[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Shir Lerman Ginzburg at anthro{dendum} writes about kintsugi in her own life.
• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait looks at the massive black hole, massing two billion suns, measured in the heart of NGC 3258.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly shares some photos from her Hudson River life.
• D-Brief notes how astronomers may be able to detect the radio signals emitted from the cores of planets orbiting dead stars.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog looks at the sociology of religion.
• JSTOR Daily looks at how Ferdinand Magellan acted in many ways like a pirate.
• Language Hat reports on the remarkable differences between the two dubbed French versions of The Simpsons, one in France and one in Québec.
• Language Log reports on the Chinese placename “Xinjiang Uygur.”
• Lawyers, Guns and Money makes the point that Joe Biden is too old, too set in his ways, to be president.
• Molly Crabapple writes at the NYR Daily about the nature and goals of the massive protest movement in Puerto Rico.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks even-handedly at the controversy surrounding the idea of building the Thirty Metre Telescope on top of sacred Mauna Kea.
• Window on Eurasia looks at controversy in Russia over the representation of different Tatar populations on the Russian 2020 census.
• Stephen Gordon at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative wonders why it was 1953 that, in Canada, saw the growth in women on the job market.

[DM] Some links: immigration, cities, small towns, French Canada, Eurasia, China, Brexit, music

Another links post is up over at Demography Matters!

• Skepticism about immigration in many traditional receiving countries appeared. Frances Woolley at the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative took issue with the argument of Andray Domise after an EKOS poll, that Canadians would not know much about the nature of migration flows. The Conversation observed how the rise of Vox in Spain means that country’s language on immigration is set to change towards greater skepticism. Elsewhere, the SCMP called on South Korea, facing pronounced population aging and workforce shrinkages, to become more open to immigrants and minorities.
• Cities facing challenges were a recurring theme. This Irish Examiner article, part of a series, considers how the Republic of Ireland’s second city of Cork can best break free from the dominance of Dublin to develop its own potential. Also on Ireland, the NYR Daily looked at how Brexit and a hardened border will hit the Northern Ireland city of Derry, with its Catholic majority and its location neighbouring the Republic. CityLab reported on black migration patterns in different American cities, noting gains in the South, is fascinating. As for the threat of Donald Trump to send undocumented immigrants to sanctuary cities in the United States has widely noted., at least one observer noted that sending undocumented immigrants to cities where they could connect with fellow diasporids and build secure lives might actually be a good solution.
• Declining rural settlements featured, too. The Guardian reported from the Castilian town of Sayatón, a disappearing town that has become a symbol of depopulating rural Spain. Global News, similarly, noted that the loss by the small Nova Scotia community of Blacks Harbour of its only grocery store presaged perhaps a future of decline. VICE, meanwhile, reported on the very relevant story about how resettled refugees helped revive the Italian town of Sutera, on the island of Sicily. (The Guardian, to its credit, mentioned how immigration played a role in keeping up numbers in Sayatón, though the second generation did not stay.)
• The position of Francophone minorities in Canada, meanwhile, also popped up at me.
• This TVO article about the forces facing the École secondaire Confédération in the southern Ontario city of Welland is a fascinating study of minority dynamics. A brief article touches on efforts in the Franco-Manitoban community of Winnipeg to provide temporary shelter for new Francophone immigrants. CBC reported, meanwhile, that Francophones in New Brunswick continue to face pressure, with their numbers despite overall population growth and with Francophones being much more likely to be bilingual than Anglophones. This last fact is a particularly notable issue inasmuch as New Brunswick’s Francophones constitute the second-largest Francophone community outside of Québec, and have traditionally been more resistant to language shift and assimilation than the more numerous Franco-Ontarians.
• The Eurasia-focused links blog Window on Eurasia pointed to some issues. It considered 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. (I’m skeptical there will be much change, myself: There has already been quite a lot of emigration from the Donbas republics to various destinations, and I suspect that more would see the sort of wholesale migration of entire families, even communities, that would add to Russian numbers but not necessarily alter population pyramids.) Migration within Russia was also touched upon, whether on in an attempt to explain the sharp drop in the ethnic Russian population of Tuva in the 1990s or in the argument of one Muslim community leader in the northern boomtown of Norilsk that a quarter of that city’s population is of Muslim background.
• Eurasian concerns also featured. The Russian Demographics Blog observed, correctly, that one reason why Ukrainians are more prone to emigration to Europe and points beyond than Russians is that Ukraine has long been included, in whole or in part, in various European states. As well, Marginal Revolution linked to a paper that examines the positions of Jews in the economies of eastern Europe as a “rural service minority”, and observed the substantial demographic shifts occurring in Kazakhstan since independence, with Kazakh majorities appearing throughout the country.
• JSTOR Daily considered if, between the drop in fertility that developing China was likely to undergo anyway and the continuing resentments of the Chinese, the one-child policy was worth it. I’m inclined to say no, based not least on the evidence of the rapid fall in East Asian fertility outside of China.
• What will Britons living in the EU-27 do, faced with Brexit? Bloomberg noted the challenge of British immigrant workers in Luxembourg faced with Brexit, as Politico Europe did their counterparts living in Brussels.
• Finally, at the Inter Press Service, A.D. Mackenzie wrote about an interesting exhibit at the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris on the contributions made by immigrants to popular music in Britain and France from the 1960s to the 1980s.

[NEWS] Five notes on French in Canada: Montréal, Ontario, Welland, Manitoba, New Brunswick

• La Presse notes that the bilingual greeting “Bonjour-Hi” is becoming more common in Montréal.
• This Ottawa Citizen opinion-writer was entirely right in noting that the Ontario government should not try to eliminate minority language rights and institutions for budgetary reasons.
• This TVO article about the forces facing the École secondaire Confédération in Welland is a fascinating study of minority dynamics.
• This brief article touches on efforts in the Franco-Manitoban community of Winnipeg to provide temporary shelter for new Francophone immigrants.
• Francophones in New Brunswick continue to face pressure, with their numbers despite overall population growth and with Francophones being much more likely to be bilingual than Anglophones. CBC reports.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Hamilton, Waterloo Region, Prince Edward County, Montréal, Sherbrooke

• CBC Hamilton profiles an interesting local project, recycling the reclaimed wood from a late 19th century building at 99 James Street North into guitars.
• CBC Kitchener-Waterloo notes that municipal politicians in that conurbation do not want their cities merged into a single unitary Region of Waterloo megacity.
• The popular destination of Prince Edward County, a destination for many from Toronto, is starting to face a shortage of affordable housing. Global News reports.
• CBC Montreal notes a proposal to build a baseball stadium in the underused lands of the Peel Basin. Might the Expos yet return?
• La Presse notes that the bill for Sherbrooke hosting the 2021 Jeux de la Francophonie is estimated to be $C 84 million.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Sherbrooke, New York City, New Orleans, Nottingham, Cape Town

• The 2023 Jeux de la Francophonie, originally planned for New Brunswick, have been taken up–provisionally–by the Québec city of Sherbrooke. HuffPostQuebec reports.
• Carmen Arroyo at Inter Press Service writes about Pedro, a migrant from Oaxaca in Mexico who has lived in new York City for a dozen years without papers.
• CityLab notes evidence that natural disasters can indeed advance gentrification, looking at the example of New Orleans.
• Guardian Cities shares some cartoons by Carol Adlam about the English city of Nottingham, neither northern nor southern.
• Civil servant magazine Apolitical takes a look at how Cape Town managed to escape its threatened water crisis.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait explains the potential discovery of an ancient rock from Earth among the Moon rocks collected by Apollo.
• Centauri Dreams looks at what will be coming next from the New Horizons probe after its Ultima Thule flyby.
• The Crux looks at the genetic library of threatened animals preserved cryogenically in a San Diego zoo.
• Far Outliers looks at the drastic, even catastrophic, population changes of Sichuan over the past centuries.
• Language Hat looks at translations made in the medieval Kingdom of Jerusalem.
• Language Log tries to translate a possibly Indo-European sentence preserved in an ancient Chinese text.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the complexity of the crisis in Venezuela.
• The LRB Blog looks at the Mexican-American border in this era of crisis.
• Marginal Revolution notes a spike in unsolved shootings in Baltimore following protests against police racism.
• Noah Smith reviews the new Tyler Cowen book, Stubborn Attachments.
• Adam Shatz at the NYR Daily reviews what sounds like a fantastic album of anti-colonial Francophone music inspired by Frantz Fanon and assembled by French rapper Rocé.
• The Planetary Society Blog takes a look what is next for China as it continues its program to explore the Moon.
• Roads and Kingdoms interviews Monique Jaques about her new photo book looking at the lives of girls growing up in Gaza.
• Rocky Planets takes a look at how rocks can form political boundaries.
• Drew Rowsome interviews choreographer Christopher House about his career and the next shows at the Toronto Dance Theatre.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel takes a look at the seeming featurelessness of Uranus.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps looks at a controversial swap of land proposed between Serbia and Kosovo.
• Window on Eurasia notes the controversial possibility of China contracting Russia to divert Siberian rivers as a water supply.
• Arnold Zwicky looks at the origins of Uri and Avi, a photo of apparently showing two men, one Palestinian and one Israeli, kissing.

[NEWS] Five divides: New Brunswick, Rohingya Hindus, Chinese censors, Iranian internet, Brexit

• The Conversation notes how New Brunswick, with its economic challenges and its language divide, represents in microcosm the problems of wider Canada.
• This Los Angeles Times article notes how Rohingya Hindus see themselves, rightly, as sharing a different fate from their Muslim coethnics.
• This New York Times article looks at how the Internet censors of China are trained, by letting them know about the actual history of their country first.
• Bloomberg reports how on the Iranian government tries to engage selectively with the social networking platforms, like Instagram and Telegram, used by the outside world.
• Bloomberg notes that the concern of Japan that the United Kingdom, Japanese companies’ chosen platform for export to the EU, might engage in a hard Brexit is pressing.

[NEWS] Five links about populations: Franco-Ontarians, Acadians, American whites, Brexit, Belgium

• CBC reports from a Franco-Ontarian youth gathering, in Ontario’s easternmost and Francophone-majority Prescott-Russell, where young Francophones are responding with defiance.
• This Acadie Nouvelle opinion piece suggests that, to deal with the problems of the Acadians of the Maritimes, they should collectively seek some sort of autonomy across provincial frontiers.
• This New York Times article noting the questionable nature of the census estimate that white Americans were bound to be a minority soon, and this projection’s political consequences, is worth reading.
• Brexit is incompatible with a liberalized immigration policy in the United Kingdom; left-wing Brexiters should know better. Politics.co.uk has it.
• CBC notes how Belgium, dealing with the election of its first black mayor and a revamping of a museum devoted to Central Africa, is starting to deal with its racist past.

[NEWS] Five Canadian politics links: Harry Leslie Smith, Simard, Jolibois, Bernier, NAFTA

• Rabble noted late last week the death, at 95, of anti-poverty activist Harry Leslie Smith.
• Amanda Simard, the only Franco-Ontarian MPP in the Ford government and representing a Francophone-majority riding, left the Ford government over the issue of its cuts to Francophone services. The Globe and Mail reported.
• MacLean’s looks at Georgina Jolibois, a MPP who represents a vast riding occupying most of northern Saskatchewan, and sees how she accomplishes this.
• The National Post considers if Maxime Bernier has any chance of making his People’s Party of Canada a viable political movement.
• The Canadian reaction to Trump’s decision to force Congress to choose between accepting the new NAFTA deal or else risk a collapse of the entire project as the old treaty expires is muted. CBC reports.

[NEWS] Five notes on language in French Canada

• Ostensibly bilingual New Brunswick is not having a French-language leaders’ debate this election because of the weak language skills of the PC leader. Global News reports.
• A man from Québec was able to hitchhike across Canada, as far as Alberta even, using only his French. The Toronto Star ,a href=”https://www.thestar.com/edmonton/2018/08/22/quebec-man-hitchhikes-across-canada-speaking-only-french.html”>reports.
• Québec Solidaire created a minor political storm over a tweet regarding the official languages of the province. The Montreal Gazette reports.
• Québec Solidaire also wants to give Quebec Sign Language official status. The Huffington Post reports.
• Amazon is working hard to give its Alexa Canadian French language support, making the device fluent in the local dialect. IT World Canada reports.