[LINK] Some Friday links

[rfmcdpei]

• Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell suggests that e-book publishing, by virture of the lower costs involved, will encourage the popularity of relatively short texts over novels of standard length.
• Daniel Drezner suggests that the success of Yanukovich the Ukrainian election is a good thing, inasmuch as it indicates that Ukraine's a politically and culturally pluralistic society (unlike, say, Russia).
• The Global Sociology blog notes that in the United States, downwards pressure on wages by immigrants isn't felt by native-born citizens but rather by recent immigrants and their families, who occupy much the same position in the labour market as the newer arrivals.
• Douglas Muir at Halfway Down the Danube wonders about the remarkable speed at which the legacies of short-lived colonial empires like the German and the Japanese can fade away.
• At the Invisible College, Jessica Dorsey examines where the emergent international law doctrine of the right to protect is in the world. It's controversial, needless to say.
• Language Log examines the growing role of English in China, to the point that its actually a language of instruction in education.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Robert Farley considers Polish history, the consensus being that the death of the Jegallonian dynasty kept Poland-Lithuania from developing the centralized state it needed to survive. Charli Carpenter also points out that estimates of Congolese war dead have accidentally been inflated due to statistical errors, and that the figure is "only" three million.
• Savage Minds' Joanna and Pal examine the use of the word "culture" in international discourse, relating to everything from concerns over cultural appropriate to international relations and state structure.
• Slap Upside the Head notes that a newly-installed Conservative Senator in Canada has a history of being quite vocally and strongly homophobic.
• The Volokh Conspiracy compares the fiscal and economic positions of California in the United States and Greece in the eurozone, suggesting that California's meeting a better reception from financial markets simply because it plays a much bigger role in the American economy than Greece does in the eurozone.
• Window in Eurasia suggests that despite the recent resignation of Tatarstan's Prime Minister Mintimir Shaimiyev, Tatarstan is still going to retain its cultural and political distinctiveness.