[URBAN NOTE] Seven city links: Pierrefonds, Edmundston, Saskatoon, Louisville, Belfast, Jerusalem …

• Ending free coffee for municipal employees in the Québec community of Pierrefonds created massive controversy. CBC reports.
• The mayor of the Francophone city of Edmundston in New Brunswick has encouraged immigrant Québec students hurt by immigration changes to come to his community. CTV News reports.
• The price of crystal meth in Saskatoon is apparently as low as $3 a bag. Global News reports.
• Guardian Cities notes how Louisville, low on trees, is trying to regreen the city as a way to deal with rising temperatures.
• Open Democracy considers if the DUP is about to lose its strongholds in Belfast.
• Guardian Cities looks at the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Kafr Aqab, a place where Palestinians can access their metropolis (and their partners).
• CityLab shares photos of the wonderful new public library of Helsinki.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at the dusty spiral of galaxy M81, here.
• Crooked Timber reacts positively to the Astra Taylor short film What Is Democracy?
• D-Brief notes that, in the South Atlantic, one humpback whale population has grown from 440 individuals to 25 thousand, nearly completing its recovery from whaling-era lows.
• Dangerous Minds looks at The Iguanas, first band of Iggy Pop.
• The Dragon’s Tales looks at consideration in South Korea at building an aircraft carrier.
• Todd Schoepflin at the Everyday Sociology Blog looks at the division of labour within his family.
• Far Outliers looks at 17th century clashes between England and Barbary Pirates.
• JSTOR Daily looks at how antibiotics are getting everywhere, contaminating food chains worldwide.
• Victor Mair at Language Log looks at the evidence not only for an ancient Greek presence in Central Asia, but for these Greeks’ contact with China.
• Dan Nexon at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that the attempt by Trump to get Ukraine to spy on his enemies was driven by what Russia and Hungary alleged about corruption in Ukraine.
• The LRB Blog looks at the transnational criminal network of the Hernandez brothers in Honduras, a source of a refugee diaspora.
• Marginal Revolution shares an argument suggesting that marriage is useful for, among other things, encouraging integration between genders.
• Sean Marshall looks at how the death of the Shoppers World in Brampton heralds a new urbanist push in that city.
• At the NYR Daily, Helen Joyce talks of her therapeutic experiences with psychedelic drugs.
• Drew Rowsome reviews the Toronto play The Particulars.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers if inflation came before, or after, the Big Bang.
• John Scalzi at Whatever has a short discussion about Marvel films that concludes they are perfectly valid.
• Window on Eurasia suggests that central Ukraine has emerged as a political force in post-1914 Ukraine.
• Arnold Zwicky considers the Indian pickle.

[URBAN NOTE] Five notes about cities: parks, productivity, suburbs, borders, libraries

• CityLab looks at a new study examining the relationship between gentrification and new city parks.
• Guardian Cities looks at the hardest-working cities in the world, and wonders if that duration of work is a good idea.
• The Conversation looks at how population growth in Canada is increasingly concentrated in car-dependent suburbs.
• VICE looks at how arbitrary municipal borders in built-up areas can have nasty effects on the lives of people caught up by them.
• Rabble reports on how Canadian libraries are handling the opioid crisis.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait urges caution in identifying K2-18b, a mini-Neptune with water vapour in its atmosphere, as Earth-like.
• Centauri Dreams reports on the discovery of C/2019 Q4 (Borisov), a likely interstellar comet like ‘Oumuamua.
• The Crux reports on the orange roughy, a fish commonly caught as byproduct that can live up to 250 years.
• D-Brief looks at the harm that may be caused by some insecticides to songbirds, including anorexia and delayed migrations.
• Dangerous Minds considers if David Bowie actually did burn his 360-ton Glass Spider stage prop.
• Gizmodo notes the formidable, fanged marsupials once existing in Australia.
• Imageo notes signs that a dreaded blob of hot water, auguring climate change, might now be lurking in the Pacific Ocean.
• io9 notes that Ryan Murphy has shared the official title sequence for the 1984 season of American Horror Story.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the history, in popular culture and actual technology, of the artificial womb.
• Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at how lightly the Sackler family got off for their involvement in triggering the opioid crisis with OxyContin.
• Marginal Revolution notes many companies are now seeking insurance to protect themselves in the US-China trade war.
• Tim Parks writes at the NYR Daily about how every era tends to have translations which fit its ethos.
• The Russian Demographics Blog shares a paper suggesting that immigration and immigrants do not have major effects on the overall fertility of highly-developed countries.
• Frank Jacobs notes a mysterious 1920s German map of South America that shows Brasilia, the Brazilian capital built only from 1956. What is up with this?
• Window on Eurasia reports on the negative effects of massive migration of workers from Tajikistan on the country’s women.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• The Buzz shares a TIFF reading list, here.
• Centauri Dreams notes the growing sensitivity of radial velocity techniques in finding weird exoplanet HR 5183 b, here.
• The Crux reports on circumgalactic gas and the death of galaxies.
• Dead Things notes the import of the discovery of the oldest known Australopithecine skull.
• Dangerous Minds reports on pioneering 1930s queer artist Hannah Gluckstein, also known as Gluck.
• Gizmodo notes that, for an unnamed reason, DARPA needs a large secure underground testing facility for tomorrow.
• JSTOR Daily looks at how Jim Crow laws affected Mexican immigrants in the early 20th century US.
• Language Hat looks at a new project to study Irish texts and language over centuries.
• Language Log shares some Chinglish signs from a top university in China.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money shares an interview with Jeffrey Melnick suggesting Charles Manson was substantially a convenient boogeyman.
• Marginal Revolution shares a paper suggesting marijuana legalization is linked to declining crime rates.
• Susan Neiman at the NYR Daily tells how she began her life as a white woman in Atlanta and is ending it as a Jewish woman in Berlin.
• The Planetary Society Blog looks at Hayabusa2 at Ryugu.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel celebrated the 230th anniversary of Enceladus, the Saturn moon that might harbour life.
• Window on Eurasia notes how global warming is harming the rivers of Siberia, causing many to run short.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the Elon Musk proposal to terraform Mars by dropping nuclear weapons on the planet’s ice caps is a bad idea.
• James Bow writes about how the introduction of faeries saved his novel The Night Girl.
• Centauri Dreams looks at the storms of Jupiter.
• The Crux explains the mystery of a village in Poland that has not seen the birth of a baby boy for nearly a decade.
• D-Brief looks at the exoplanets of nearby red dwarf Gliese 1061.
• Cody Delisraty talks of Renaissance painter Fra Angelico.
• Drew Ex Machina commemorates the 30th anniversary of the Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune.
• The Dragon’s Tales shares links to some papers about the Paleolithic.
• JSTOR Daily hosts an essay by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger suggesting that Internet rot might be good since it could let people start to forget the past and so move on.
• Language Hat questions whether the phrase “free to all” has really fallen out of use.
• Language Log takes a look about immigration to the United States and Emma Lazarus’ famous poem.
• Dan Nexon at Lawyers, Guns and Money takes issue with the suggestion of, among other, Henry Farrell, that we are headed away from globalization towards fortress economies. Redundancy, he suggests, will be more important.
• Marginal Revolution links to a disturbing paper suggesting users of opioids use them in part for social reasons.
• The NYR Daily features an exchange on a new law in Singapore seeking to govern fake news.
• The Power and the Money features a guest post from Leticia Arroyo Abad looking at Argentina before the elections.
• Drew Rowsome takes a look at a new play by Raymond Helkio examining the life of out boxer Mark Leduc.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers if we can test gravitational waves for wave-particle duality.
• Arnold Zwicky shares photos of the many flowers of Gamble Garden, in Palo Alto.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Architectuul takes a look at different retrofuture imaginings from the 20th century of what architecture might look like in the 21st century.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the mysteries surrounding a sudden recent eruption of Sagittarius A*.
• Centauri Dreams considers what the James Webb Space Telescope might be able to pick up from TRAPPIST-1.
• Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber considers Ossian’s Ride, a SF novel by Fred Hoyle imagining a progressive Ireland leapfrogging ahead of Britain, and how this scenario is being realized now.
• D-Brief looks at what a glitch in the spin rate of the Vela pulsar reveals about these bodies.
• Dangerous Minds looks at how Rock Hudson came to star in the SF film Seconds.
• Bruce Dorminey notes a new NASA Kepler study suggesting (very) broadly Earth-like worlds might orbit as many as one in six Sun-like stars.
• Gizmodo links</u. to a study suggesting the oddly fuzzy core of Jupiter might be a consequences of an ancient collision with a massive protoplanet.
• Imageo notes that July broke all sorts of climate records.
• Joe. My. God. notes that the Trump administration has exempted Bibles from the new China tariffs.
• Language Hat considers, after the space of a decade, why people might say a language is so foreign as to be Greek.
• Robert Farley links at Lawyers, Guns and Money to an analysis of what major battle fleets around the world would have looked like in 1950 absent a Second World War.
• The LRB Blog notes how the UK Conservative government’s turn towards repressive law-and-order measures will please Faragists.
• The Map Room Blog shares maps indicating the scale of the American opioid crisis.
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution links to one of his columns noting how two decades of nil economic growth has harmed Italy.
• Peter Watts at his blog has a critical take on the Chinese SF movie The Wandering Earth.
• The NYR Daily looks at how things are becoming quite bad for Kashmiris.
• The Planetary Society Blog looks at how the OSIRIS-REx team is looking for sample sites on asteroid Bennu.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes the evidence from our solar system’s moons that two planets can indeed stably share the same orbit.
• Towleroad notes how a successful campaign has helped London fetish bar Backstreet survive gentrification.
• Arnold Zwicky shares some gorgeous blue and black flowers in the Gamble Garden of Palo Alto, and meditations on said.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: raccoons, High Park sakura, dog parks, marijuana, Queen Video

• Jamie Bradburn looks back at vintage coverage in the Toronto press from 1952 about some fortunate raccoons.
• blogTO notes that this weekend will seek peak bloom in the cherry blossoms of High Park.
• Edward Brown at Spacing writes about the decades-long struggle to get dog parks accepted in Toronto.
• CBC Toronto notes controversy in Etobicoke surrounding a local brewery’s decision to process medical marijuana on site.
• This National Post article by Sadaf Ahsan looks at how now-defunct Queen Video contributed hugely to pop culture in Toronto.

[NEWS] Five Canadian culture links: Ontario, French’s, Sealfest, Beauty in a Box, oilpatch & drugs

• Jamie Bradburn takes a look at the early 1980s genesis of the Ontario slogan “Yours to discover”.
• CBC examines how French’s ketchup managed to take a lead over Heinz thanks to good marketing use of Canadian patriotism.
• CBC reports on the east coast culinary festival of Sealfest, making use of seal products.
• NOW Toronto praises Beauty in a Box, the new Cheryl Thompson book examining the African-Canadian beauty industry in all of its many facets through history.
• This Toronto Star exposé takes a look at the disturbingly high rates of substance abuse among Alberta oilpatch workers.

[NEWS] Five JSTOR Daily links: doctors & drugs, horses & war, JFK, raisin wine, Irish & Ireland

• JSTOR Daily notes how early doctors used to party with drugs as a matter of course.
• JSTOR Daily notes the experiences of horses and donkeys in the US Civil War.
• JSTOR Daily notes how the disaster of the Bay of Pigs changed the decision-making of JFK.
• JSTOR Daily notes how early 19th century American Jews made use of raisin wine in Passover, and how this changed.
• JSTOR Daily notes how the revival of the Irish language, connecting Ireland to the rest of Europe, played a key role in leading to independence for Ireland.