[NEWS] Ten Window on Eurasia links

• What will become of the Azerbaijani language in education in Iran? More here.
• Is a Russia-Belarus state union feasible? More here.
• Is Estonia, as some would have it, a viable model for the Finnic Mordvin peoples of the Russian interior? More here.
• Will Russia be happy with its alliance with China if this makes it a secondary partner, a relatively weaker exporter of resources? More here.
• How many Muslims are there in Moscow, and what import does the controversy over their numbers carry? More here.
• Is the Russian fertility rate set to stagnate, leading to long-term sharp decline? More here.
• If 10% of the Russian working-age population has emigrated, this has serious consequences for the future of Russia. More here.
• Irredentism in Kazakhstan, inspired by the example of Crimea, is just starting to be a thing. More here.
• The decline of Russian populations in the north of Kazakhstan, and the growth of Uzbeks, is noteworthy. More here.
• The different Russian proposals for the future of the Donbas, an analyst notes, are built to keep Ukraine a neutral country. More here.

[DM] Some links: longevity, real estate, migrations, the future (#demographymatters, #demographics, #population)

I have a links post up at Demography Matters.

• Old age popped up as a topic in my feed. The Crux considered when human societies began to accumulate large numbers of aged people. Would there have been octogenarians in any Stone Age cultures, for instance? Information is Beautiful, meanwhile, shares an informative infographic analyzing the factors that go into extending one’s life expectancy.
• Growing populations in cities, and real estate markets hostile even to established residents, are a concern of mine in Toronto. They are shared globally: The Malta Independent examined some months ago how strong growth in the labour supply and tourism, along with capital inflows, have driven up property prices in Malta. Marginal Revolution noted there are conflicts between NIMBYism, between opposing development in established neighbourhoods, and supporting open immigration policies.
• Ethnic migrations also appeared. The Cape Breton Post shared a fascinating report about the history of the Jewish community of industrial Cape Breton, in Nova Scotia, while the Guardian of Charlottetown reports the reunification of a family of Syrian refugees on Prince Edward Island. In Eurasia, meanwhile, Window on Eurasia noted the growth of the Volga Tatar population of Moscow, something hidden by the high degree of assimilation of many of its members.
• Looking towards the future, Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen was critical of the idea of limiting the number of children one has in a time of climate change. On a related theme, his co-blogger Alex Tabarrok highlights a new paper aiming to predict the future, one that argues that the greatest economic gains will eventually accrue to the densest populations. Established high-income regions, it warns, could lose out if they keep out migrants.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait shares Johannes Kroeger’s image of the median Earth.
• The Crux considers when human societies began to accumulate large numbers of aged people. Would there have been octogenarians in any Stone Age cultures, for instance?
• The Dragon’s Tales considers Russia’s strategy in Southeast Asia.
• Alexandra Samuel at JSTOR Daily notes that one way to fight against fake news is for people to broaden their friends networks beyond their ideological sympathizers.
• Language Log, noting a television clip from Algeria in which a person defend their native dialect versus standard Arabic, compares the language situation in the Arab world to that of China.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen explains how the Tervuren Central African museum in Brussels has not been decolonized.
• The Planetary Society Blog explores the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains why, in current physics, the multiverse must exist.
• Strange Company explores the strange disappearance, in the Arizona desert in 1952, of a young couple. Their plane was found and in perfect condition, but what happened to them?
• Strange Maps reports on the tragic migration of six Californian raptors, only one of which managed to make it to its destination.
• Towleroad reports on the appearance of actor and singer Ben Platt on The Ellen Show, talking about his career and coming out.
• Window on Eurasia notes the apparently widespread mutual dislike of Chechens and Muscovites.
• Arnold Zwicky considers the French Impressionist artists Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Suzanne Valadon, with images of their art.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly writes about the importance of seeing the world from new angles.
• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber suggests that, worldwide, coal is becoming increasingly closely associated with corruption.
• D-Brief looks at a study drawing on Twitter that suggests people will quickly get used to changing weather in the era of climate change.
• Jonathan Wynn at the Everyday Sociology Blog writes about a family trip during which he spent time listening to sociology-related podcasts.
• Far Outliers notes the life-determining intensity of exam time for young people in Calcutta.
• io9 notes that, finally, the classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Once More, With Feeling” is being released on vinyl.
• JSTOR Daily looks at how medieval Europe regulated the sex trade.
• Language Hat looks at how anthropologists have stopped using “hominid” and started using “hominin”, and why.
• Language Log considers the difficulty of talking about “Sinophone” given the unrepresented linguistic diversity included in the umbrella of “Chinese”.
• Marginal Revolution suggests there are conflicts between NIMBYism and supporting open immigration policies.
• At Out There, Corey S. Powell interviews astronomer Slava Turyshev about the possibility not only of interstellar travel but of exploiting the Solar Gravity Lens, 550 AU away.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 9 mission.
• Towleroad notes that Marvel Comics is planning to make its lead character in the Eternals gay.
• Daniel Little at Understanding Society examines how the human body and its physical capacities are represented in sociology.
• Window on Eurasia notes the growth of the Volga Tatar population of Moscow, something hidden by the high degree of assimilation of many of its members.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell notes, in connection to Huawei, the broad powers allotted to the British government under existing security and communications laws.
• Arnold Zwicky looks at anteaters and antedaters.

[DM] Some news links: history, cities, migration, diasporas

I have another round-up post of links at Demography Matters, this one concentrating heavily on migration as it affects cities. An essay will come tomorrow, I promise!

• JSTOR Daily considers the extent to which the Great Migration of African-Americans was a forced migration, driven not just by poverty but by systemic anti-black violence.
• Even as the overall population of Japan continues to decline, the population of Tokyo continues to grow through net migration, Mainichi reports.
• This CityLab article takes look at the potential, actual and lost and potential, of immigration to save the declining Ohio city of Youngstown. Will it, and other cities in the American Rust Belt, be able to take advantage of entrepreneurial and professional immigrants?
• Window on Eurasia notes a somewhat alarmist take on Central Asian immigrant neighbourhoods in Moscow. That immigrant neighbourhoods can become largely self-contained can surprise no one.
• Guardian Cities notes how tensions between police and locals in the Bairro do Jamaico in Lisbon reveal problems of integration for African immigrants and their descendants.
• 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.
• CBC Prince Edward Island notes that immigration retention rates on PEI, while low, are rising, perhaps showing the formation of durable immigrant communities. Substantial international migration to Prince Edward Island is only just starting, after all.
• The industrial northern Ontario city of Sault Sainte-Marie, in the wake of the closure of the General Motors plant in the Toronto-area industrial city of Oshawa, was reported by Global News to have hopes to recruit former GM workers from Oshawa to live in that less expensive city.
• Atlas Obscura examines the communities being knitted together across the world by North American immigrants from the Caribbean of at least partial Hakka descent. The complex history of this diaspora fascinates me.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• The Crux notes the discovery of a second impact crater in Greenland, hidden under the ice.
• D-Brief notes new evidence that ancient Celts did, in fact, decapitate their enemies and preserve their heads.
• Far Outliers notes how Pakhtun soldier Ayub Khan, in 1914-1915, engaged in some cunning espionage for the British Empire on the Western Front.
• Kashmir Hill at Gizmodo notes how cutting out the big five tech giants for one week–Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft–made it almost impossible for her to carry on her life.
• Hornet Stories notes that, unsurprisingly, LGBTQ couples are much more likely to have met online that their heterosexual counterparts.
• At In Media Res, Russell Arben Fox imagines Elizabeth Warren giving a speech that touches sensitively and intelligently on her former beliefs in her Cherokee ancestry.
• Mónica Belevan at the Island Review writes, directly and allegorically, about the Galapagos Islands and her family and Darwin.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the economics of the romance novel.
• Language Hat notes the Mandombe script creating by the Kimbanguist movement in Congo.
• Harry Stopes at the LRB Blog notes the problem with Greater Manchester Police making homeless people a subject of concern.
• Ferguson activists, the NYR Daily notes, are being worn down by their protests.
• Roads and Kingdoms lists some things visitors to the Uzbekistan capital of Tashkent should keep in mind.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel makes a case for supersymmetry being a failed prediction.
• Towleroad notes the near-complete exclusion of LGBTQ subjects and themes from schools ordered by Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro.
• Window on Eurasia notes a somewhat alarmist take on Central Asian immigrant neighbourhoods in Moscow.
• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at the Kurds, their history, and his complicated sympathy for their concerns.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Hamilton, Boston, Valencia, Moscow, Hyderabad

• Ridership on the Hamilton Street Railway is growing but still below projected numbers. Global News reports.
• Residents of the Lincolnshire city of Boston, one of the most pro-Brexit in the United Kingdom, fear Brexit might not happen. Global News reports.
• CityLab notes how the Spanish city of Valencia is doing its best to keep local bee populations thriving.
• Deutsche Welle takes a look at how residents of one village once on the fringes of Moscow have found their environment transformed by massive urbanization.
• Guardian Cities takes a look at the central position played by “Tollywood”, the Telugu-speaking film industry’s hub, in the fate of a globalizing Hyderabad.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Architectuul looks at the modernist works of Spanish Antonio Lamela, building after the Second World War under Franco.
• Centauri Dreams considers the possibility of life-supporting environments on Barnard’s Star b, a frozen super-Earth.
• The Crux takes a look at how, and when, human beings and their ancestors stopped being as furry as other primates.
• D-Brief notes the Russian startup that wants to put advertisements in Earth orbit.
• Drew Ex Machina takes a look at the Soyuz 4 and 5 missions, the first missions to see two crewed craft link up in space.
• Far Outliers notes</a the extent to which, before the Opium War, knowledge of Chinese language and culture was kept strictly secret from Westerners at Canton.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing notes the ironies of housing a state-of-the-art supercomputers in the deconsecrated Torre Girona Chapel in Barcelona.
• Gizmodo notes a new study claiming that the rings of Saturn may be less than a hundred million years old, product of some catastrophic obliteration of an ice moon perhaps.
• Joe. My. God. notes the death of Pulitzer-winning lesbian poet Mary Oliver.
• JSTOR Daily takes a look at the rising prominence of hoarding as a psychological disorder.
• Language Hat shares a manuscript more than a hundred pages long, reporting on terms relating to sea ice used in the Inupiaq language spoken by the Alaska community of Kifigin, or Wales.
• Language Log examines the etymology of “slave” and “Slav”. (Apparently “ciao” is also linked to these words.)
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that Buzzfeed was right to claim that Trump ordered his lawyer to lie to Congress about the Moscow Trump Tower project.
• Marginal Revolution notes a serious proposal in the Indian state of Sikkim to set up a guaranteed minimum income project.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps links to a map showing visitations of the Virgin Mary worldwide, both recognized and unrecognized by the Vatican.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes the continuing controversy over the identity of AT2018cow.
• Window on Eurasia suggests that Russians have more to fear from a Sino-Russian alliance than Americans, on account of the possibility of a Chinese takeover of Russia enabled by this alliance.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Montréal, London, Bihac, Rovaniemi, MOscow

• Tenants in a Montréal apartment complex, in Little Burgundy are facing displacement after their home was bought by a company intent on turning their units into short-term rentals. CTV reports.
• Guardian Cities looks at the rising crime rate in London, concentrated among the young of that city.
• Politico Europe looks at how Bihac, in western Bosnia, has become a cul-de-sac trapping migrants seeking the European Union.
• Guardian Cities tells how Rovaniemi in northern Finland recovered from devastation in the Second World war to become a modernist home to Santa Claus.
• Owen Hatherley at Dezeen writes about how the successful new urbanism of the city of Moscow should not be mistaken for liberal politics there.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Montréal, London, Moscow, Cape Town, Tokyo and Kawaguchi

• Ici Radio-Canada notes the stiff competition that the port of Montréal is facing from its American competitors.
• JSTOR Daily reports on the solidarities created among diverse groups in London by the effects of the Blitz.
• Window on Eurasia notes the paranoia of some commentators and power figures about the emergence of ethnic neighbourhoods in Moscow, Central Asians featuring particularly.
• Guardian Cities notes that Bo Kaap, a traditionally Muslim Coloured enclave in Cape Town, is facing severe pressure from gentrification.
• The South Chima Morning Post notes the fact of the emergence of a thriving Chinatown in the Tokyo suburb of Kawaguchi, and the controversy that this new neighbourhood has created.