[BLOG] Five NYR Daily links (@nyr_daily)

• Garry Wills writes at the NYR Daily about the history of impeachment, here.
• David Rieff writes at the NYR about Peronism and the new president, in Argentina, here.
• The NYR Daily looks at the disaster soon to be visited by Brexit on Northern Ireland, here.
• Matt Seaton writes at the NYR Daily about what the recent British election reveals about the failing health of social democracy in England.
• The NYR Daily looks at the new movie Atlantics, which looks at migration and Africa.

[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.

[NEWS] Ten Halloween links (#halloween)

• Jamie Bradburn took a look at now-effaced Toronto cemetery Potter’s Field, here.
• Kingston, Ontario’s Skeleton Park is a remarkable legacy. Global News reports.
• CBC Saskatoon reports on the origins of Halloween in harvest events.
• The Hong Kong protests took on a new tinge this Halloween. CBC reports.
• The Vancouver tradition of Halloween fireworks may be dying out. The National Post reports.
• Guardian Cities looks around the world, from Derry to West Hollywood, at local celebrations of Halloween.
• Gizmodo shares an image of a ghostly collision of galaxies in deep space.
• Dangerous Minds shared some album covers inspired by Halloween.
• CBC looks at the very low rate of candy tampering in Canada over the past decade.
• JSTOR Daily considers how the Great Pumpkin of Peanuts came to be so great.

[AH] Five r/imaginarymaps #alternatehistory maps: Polabians, Huguenots, Malays, Finland, Ireland

• This r/imaginarymaps map imagines the survival of a Slavic people of east Germany to nation-statehood, not the extant Sorbs but the more obscure Polabians.
• Was there ever a possibility, as imagined in this r/imaginarymaps map, of a Huguenot polity forming and seceding from France?

This r/imaginarymaps map imagines a decidedly different Malay world, with a fragmented Indonesia.

• This r/imaginarymaps map imagines a Finland that grew sharply, to include much more of Karelia and even North Ingria.
• What would have come if, as suggested here, Northern Ireland had been repartitioned in the 1920s, most of the west and south passing to independent Ireland?

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Montréal, Hillsborough, Derry, Paris, Mecca

• La Presse looks at the challenges facing changing Lachine-Est, here.
• The small New Brunswick town of Hillsborough may lose its only grocery store. Global News reports.
• Guardian Cities looks at the vexed question of how, or if, the Northern Ireland city of Derry should celebrate its political murals.
• Guardian Cities notes that Paris will soon host a substantial rooftop farm.
• Tom van Laer and Elif Izberk-Bilgin at The Conversation explain why reviews of facilities in holy cities, like Mecca, tend to be so inflated.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Centauri Dreams links to a paper noting that the interiors of planets play a critical role in determining planetary habitability.
• Belle Waring writes at Crooked Timber about imaginative dream worlds, criticized by some as a sort of maladaptive daydreaming I don’t buy that; I am interested in what she says about hers.
• D-Brief notes the very recent discovery of a small tyrannosaur.
• Dead Things considers the possibility that a new South African hominin, Australopithecus sediba, might actually be the ancestor of Homo sapiens.
• JSTOR Daily looks at how one negative side-effect of the renewable energy boom is the mass mining of rare earth elements.
• Erik Loomis writes at Lawyers, Guns and Money about the way in which not just history but history fandoms are gendered, the interests of women being neglected or downplayed.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen reports on how a new US-Chinese trade deal will not do much to deal with underlying issues.
• The New APPS Blog notes the great profits made by the gun industry in the United States and the great death toll, too, associated with the guns produced.
• The NYR Daily visits the Northern Ireland town of Carrickfergus, home to Louis MacNeice and made famous by violence as the whole province sits on the edge of something.
• Drew Rowsome takes a look at the queer horror film The Skin of The Teeth.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains what the technical limits of the Hubble Space Telescope are, and why it needs a replacement.
• Window on Eurasia notes changing patters of population change in the different regions of Russia.
• Arnold Zwicky shares some photos of notable public art in Switzerland, starting with The Caring Hand in his ancestral canton of Glarus.

[URBAN NOTE] Seven city links: Montréal, Camden, Derry, Rome, Cape Town, Hong Kong, Dhaka & Calcutta

• La Presse notes that the Bixi bike-sharing service in Montréal is celebrating its 11th anniversary.
• Marginal Revolution notes how better policing cut into crime in Camden, New Jersey.
• The NYR Daily looks at how Brexit and a hardened border will hit the Northern Ireland city of Derry.
• Guardian Cities reports on the gang that goes around Rome at night making illegal repairs to crumbling infrastructure.
• CityLab reports on how Cape Town is coping, one year after it nearly ran out of water.
• Roads and Kingdoms shares tips for travellers visiting Hong Kong.
• Guardian Cities reports on the families made refugees by Partition who tried to swap homes in Dhaka and Calcutta.

[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.

[NEWS] Five politics links: Canadian navy, Chemi Lhamo, refugee chocolate, Brexit, Ireland

• Is the culture of the Canadian navy that much of an obstacle to the retention of personnel? Global News reports.
• That Chemi Lhamo, a Tibetan-Canadian student who was elected student president of the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus, has come under attacks coordinated through Chinese social media on account of her heritage is disturbing. CBC reports.
• A successful Nova Scotia chocolatier founded by Syrian refugees is set to take on new refugee hires. The National Post reports.
• Pankaj Mishra writing at The New York Times is, perhaps unkind but not wrong, in suggesting that the bad habits of Britain’s imperial elites are finally rebounding on Britain in this mismanaged Brexit.
• Andrew Gallagher writes at Slugger O’Toole about the impossibility of Ireland ever having good boundaries through any imaginable partition.

[NEWS] Five links: Tumblr, Lough Foyle, giant snails, Gillian Genser, Tell el-Hammam

• VICE’s Motherboard suggests that the crackdown on anything NSFW on Tumblr can be blamed on the expanding power of the Apple Store, one element of its indiscriminate sanitization of the Internet.
• Garrett Carr at 1843 Magazine takes a look at Lough Foyle, the northern Irish bay that will become part of a hard border come Brexit.
• Giant African snails, Sarah Laskow suggests at Atlas Obscura, have spread so widely in recent centuries thanks to humanity that the presence of their shells might well be a noticeable marker of the Anthropocene.
• At Toronto Life, sculptor Gillian Genser tells the heartbreaking story of how she was poisoned by the heavy metals contained in the mussel shells that she used as raw materials for a sculpture.
• Evan Gough at Universe Today reports the claim of some archaeologists that, 3700 years ago, the city of Tell el-Hammam was destroyed by a meteor that exploded above it with the force of a large nuclear warhead. Inspiration for Sodom and Gomorrah?