[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Adam Fish at anthro{dendum} shares a new take on the atmosphere, as a common good.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares a photo of Earth taken from a hundred million kilometres away by the OSIRIS-REx probe.
• The Crux tells the story of how the first exoplanets were found.
• D-Brief notes that life could be possible on a planet orbiting a supermassive black hole, assuming it could deal with the blueshifting.
• io9 looks at the latest bold move of Archie Comics.
• JSTOR Daily explores cleaning stations, where small fish clean larger ones.
• Dan Nexon at Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the role China seeks to play in a remade international order.
• The Map Room Blog looks at the new upcoming national atlas of Estonia.
• Marginal Revolution touches on the great ambition of Louis XIV for a global empire.
• Steve Baker of The Numerati shares photos from his recent trip to Spain.
• Anya Schiffrin at the NRY Daily explains how American journalist Varian Fry helped her family, and others, escape the Nazis.
• Drew Rowsome reviews the classic movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps shares a map looking at the barriers put up by the high-income world to people moving from outside.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel answers the complex question of how, exactly, the density of a black hole can be measured.
• John Scalzi at Whatever reviews Gemini Man. Was the high frame rate worth it?
• Window on Eurasia notes the deep hostility of Tuvins towards a large Russian population in Tuva.
• Arnold Zwicky considers the existential question of self-aware cartoon characters.

[NEWS] Five cultural links: Hitler, Internet, Nova Scotia roads, BC gangs, Pontic Greek

• The BBC takes a look at Pontic Greek, a Greek dialect that survives precariously in exile from its homeland in Anatolia.
• Klaus Meyer writes at The Conversation about how Hitler, in his rise to power, became a German citizen.
• Low-income families in the Toronto area face serious challenges in getting affordable Internet access. CBC reports.
• Jeremy Keefe at Global News takes a look at Steve Skafte, an explorer of abandoned roads in Nova Scotia.
• In some communities in British Columbia, middle-class people have joined criminal gangs for social reasons. CBC reports.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Larry Claes at Centauri Dreams considers the issues of the alien featuring in the title of the classic The Thing, facing human persecution.
• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber starts a debate about past blogging and conventional wisdom.
• The Crux reports on a mass rescue of orphaned flamingo chicks in South Africa.
• D-Brief notes new evidence that asteroids provided perhaps half of the Earth’s current supply of water.
• Cody Delistraty looks at how the far-right in Germany is appropriating artworks to support its view of history.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes that China may be hoping to build a base at the Moon’s south pole by 2029.
• Far Outliers reports on the 1865 collapse of the Confederacy.
• Gizmodo reports on how astronomers have identified the approximate location of a kilonova that seeded the nascent solar system with heavy elements.
• Joe. My. God. shares the news from yet another study demonstrating that HIV cannot be transmitted by HIV-undetectable people. U=U.
• JSTOR Daily notes how, via Herb Caen, the Beat Generation became known as Beatniks.
• Language Hat shares and comments upon a passage from Dostoevsky noting how an obscenity can be stretched out into an entire conversation.
• Language Log considers a peculiarity of the Beijing dialect.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how statehood has been used to game the American political system.
• Marginal Revolution links to a paper suggesting that countries with greater levels of gender inequality are more likely to produce female chess grandmasters.
• Justin Petrone at North!, considering the history of writers in Estonia, considers what the mission of the writer should be.
• The NYR Daily examines the black people once miners in the Kentucky town of Lynch, remembering and sharing their experiences.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw considers what he has learned from a recent research and writing contract.
• Jason C. Davis at the Planetary Society Blog reports in greater detail on the crater Hayabusa 2 made in asteroid Ryugu.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains how the Event Horizon Telescope acts like a mirror.
• Strange Company shares an impressively diverse collection of links.
• Towleroad talks with writer Tim Murphy about his new novel, Correspondents.
• Window on Eurasia considers future directions for Ukrainian language policy.
• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at the artistic riches horded by the Nazis in the Bavarian castle of Neuschwanstein.

• Hornet Stories reports on Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, two Jewish stepsisters and lovers who resisted the Nazis on the Channel Islands.
• CBC Montreal recently revisited the homophobic 1989 murder of Joe Rose, a crime that galvanized gay activism in that city.
• The story of a lesbian subject of a recent Queer Eye episode who now subject of crowdfunding efforts to send her back to college is lovely. NBC News reports.
• This them article takes a look at the role played by Dan Levy in the creation of Schitt’s Creek as a fictional community where LGBTQ people exist but homophobia is just not an issue. It’s refreshing.
• This post at Reddit’s daystrominstitute makes the argument that the “evil bisexuals” of the Mirror Universe are easily explained by Terrans living in a civilization where sexuality is a matter and vehicle of domination, not necessarily by homophobia.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Cody Delistraty considers the new field of dystopian realism–of dystopia as a real thing in contemporary lives–in popular culture.
• D-Brief notes how direct experiments in laboratories have helped geologists better understand the mantle of the Earth.
• Far Outliers shares a terribly sad anecdote of a young woman in China who killed herself, victim of social pressures which claim many more victims.
• Imageo notes how recent headlines about ocean temperature increases are misleading in that they did not represent the steady incremental improvements of science generally.
• Joe. My. God. notes the unexpectedly rapid shift of the location of the northern magnetic pole.
• JSTOR Daily links to a paper that links to the quietly subversive aesthetics and politics of the 1950s and 1960s surf movie.
• Language Hat links to an intriguing paper looking at the relationship between the size of an individual’s Broca’s area, in their brain, and the ways in which they can learn language.
• Language Log shares a poster from Taiwan trying to promote use of the Hakka language, currently a threatened language among traditional speakers.
• Dan Nexon at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the extreme secrecy of Trump regarding his Helsinki discussions with Putin, going so far as to confiscate his translator’s notes.
• Justin Petrone at north! writes about the exhilarating and liberating joys of hope, of fantasy.
• The NYR Daily examines the new Alfonso Cuarón film, the autobiographical Roma.
• Drew Rowsome takes a look at the interesting show by Damien Atkins at Crow’s Nest Theatre, We Are Not Alone.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel reports on what a report of the discovery of of the brightest quasar actually means.
• Window on Eurasia notes the historical cooperation, before Operation Barbarossa, between the Nazis’ Gestapo and Stalin’s NKVD.
• Arnold Zwicky shares a video examining Chavacano, the Spanish-based creole still spoken in the Philippines.

[NEWS] Five politics links: Weimar violence, Nazi bios, Russia, US military, Ontario under Ford

• Open Democracy notes how the unrestrained and unpunished violence of the far right helped doom the Weimar Republic.
• VICE reports on a remarkable project, wherein an American in the 1930s solicited and received explanations from Germans as to why they became Nazis. (The letters’ language echoes.)
• This Adnan Khan interview at MacLean’s with Russian expert Bobo Lo puts forth the origins and prospects of the Russian challenge to the world order.
• Given the growing problems of the United States, the fact that American military power versus China or Russia cannot be guaranteed is something Canada needs to take into account. CBC reports.
• Stephen Maher at MacLean’s makes the point that, with the casual corruption of the Doug Ford government, it is as if Ontario is living a Dukes of Hazzard episode.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• David Price at {anthro}dendum considers, going through archival material from the 1950s, the number of radical anthropologists in the US as yet little known or unknown who were marginalized by the Red Scare.
• Centauri Dreams ruminates on a paper examining ‘Oumuamua that considers radiation pressure as a factor in its speed. Might it work as–indeed, be?–a lightsail?
• D-Brief notes the various reasons why the Chinese proposal for an artificial moon of sorts, to illuminate cities at night, would not work very well at all.
• The Dragon’s Tales touches on the perhaps hypocritical anger of Russia at the United States’ departure from the INF treaty.
• Far Outliers notes the sharp divides among Nazi prisoners of war in a camp in Texas, notably between pro- and anti-Nazi prisoners.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing revisits the original sin of the Internet culture, its imagining of a split between an individual’s virtual life and the remainder of their life.
• The Island Review welcomes, and interviews, its new editor C.C. O’Hanlon.
• JSTOR Daily explores the reasons for considering climate change to be a national security issue.
• Language Hat is enthused by the recent publication of a new dictionary of the extinct Anatolian languages of the Indo-European family.
• Language Log examines the existence of a distinctive, even mocked, southern French accent spoken in and around (among other cities) Toulouse.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the rise of fascism in Brazil with Bolsonaro.
• Roger Shuy at Lingua Franca writes about the power of correspondence, of written letters, to help language learners. (I concur.)
• At the LRB Blog, Jeremy Bernstein writes about anti-Semitism in the United States, in the 1930s and now.
• The NYR Daily examines the life of writer, and long-time exile from her native Portugal, Maria Gabriela Llansol.
• Haley Gray at Roads and Kingdoms reports on the life and work of Mark Maryboy, a Navajo land rights activist in Utah.
• Window on Eurasia looks at the Russian urban myth of blonde Baltic snipers from the Baltic States who had been enlisted into wars against Russia like that of Chechnya in the 1990s.
• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at the classic red phone booths of the United Kingdom, now almost all removed from the streets of the country and sent to a graveyard in a part of rural Yorkshire that has other claims to fame.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Markham, Hamilton, Rotterdam, Hambantota, Warsaw

• In response to a desire to remove an almost bizarre controversial statue of a cow from its location in a neighbourhood in Markham, the owner has sued the city for $C 4 million. The Toronto Star reports.
• The mayor of Hamilton, Ontario, would like housing incorporated into shopping malls, to deal with issues of housing and retail in one go. Global News reports.
• Brexit threatens to decidedly destabilize the picture for the Dutch port city of Rotterdam. The Independent reports.
• Bloomberg notes that the controversial Chinese-owned port of Hambantota, in Sri Lanka, is doing terrible business.
• Newly-discovered documents provide confirmation of the belief that the Nazis planned to utterly destroy Warsaw. The National Post reports.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Centauri Dreams celebrates the science behind Cassini.
• Crooked Timber’s Henry Farrell is breaking from Harvard’s Kennedy Centre over its revocation of an invitation to Chelsea Manning.
• The Crux points to the ways in which the legacy of Cassini will still be active.
• D-Brief notes that some tool-using macaques of Thailand are overfishing their environment.
• Hornet Stories notes the eulogy given by Hillary Clinton at the funeral of Edie Windsor.
• Inkfish notes one way to define separate bird species: ask the birds what they think. (Literally.)
• The LRB Blog notes the recent passing of Margot Hielscher, veteran German star and one-time crush of Goebbels.
• The NYR Daily notes the chilling effects on discourse in India of a string of murders of Indian journalists and writers.
• At the Planetary Science Blog, Emily Lakdawalla bids farewell to the noble Cassini probe.
• Roads and Kingdoms notes a breakfast in Bangladesh complicated by child marriage.
• Towleroad notes an Australian church cancelled an opposite-sex couple’s wedding because the bride supports equality.
• Arnold Zwicky notes the marmots of, among other places, cosmopolitan and multilingual Swiss canton of Graubünden.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Centauri Dreams analyzes the latest suggestive findings about water on potentially habitable exoplanets of TRAPPIST-1.
• A Game of Thrones-themed cat bed, as described by Dangerous Minds, is almost tempting. (Almost.)
• Hornet Stories takes a brief look at what the Nazis were like for, and did to, queers.
• Joe. My. God. notes that Texas’ secretary of state turned down an aid offer from Québec, asking only for prayers.
• Language Hat looks at the ways in which different African writers have glossed Africa in their works.
• Marginal Revolution links to a paper looking at the effect that serious floods have on cities’ long-run economic growth.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw notes the discovery of sunken garum-exporting Neapolis off of the coast of Tunisia.
• The Planetary Society Blog looks at the latest ventures of the Opportunity rover as winter approaches on Mars.
• Roads and Kingdoms notes the Café Touba coffee of Senegal, sign of resistance to colonialism and globalization.
• Window on Eurasia notes a proposal in Russia to memorialize Muslims who resisted changing traditional value systems.