[PHOTO] Five photo links: Flickr, Instagram, cities, Tom Saint CLair, Peter Hujar

• Gizmodo has a perhaps unduly pessimistic take on the purchase of Flickr by SmugMug. I use Flickr regularly; I wish it luck.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly talks about her use of Instagram, and about what she sees as the site’s good and bad sides.
• CityLab considers the impact of Instagram, and social networking-driven photography, on the identities and representations of cities.
• Drew Rowsome takes a look at the photography of Tom Saint Clair. (NSFW.)
• Towleroad highlights a showing of the photography of Peter Hujar in New York City that I wish I could attend.

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[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Anthro{dendum} links to a roundup of anthropology-relevant posts and news items.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shows how the impending collision of galaxies NGC 4490 and NGC 4485 has created spectacular scenes of starbirth.
• Centauri Dreams notes the upcoming stream of new observatories and satellites that will enable better charting of exoplanets.
• Kieran Healy shares a cool infographic depicting the scope of the British baby boom.
• Hornet Stories shares the amazing video for the fantastic new song by Janelle Monáe, “Pynk.”
• JSTOR Daily notes what happens when you send Frog and Toad to a philosophy class.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money makes the obvious point that abandoning civil rights of minorities is a foolish strategy for American liberals.
• The LRB Blog shares a reflection on Winnie Mandela, and the forces she led and represents.
• The Map Room Blog links to detailed maps of the Rohingya refugee camps.
• Marginal Revolution takes issue with a proposal by Zeynep Tufekci for a thorough regulation of Facebook.
• The NYR Daily notes how Israel is making full use of the law to enable its colonization of the West Bank.
• The Planetary Society Blog’s Emily Lakdawalla reports from inside a NASA clean room where the new InSight Mars rover is being prepared.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer talks about what is really wrong with a Trump Organization letter to the president of Panama regarding a real estate development there.
• Strange Company looks at the life of 19th century fraudster and murdering John Birchall.

[NEWS] Five LGBT links: Village killings of the 1970s, Grindr, Fire Island, Steve Rogers’ Brooklyn

• This long-form CBC article on a string of unsolved murders of gay men in the late 1970s is compelling, frightening reading.
• Daily Xtra recently shared a Body Politic article from the 1970s by the late great Robin Hardy on the mysterious killings of gay men at the time. (Visibility, as Hardy suggests, can save lives.)
• The suggestion that excessive dependency on Grindr and similar apps is not helping queer men form rewarding relationships does not sound inherently implausible to me. Vox has it.
• Hornet Stories shares a guide to Fire Island, here.
• Things With Wings looks at the history of New York City and Brooklyn and finds out that the neighbourhood where Steven Rogers lived in the 1930s and 1940s, Brooklyn Heights, was actually a mecca of out queer people and communities.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Kambiz Kamrani at Anthropology.net notes new research suggesting that all modern Australian Aborigine languages descend from a single ancestor more than ten thousands years ago.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly considers the search for one’s spiritual home.
• Centauri Dreams notes the planned ESA ARIEL mission, intended to study exoplanet formation and atmospheres.
• Crooked Timber considers the prospects for the university in the United Kingdom, post-strike.
• D-Brief notes a study suggesting the worlds of TRAPPIST-1 might be too wet, too water-rich, to sustain life.
• Cody Delistraty shares an interview with Nancy Jo Sales on everything from childhood to Facebook.
• Dead Things notes the discovery of human footprints on the seafloor off of British Columbia, predating the Ice Age.
• Bruce Dorminey notes the possibility that ocean worlds in the “ice cap zone” could manage to support life
• Drew Ex Machina takes a look at the observations to date of near-Jovian analogue world Epsilon Indi Ab.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes ambitious plans by one private space development company to set up a functioning cislunar economy.
• Hornet Stories notes the upcoming re-release of Garbage’s second album, Version 2.0.
• In A State of Migration’s Lyman Stone takes a look at the regional origins of German immigrants to the US in the mid-19th century.
• Joe. My. God. notes that Grindr shares private user data with third parties that, among other things, would allow them to determine the HIV status of different individuals.
• JSTOR Daily notes the struggle for equal civil rights in Alaska, as indigenous people fought for equality.
• The NYR Daily reports on an interesting exhibit of post-Second World War modern art from Germany.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Kambiz Kamrani at Anthropology.net notes that the more Neanderthal DNA gets sequenced, the more we know of this population’s history.
• Anthro{dendum} takes a look at anthropologists who use their knowledge and their access to other cultures for purposes of espionage.
• Crooked Timber tackles the question of immigration from another angle: do states have the authority to control it, for starters?
• Dangerous Minds shares a fun video imagining Netflix as it might have existed in 1995.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog considers how the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico is an instance of American state failure.
• The Frailest Thing’s L.M. Sacasas considers is vows to abandon Facebook are akin to a modern-day vow of poverty.
• JSTOR Daily looks at Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and why it still matters.
• Language Log considers the naming practices of new elements like Nihonium.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money suggests that, based on the stagnation of average incomes in the US as GDP has growth, capitalism can be said to have failed.
• Lingua Franca considers the origin of the phrase “bad actor.”
• Marginal Revolution links to a paper suggesting that the American opioid epidemic is not simply driven by economic factors.
• The NYR Daily considers how Poland’s new history laws do poor service to a very complicated past.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw has an interesting post examining the settlement of Australisa’s inland “Channel Country” by cattle stations, chains to allow herds to migrate following the weather.
• The Planetary Science Blog’s Emily Lakdawalla takes a look at the latest science on famously volcanic Io.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel examines how the Milky Way Galaxy is slowly consuming its neighbours, the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds.

[WRITING] Five notes about writing in the social networking era

• This older JSTOR Daily link suggests that, used properly, Facebook can actually be good for its users, helping them maintain vital social connections.
• Alexandra Samuel’s suggestion, at JSTOR Daily, that Facebook revived the classical epistolary friendship has some sense to it. I would be inclined to place an emphasis on E-mail over more modern social messaging systems.
• Drew Rowsome wrote a couple of months ago about how Facebook can make it difficult to post certain kinds of content without risking getting his ability to share this content limited.
• Farah Mohammed wrote at JSTOR Daily about the rise and fall of the blog, now in 2017 scarcely as important as it was a decade ago. Social media just does not support the sorts of long extended posts I like, it seems.
• Josephine Livingstone at The New Republic bids farewell to The Awl, an interesting online magazine that now looks as if it represented an earlier, failed model of writing. (What is the working one? Ha.)

[NEWS] Five language links: Inuktitut, Icelandic, Ladino, Spanish, isiXhosa

• I entirely agree with the argument of Aluki Kotierk, writing at MacLean’s, who thinks the Inuit of Nunavut have been entirely too passive, too nice, in letting Inuktitut get marginalized. Making it a central feature in education is the least that can be done. (Québec-style language policies work.)
• Although ostensibly a thriving language in many domains of life, the marginalization of the Icelandic language in the online world could be an existential threat. The Guardian reports.
• As part of a bid to keep alive Ladino, traditional language of the Sephardic Jews, Spain has extended to the language official status including support and funding. Ha’aretz reports.
• A new set of policies of Spain aiming at promoting the Spanish language have been criticized by some in Hispanic American states, who call the Spanish moves excessively unilateral. El Pais reports.
• isiXhosa, the language of the Xhosa people of South Africa, is getting huge international attention thanks to its inclusion in Black Panther. The Toronto Star reports.