[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Montréal, New Orleans, Berlin, Hasankeyf, Hong Kong

• Why not build a public beach in the Montréal neighbourhood of Lachine? Global News considers.
• The Vietnamese cuisine of New Orleans does look good. VICE reports.
• CityLab describes an effort to build a smart city in Berlin, in Siemensstadt. I wish Berliners better outcomes than what Toronto seems to be getting in the Port Lands.
• Guardian Cities reports on what seems to me to be a terrible plan to flood the ancient settlement of Hasankeyf in Turkey for dams.
• Saša Petricic at CBC looks at how the political consensus in Hong Kong has broken down, perhaps irretrievably.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Saira Mehmood blogs at {anthro}dendum about her experiences as an ethnographer in her New Orleans community.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait blogs about Supernova 2016iet, a rare example of a pair-instability supernova.
• At the Broadside Blog, Caitlin Kelly writes about the need of people to avoid isolation.
• Centauri Dreams notes that future astronomers might be able to detect the fluorescence of life on exoplanets during flares.
• Why, Crooked Timber asks, shouldn’t children be given the vote?
• D-Brief notes scientists have manufactured a ring of carbon atoms.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the complexities of #VanLife in the United States, at once a lifestyle choice in the US and a response to poverty.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money is decidedly unimpressed by the recent rewriting of the Statue of Liberty.
• Neuroskeptic looks at how neuroimaging studies study surprisingly few left-handers, and how this is a problem.
• The NYR Daily looks at how Big Data in China is enhancing state power, concentrating on the situation in Xinjiang.
• Drew Rowsome looks at a new documentary on the genesis of Fiddler on the Roof, Fiddler: Miracle of Miracles.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at how dark matter and black holes can interact.
• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at coded anti-black racism in the 1937 United States.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Montréal, Hyder, Buenos Aires, New Orleans, Hong Kong

• HuffPostQuebec imagines what an Expo held in Montréal for 2030 would look like, and what effect it would have on the metropolis.
• The Alaska Life notes the near-ghost town of Hyder, a community most easily accessible from Canada.
• Guardian Cities reports on a recent expulsion of street traders from a district in Buenos Aires.
• CityLab notes the growing unacceptability of a group parading in blackface in Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
• Guardian Cities explains how through, among other things, canny property investments, mass transit in Hong Kong is self-supporting financially.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• At Antipope, Charlie Stross announces (among other things) that his series The Laundry Files has been options for television development.
• D-Brief notes more evidence for the idea that regular exercise can help psychologically, this study suggesting help to long-term memory.
• At the Everyday Sociology Blog, Karen Sternheimer writes about sociologists who study subjects that matter to them, subjects that might personally involve them, even.
• Gizmodo notes that astronomers have detected the formation of dark spots on Neptune, akin to those seen by Voyager 2 in its flyby in 1989, for the first time.
• JSTOR Daily considers how humans can live alongside crocodiles in peace.
• Language Log considers gāngjīng 杠精, a new Chinese word that may well denote “troll”.
• Erik Loomis writes at Lawyers, Guns and Money about beers that can serve industrial purposes like film development.
• The Map Room Blog notes new maps of a modern Westeros created by designer Jamie Shadrach.
• Marginal Revolution notes regulatory controversy in Alexandria, Virginia, regarding a potential halal butchery facility for chickens.
• Roads and Kingdoms interviews writer L. Kasimu Harris about the inequalities of New Orleans.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel shows readers what the galaxy would look like in electromagnetic frequencies other than those of visible light.
• Arnold Zwicky writes about progress in education.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Kingston, Montréal, Chicago, New Orleans, Buenos Aires

• Plans for a residential development in Kingston’s west-end Graceland district have raised environmental concerns. Global News reports.
• HuffPostQuebec shares the exciting plans for expanding and modernizing the complex around the Oratoire Saint-Joseph.
• CityLab notes how, despite having a declining black population, Chicago is set to elect a black mayor.
• VICE looks at the bars and nightclubs in uptown New Orleans that, in the 1970s, hosted the city’s jazz and funk scenes.
• Guardian Cities reports on the murga, the latest dance/pop culture craze in Buenos Aires.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Ottawa, Manhattan, Vancouver, New Orleans, Derry

• CBC Ottawa reports on the impressive scope of the new light rail mass transit planned for the wider city of Ottawa.
• Richard Florida, writing at CityLab, notes a study tracing the second of two clusters of skyscrapers in Manhattan, in Midtown, to a late 19th century specialty in shopping.
• The Tyee notes how activist Yuly Chan helped mobilize people to protect Chinatown in Vancouver from gentrification.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the history of the free people of colour of New Orleans, a group established under the French period but who faced increasing pressures following Americanization.
• At Open Democracy, Christophe Solioz considers what is to be done to help protect the peace in Derry, second city of Northern Ireland, in the era of Brexit.

[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.

[URBAN NOTE] Seven city links: smart cities, coffee, accessible transport, regionalism, boomtowns,

• The Conversation notes the concerns of Canadians about the potential privacy concerns regarding smart cities.
• This CityMetric article examines the particular role of the chain coffeeshop in the contemporary city.
• Will the tragic death of young mother Malaysia Goodson, killed trying to access public transit, lead to the spread of accessible infrastructure? Guardian Cities considers.
• A forced amalgamation of the different regional municipalities of Toronto could easily come into conflict with locals’ identities, the Toronto Star noted.
• National Geographic considers Silicon Valley-type boomtowns around the world. (Toronto is on that list.)
• This Bloomberg article makes the point that, in same cases, merging cities with prosperous suburbs might be a godsends for the wider conurbations.
• This Curbed article by novelist Jami Attenberg looks at what has changed for her–what she has gained–since moving from large metropolis New York City to the smaller centre of New Orleans.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Kambiz Kamrani at Anthropology.net notes new findings suggesting that the creation of cave art by early humans is product of the same skills that let early humans use language.
• Davide Marchetti at Architectuul looks at some overlooked and neglected buildings in and around Rome.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait explains how Sirius was able to hide the brilliant Gaia 1 star cluster behind it.
• Centauri Dreams looks at new procedures for streamlining the verification of new exoplanet detections.
• Crooked Timber notes the remarkably successful and once-controversial eroticization of plant reproduction in the poems of Erasmus Darwin.
• Dangerous Minds notes how an errant Confederate flag on a single nearly derailed the career of Otis Redding.
• Detecting biosignatures from exoplanets, Bruce Dorminey notes, may require “fleets” of sensitive space-based telescopes.
• Far Outliers looks at persecution of non-Shi’ite Muslims in Safavid Iran.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the history of the enslavement of Native Americans in early colonial America, something often overlooked by later generations.
• This video shared by Language Log, featuring two Amazon Echos repeating texts to each other and showing how these iterations change over time, is oddly fascinating.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis is quite clear about the good sense of Will Wilkinson’s point that controversy over “illegal” immigration is actually deeply connected to an exclusivist racism that imagines Hispanics to not be Americans.
• Lingua Franca, at the Chronicle of Higher Education, looks at the uses of the word “redemption”, particularly in the context of the Olympics.
• The LRB Blog suggests Russiagate is becoming a matter of hysteria. I’m unconvinced, frankly.
• The Map Room Blog shares a map showing global sea level rise over the past decades.
• Marginal Revolution makes a case for Americans to learn foreign languages on principle. As a Canadian who recently visited a decidedly Hispanic New York, I would add that Spanish, at least, is one language quite potentially useful to Americans in their own country.
• Drew Rowsome writes about the striking photographs of Olivier Valsecchi.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes that, in the 2030s, gravitational wave observatories will be so sensitive that they will be able to detect black holes about to collide years in advance.
• Towleroad lists festival highlights for New Orleans all over the year.
• Window on Eurasia notes how recent changes to the Russian education system harming minority languages have inspired some Muslim populations to link their language to their religion.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell makes the case that Jeremy Corbyn, through his strength in the British House of Commons, is really the only potential Remainder who is in a position of power.

[NEWS] Five LGBTQ links: Josh Weed, James McCourt, Upstairs Inferno, PrEP, Hall of Justice

• NewNowNext notes the divorce of out gay Mormon Josh Weed from his wife, after they realized their marriage wasn’t working. To his belated credit, he seems to be quite upset at the way that his personal story was used to justify homophobia.
• At The New Yorker, Michael LaPointe celebrates James McCourt’s 1993 novel about the AIDS epidemic, Time Remaining.
• Towleroad notes the odd and harmful refusal of the Publix grocery store chain to let its insurance companies cover Truvada prescriptions, for PrEP.
• Drew Rowsome reviews Upstairs Inferno, a recent documentary about a fire in a New Orleans gay bar in 1973 that killed dozens and its aftermath.
• R.M. Vaughan reports for The Globe and Mail about the new Hall of Justice poster program in Toronto, aimed to popularize LGBTQ heroes.