a majority of students in the United States attend diverse schools, and where.
• Strange Company explores the mysterious death of Marc-Antoine Calas, whose death triggered the persecution of Huguenots and resulted in the mobilization of Enlightenment figures like Voltaire against the state. What happened?
• Towleroad hosts a critical, perhaps disappointed, review of the major gay play The Inheritance.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little looks at the power of individual people in political hierarchies.
• Window on Eurasia shares an opinion piece noting how many threats to the Russian language have come from its association with unpopular actions by Russia.
• Arnold Zwicky explores queens as various as Elizabeth I and Adore Delano.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: Valley Land Trail, e-scooters, rental housing, Brooke Lynn Hytes

• The new Valley Land Trail in Scarborough looks amazing. blogTO explains.
• John Lorinc writes at Spacing about the challenges posed by the legalization of e-scooters in Toronto.
• Why are there not more apartment buildings being built in Toronto, given the pressing demand for rental housing? The Toronto Star reports.
• David Sajecki at Spacing writes about how the construction of a low-rise apartment building at 1103 Dufferin Street, one that blends seamlessly into Wallace Emerson, points the way forward for the city.
• At Toronto Life, Emily Landau profiles Toronto-born drag queen Brooke Lynn Hytes.

[MUSIC] Five music links: St. Vincent, Madonna, Ireland, Ukraine, globalization

• Michael Cuby at them praises the musicianship of St. Vincent.
• Queerty notes that the new Madonna video, for the song “I Rise”, will feature multiple drag queens.
• The Signal looks at how the Library of Congress is preserving, and indexing, its archives of traditional Irish music.
• Zbigniew Wojnowski writes at Open Democracy about how Ukrainian popular music has evolved from the 1980s on, facing all sorts of cultural and political issues as Ukraine itself has changed hugely.
• CBC looks at how pop music these days has become increasingly globalized, major hits incorporating languages other than English and stars often initially unknown to North American audiences.

[NEWS] Five LGBTQ links: queercore, lesbian pulp novels, drag, Church closeted, #MeToo

• Hornet Stories looks at the history of the queercore punk movement.
• Sarah Fonseca at them examines the subgenre of the lesbian pulp novel.
• CBC carries the argument of drag queen Halal Bae that, after RuPaul made drag mainstream, it’s up to new artists like her to broaden the scope of the genre.
• I am strongly inclined to agree with Andrew Sullivan that the closeted corruption documented by Frédéric Martel in the Roman Catholic Church is morally repugnant. His New York blog has it.
• Kai Cheng Thom writes at Daily Xtra about the #MeToo movement in the context of queer communities, and the extra burdens it–and we–face.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: housing & ODSP, Crystal Papineau, Y&E Brooke Lynn Hites, loneliness

• Justin Haynes writes at NOW Toronto about the exceptional difficulty of finding affordable housing in Toronto for people on ODSP.
• CBC Toronto reports on the life of Crystal Papineau, a homeless woman who died in a tragic accident in Bloorcourt.
• Transit Toronto notes that Yonge and Eglinton is going to be disrupted for the next two months by Eglinton Crosstown construction.
• Toronto Life looks at Brooke Lynn Hites, the first Canadian contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race.
• Samantha Edwards writes at NOW Toronto about the concern that our city’s boom in condo construction might also lead to loneliness. What is to be done?

[NEWS] Five LGBTQ links: Moncton, Toronto drag queens, Pete Shelley, refugees, zines

• A new LGBTQ lounge is set to open up in Moncton, filling a much-needed niche in the nightlife of the city, nay region. Huddle Today reports.
• Toronto Life shares some photos of eight top Toronto drag queens.
• NOW Toronto takes a look at the out queer life of musician Pete Shelley.
• Hornet Stories notes the growing difficulties LGBTQ refugees face getting asylum around the world, even with ostensibly pro-LGBTQ countries.
• Hornet Stories looks at how queer zines continue to thrive.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait reports on Supernova 2018oh in nearby galaxy UGC 4780, a star that demonstrated a most unusual bump in its light curve. Did the explosion engulf a neighbouring star?
• Centauri Dreams reports on New Horizons as it approaches its next target, the Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule.
• D-Brief notes new observations of a black hole suggesting that gas around them forms not a rigid donut shape but rather a looser fountain.
• Dead Things notes a new discovery that the icythosaur had blubber like modern cetaceans, demonstrating convergent evolution.
• Cody Delistraty writes about changing perceptions of painter Egon Schiele.
• Far Outliers notes how Japanese prisoners of war were often so surprised by good treatment that they reciprocated, by freely sharing information with interrogators.
• Hornet Stories notes that, at least on Reddit, RuPaul’s Drag Race is the most discussed show currently playing on television.
• Joe. My. God. notes that the Indian police was seeking two American evangelical Christian missionaries for aiding another to breach North Sentinel Island, both having fled the country.
• JSTOR Daily looks back to a 1963 paper on the effects of automation on society by Leon Megginson, finding that many of his predictions were correct.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that it is a sad day for Hungary that its government was able to drive the Central European University out of Budapest into exile.
• At Lingua Franca, Roger Shuy takes a look at the dreaded PhD oral exam. (I know that seeing other students taking it was one thing putting me off from academia.)
• The LRB Blog takes a look at the disastrous state of politics in Honduras, with a corrupt leader deeply compromised by (among other things) a dependency upon the United States.
• The NYR Daily takes a look at the beautiful Tibetan Buddhist religious art on display in the Ladakh settlement of Alchi.
• Window on Eurasia notes a conference in Moscow taking a look at a Eurasianism based on a Slavic-Turkic synthesis.
• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at Santa Barbara in some of her many dimensions.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Architectuul shares the latest issue of the journal Archifutures, reporting on strategies for adapting to apocalyptic enviroments.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait breaks down for readers the import of the sighting of material on the fringes of the event horizon of Sagittarius A*.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly talks about zhush, the act of renewing one’s home as winter approaches.
• Centauri Dreams notes the fine-tuning of hypothetical mechanisms for delivering water to the Earth (and other inner worlds) during the Late Heavy Bombardment period.
• D-Brief notes the identification in many ancient human skeletons of deformities likely product of inbreeding.
• Dangerous Minds links to a fascinating documentary looking at the culture of tribute bands.
• Drew Ex Machina reports on the earliest stages of the space race, in both the Soviet Union and the United States.
• Hornet Stories notes that Sasha Velour is off to the Smithsonian to give a speech on the importance of drag in culture.
• JSTOR Daily reports on the parlous environment of the Mediterranean Sea, with sea level rise and pollution promising to make a mess.
• Language Hat notes how, in France, the concept of being “excited” that exists in the Anglophone world and in French Canada may not be represented in the local French.
• Language Log considers, in the context of the recent Sokal Squared hoax, the ethnographic peculiarities of academia.

[URBAN NOTE] Twelve Toronto links

• Edward Keenan is entirely right to praise the idea of exploring the cherry blossoms of Toronto by foot. The Toronto Star has it.
• Mark Cullen noted last week the struggle to keep what may be the oldest tree in Toronto, a red soak more than three centuries old, alive, over at the Toronto Star.
• John Tory is quite right to note that Toronto needs to prepare for possible surges of refugees. CBC reports.
• A Scarborough mansion that has been abandoned for years has just sold for $C 3.8 million. The Toronto Star reports.
• The infamous Giraffe building on the northwest corner of Dundas West and Bloor may be set to disappear, finally, under a wave of new construction there. Toronto Life reports.
• blogTO makes the case that west-end Rogers Road is becoming the new centre of the Portuguese-Canadian community, here.
• Orfus Road, off Dufferin Street near Yorkdale, is a place to go for outlet stores and discounted merchandise. blogTO notes.
• The TTC has cancelled its weekend closures of parts of different subway routes after disputes with the union. The Toronto Star reports.
• By one metric, Toronto falls behind only New York City in the race for the Amazon HQ2. The Toronto Star reports.
• NOW Toronto tells the story of someone who grew marijuana in their backyard, here.
• An AI Weiwei show will be coming to Toronto in 2019. NOW Toronto reports.
• Peter Knegt profiles Toronto drag queen Sofonda Cox, over at CBC.

[NEWS] Five LGBTQ links: Toronto, Daniel Mallory Ortberg, Melvin Iscove, Michelle Visage, drag kings

• People interviewed by front-line police regarding the Church-Wellesley serial killer affair suggest that, if there was any problem, it was certainly not with the sensitive and informed front-line officers. The Toronto Star reports.
• Heather Havrilesky at The Cut interviews Daniel Mallory Ortberg and, in so doing, celebrates his outing himself as trans.
• The medical license of Dr. Melvin Iscove, who as a psychiatrist practiced conversion therapy without quite admitting to it, has been suspended following findings that he had sex with his male patients. The Toronto Star reports.
• In a wide-ranging interview, E. Alex Jung talks with Michelle Visage about RuPaul’s drag ace, her life, and the changing lines between gay and trans, gender and sexuality, that she has seen since the 1980s, over</a at Vulture.
• Hazel Cills at Jezebel takes a look at drag kings. I’d not heard of them in a while: What are they doing? What is this genderbending cultural form evolving into? They need more prominence.