[URBAN NOTE] Ten JSTOR Daily links (@jstor_daily)

• JSTOR Daily considers whether koalas are actually going extinct, here.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the life and accomplishments of Alexander Von Humboldt, here.
• JSTOR Daily looks at how a move to California doomed the Oneida Community, here.
• JSTOR Daily considers how the genetically diverse wild relatives of current crops could help our agriculture, here.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the devastating flood of Florence in 1966, here.
• JSTOR Daily points out there is no template for emotional intelligence, here.
• JSTOR Daily explores some remarkable lumpy pearls, here.
• JSTOR Daily notes an 1870 scare over the future of men, here.
• JSTOR Daily reports on the staging of war scenes for the 1945 documentary The Battle of San Pietro, here.
• JSTOR Daily considers the bioethics of growing human brains in a petri dish, here.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Bad Astronomer notes the latest news on interstellar comet 2/Borisov.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly emphasizes how every writer does need an editor.
• Centauri Dreams notes how the gas giant GJ 3512 b, half the mass of Jupiter orbiting a red dwarf star closely, is an oddly massive exoplanet.
• Gina Schouten at Crooked Timber looks at inter-generational clashes on parenting styles.
• D-Brief looks at the methods of agriculture that could conceivably sustain a populous human colony on Mars.
• Bruce Dorminey argues that we on Earth need something like Starfleet Academy, to help us advance into space.
• Colby King at the Everyday Sociology Blog looks at how the socio-spatial perspective helps us understand the development of cities.
• Russell Arben Fox at In Media Res listens to the Paul McCartney album Flaming Pie.
• io9 looks at Proxima, a contemporary spaceflight film starring Eva Green.
• JSTOR Daily looks at how the intense relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia began in, and reflected, the era of Jim Crow.
• Language Hat notes a report suggesting that multilingualism helps ward off dementia.
• Language Log takes issue with the names of the mascots of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the emergence of a ninth woman complaining about being harassed by Al Franken.
• Marginal Revolution links to a new paper arguing that the Washington Consensus worked.
• The NYR Daily shares an Aubrey Nolan cartoon illustrating the evacuation of war children in the United Kingdom during the Second World War.
• At Out of Ambit, Diane Duane shares a nice collection of links for digital mapmakers.
• The Planetary Society Blog looks at how the European Space Agency supports the cause of planetary defense.
• Roads and Kingdoms interviews Kenyan writer Kevin Mwachiro at length.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel reports on how a mysterious fast radio burst helped illuminate an equally mysterious galactic halo.
• Strange Company reports on the mysterious and unsolved death in 1936 of Canadian student Thomas Moss in an Oxfordshire hayrick.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps notes how Mount Etna is a surpassingly rare decipoint.
• Understanding Society considers the thought of Kojève, after Hegel, on freedom.
• Window on Eurasia looks at the falling numbers of Russians, and of state support for Russian language and culture, in independent Central Asia.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell looks at how individual consumer responses are much less effective than concerted collective action in triggering change.
• Arnold Zwicky reports on some transgender fashion models.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Architectuul shares photos from a bike tour of Berlin.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait reports on new evidence that exocomets are raining on star Beta Pictoris.
• Larry Klaes at Centauri Dreams reviews the two late 1970s SF films Alien and Star Trek I, products of the same era.
• D-Brief reports on Hubble studies of the star clusters of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
• Bruce Dorminey shares Gemini telescope images of interstellar comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov).
• The Dragon’s Tales shares video of Space X’s Starhopper test flight.
• Far Outliers notes the import of the 13th century Norman king of England calling himself Edward after an Anglo-Saxon king.
• Gizmodo notes that not only can rats learn to play hide and seek, they seem to enjoy it.
• io9 notes the fantastic high camp of Mister Sinister in the new Jonathan Hickman X-Men run, borrowing a note from Kieron Gillen’s portrayal of the character.
• Joe. My. God. notes that Guiliani’s soon-to-be ex-wife says he has descended from 911 hero to a liar.
• Language Log looks at the recent ridiculous suggestion that English, among other languages, descends from Chinese.
• The LRB Blog looks at the brief history of commemorating the V2 attacks on London.
• Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the practice in Saskatchewan of sterilizing First Nations women against their consent.
• Marginal Revolution suggests that farmers in Brazil might be getting a partly unfair treatment. (Partly.)
• The Planetary Society Blog explains why C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) matters.
• Window on Eurasia notes that, for the first time, immigrants from Turkmenistan in Belarus outnumber immigrants from Ukraine.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomy notes the remarkably eccentric orbit of gas giant HR 5138b.
• Centauri Dreams notes the impact that large-scale collisions have on the evolution of planets.
• Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber noted yesterday that babies born on September 11th in 2001 are now 18 years old, adults.
• The Crux notes that some of the hominins in the Sima de los Huesos site in Spain, ancestors to Neanderthals, may have been murdered.
• D-Brief reports on the cryodrakon, a pterosaur that roamed the skies above what is now Canada 77 million years ago.
• Dangerous Minds looks at the political artwork of Jan Pötter.
• Gizmodo notes a poll suggesting a majority of Britons would support actively seeking to communicate with extraterrestrial civilizations.
• io9 has a loving critical review of the first Star Trek movie.
• JSTOR Daily shares, from April 1939, an essay by the anonymous head of British intelligence looking at the international context on the eve of the Second World War.
• Language Log notes a recent essay on the mysterious Voynich manuscript, one concluding that it is almost certainly a hoax of some kind.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money considers the future of the labour movement in the United States.
• Marginal Revolution considers what sort of industrial policy would work for the United States.
• Yardena Schwartz writes at NYR Daily about the potential power of Arab voters in Israel.
• Jim Belshaw at Personal Reflections explains why, despite interest, Australia did not launch a space program in the 1980s.
• Drew Rowsome provides a queer review of It: Chapter Two.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes how government censorship of science doomed the Soviet Union and could hurt the United States next.
• Window on Eurasia notes how, in the Volga republics, recent educational policy changes have marginalized non-Russian languages.
• Arnold Zwicky shares a glossy, fashion photography-style, reimagining of the central relationship in the James Baldwin classic Giovanni’s Room, arranged by Hilton Als.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Anthropology.net reports on the discovery of footprints of a Neanderthal band in Le Rozel, Normandy, revealing much about that group’s social structure.
• Bad Astronomer’s Phil Plait explains why standing at the foot of a cliff on Mars during local spring can be dangerous.
• Centauri Dreams shares a suggestion that the lakes of Titan might be product of subterranean explosions.
• Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber considers how, and when, anger should be considered and legitimated in discussions of politics.
• The Crux looks at the cement mixed successfully in microgravity on the ISS, as a construction material of the future.
• D-Brief looks at what steps space agencies are considering to avoid causing harm to extraterrestrial life.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes new evidence that the Anthropocene, properly understood, actually began four thousand years ago.
• Jonathan Wynn writes at the Everyday Sociology Blog about how many American universities have become as much lifestyle centres as educational communities.
• Far Outliers reports on how, in the 13th century, the cultural differences of Wales from the English–including the Welsh tradition of partible inheritance–caused great instability.
• This io9 interview with the creators of the brilliant series The Wicked and the Divine is a must-read.
• JSTOR Daily looks at a paper considering how teachers of German should engage with the concept of Oktoberfest.
• Language Hat looks at a new study examining the idea of different languages being more efficient than others. (They are not, it turns out.)
• Language Log looks at the history of translating classics of Chinese literature into Manchu and Mongolian.
• Erik Loomis considers the problems the collapse of local journalism now will cause for later historians trying to do research in the foreseeable future.
• Marginal Revolution reports on research suggesting that markets do not corrupt human morality.
• Neuroskeptic looks in more detail at the interesting, and disturbing, organized patterns emitted by organoids built using human brain cells.
• Stephen Baker at The Numerati writes, with photos, about what he saw in China while doing book research. (Shenzhen looks cool.)
• The NYR Daily notes the import of the working trip of Susan Sontag to Sarajevo in 1993, while that city was under siege.
• Robert Picardo at the Planetary Society Blog shares a vintage letter from Roddenberry encouraging Star Trek fans to engage with the Society.
• Noel Maurer at The Power and the Money looks at the economy of Argentina in a pre-election panic.
• Strange Company looks at the life of Molly Morgan, a British convict who prospered in her exile to Australia.
• Window on Eurasia notes that, in 1939, many Soviet citizens recognized the import of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; they knew their empire would expand.
• Arnold Zwicky looks at the treatment of cavemen, as subjects and providers of education, in pop culture.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Architectuul takes a look at different retrofuture imaginings from the 20th century of what architecture might look like in the 21st century.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the mysteries surrounding a sudden recent eruption of Sagittarius A*.
• Centauri Dreams considers what the James Webb Space Telescope might be able to pick up from TRAPPIST-1.
• Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber considers Ossian’s Ride, a SF novel by Fred Hoyle imagining a progressive Ireland leapfrogging ahead of Britain, and how this scenario is being realized now.
• D-Brief looks at what a glitch in the spin rate of the Vela pulsar reveals about these bodies.
• Dangerous Minds looks at how Rock Hudson came to star in the SF film Seconds.
• Bruce Dorminey notes a new NASA Kepler study suggesting (very) broadly Earth-like worlds might orbit as many as one in six Sun-like stars.
• Gizmodo links</u. to a study suggesting the oddly fuzzy core of Jupiter might be a consequences of an ancient collision with a massive protoplanet.
• Imageo notes that July broke all sorts of climate records.
• Joe. My. God. notes that the Trump administration has exempted Bibles from the new China tariffs.
• Language Hat considers, after the space of a decade, why people might say a language is so foreign as to be Greek.
• Robert Farley links at Lawyers, Guns and Money to an analysis of what major battle fleets around the world would have looked like in 1950 absent a Second World War.
• The LRB Blog notes how the UK Conservative government’s turn towards repressive law-and-order measures will please Faragists.
• The Map Room Blog shares maps indicating the scale of the American opioid crisis.
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution links to one of his columns noting how two decades of nil economic growth has harmed Italy.
• Peter Watts at his blog has a critical take on the Chinese SF movie The Wandering Earth.
• The NYR Daily looks at how things are becoming quite bad for Kashmiris.
• The Planetary Society Blog looks at how the OSIRIS-REx team is looking for sample sites on asteroid Bennu.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes the evidence from our solar system’s moons that two planets can indeed stably share the same orbit.
• Towleroad notes how a successful campaign has helped London fetish bar Backstreet survive gentrification.
• Arnold Zwicky shares some gorgeous blue and black flowers in the Gamble Garden of Palo Alto, and meditations on said.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Anthro{dendum} features an essay examining trauma and resiliency as encountered in ethnographic fieldwork.
• Architectuul highlights a new project seeking to promote historic churches built in the United Kingdom in the 20th century.
• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait examines Ahuna Mons, a muddy and icy volcano on Ceres, and looks at the nebula Westerhout 40.
• Centauri Dreams notes the recent mass release of data from a SETI project, and notes the discovery of two vaguely Earth-like worlds orbiting the very dim Teegarden’s Star, just 12 light-years away.
• Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber notes that having universities as a safe space for trans people does not infringe upon academic freedom.
• The Crux looks at the phenomenon of microsleep.
• D-Brief notes evidence that the Milky Way Galaxy was warped a billion years ago by a collision with dark matter-heavy dwarf galaxy Antlia 2, and notes a robotic fish powered by a blood analogue.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes that India plans on building its own space station.
• Earther notes the recording of the song of the endangered North Pacific right whale.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog looks at the role of emotional labour in leisure activities.
• Far Outliers looks at how Japan prepared for the Battle of the Leyte Gulf in 1944.
• Gizmodo looks at astronomers’ analysis of B14-65666, an ancient galactic collision thirteen billion light-years away, and notes that the European Space Agency has a planned comet interception mission.
• io9 notes how the plan for Star Trek in the near future is to not only have more Star Trek, but to have many different kinds of Star Trek for different audiences.
• Joe. My. God. notes the observation of Pete Buttigieg that the US has probably already had a gay president.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the many ways in which the rhetoric of Celtic identity has been used, and notes that the archerfish uses water ejected from its eyes to hunt.
• Language Hat looks at why Chinese is such a hard language to learn for second-language learners, and looks at the Suso monastery in Spain, which played a key role in the coalescence of the Spanish language.
• Language Log looks at the complexities of katakana.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the death of deposed Egypt president Mohammed Morsi looks like a slow-motion assassination, and notes collapse of industrial jobs in the Ohio town of Lordstown, as indicative of broader trends.
• The LRB Blog looks at the death of Mohamed Morsi.
• The Map Rom Blog shares a new British Antarctic Survey map of Greenland and the European Arctic.
• Marginal Revolution notes how non-religious people are becoming much more common in the Middle East, and makes the point that the laying of cable for the transatlantic telegraph is noteworthy technologically.
• Noah Smith at Noahpionion takes the idea of the Middle East going through its own version of the Thirty Years War seriously. What does this imply?
• The NYR Daily takes a look at a Lebanon balanced somehow on the edge, and looks at the concentration camp system of the United States.
• The Planetary Society Blog explains what people should expect from LightSail 2, noting that the LightSail 2 has launched.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw points readers to his stories on Australian spy Harry Freame.
• Rocky Planet explains, in the year of the Apollo 50th anniversary, why the Moon matters.
• Drew Rowsome reviews, and praises, South African film Kanarie, a gay romp in the apartheid era.
• The Russian Demographics Blog links to a paper examining the relationship between childcare and fertility in Belgium, and looks at the nature of statistical data from Turkmenistan.
• The Strange Maps Blog shares a map highlighting different famous people in the United States.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains why different galaxies have different amounts of dark matter, and shares proof that the Apollo moon landings actually did happen.
• Towleroad notes the new evidence that poppers, in fact, are not addictive.
• Window on Eurasia warns about the parlous state of the Volga River.
• Arnold Zwicky takes an extended look at the mid-20th century gay poet Frank O’Hara.

[URBAN NOTE] Some Saturday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait considers the possibility that our model for the evolution of galaxies might be partially disproven by Big Data.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly reports how she did her latest article for the New York Times.
• Centauri Dreams notes the beginning of a search for habitable-zone planets around Alpha Centauri A and B.
• The Crux looks at how the skull trophies of the ancient Maya help explain civilizational collapse.
• D-Brief notes new evidence suggesting that our humble, seemingly stable Sun can produce superflares.
• Dead Things reports on the latest informed speculation about the sense of smell of Tyrannosaurus Rex.
• The Dragon’s Tales shares the NASA report on its progress towards the Lunar Gateway station.
• Gizmodo looks at the growing number of China’s beautiful, deadly, blooms of bioluminescent algae.
• io9 reports that Stjepan Sejic has a new series with DC, exploring the inner life of Harley Quinn.
• JSTOR Daily looks at an example of a feminist musical, the Chantal Akerman The Eighties.
• Language Hat links to a review of a dystopian novel by Yoko Tawada, The Emissary, imagining a future Japan where the learning of foreign languages is banned.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money reiterates that history, and the writing of history, is an actual profession with skills and procedures writers in the field need to know.
• Liam Shaw writes at the LRB Blog about how people in London, late in the Second World War, coped with the terrifying attacks of V2 rockets.
• The Map Room Blog links to a new book, Wayfinding, about the neuroscience of navigation.
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution reviews a Robert Zubrin book advocating the colonization of space and finds himself unconvinced.
• The Planetary Society Blog looks at the ancient comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko explored by the ESA Rosetta probe.
• Roads and Kingdoms provides tips for visitors to the Paraguay capital of Asuncion.
• Peter Rukavina reports that, on the day the new PEI legislature came in, 105% of Island electricity came from windpower.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel argues that, in searching for life, we should not look for exoplanets very like Earth.
• Strange Company shares another weekend collection of diverse links.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little shares the views of Margaret Gilbert on social facts.
• Window on Eurasia suggests Kadyrov might dream of a broad Greater Chechnya, achieved at the expense of neighbouring republics.
• Arnold Zwicky considers some superhero identity crises, of Superman and of others.

[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.