• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling mourns the death of Alvin Toffler.
• The Big Picture shares images of the Istanbul airport attack.
• blogTO notes Toronto's recent Trans March was the largest in world history.
• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly interviews memoirist Plum Johnson.
• Centauri Dreams considers the determination of distances to dim stars and ( Read more... )

Bloomberg's Alice Baghdjian writes about how the strength of the Swiuss franc, especially relative to the Euro, has been hurting the Swiss economy.

Nestled on the banks of Lake Zurich, humidifier-maker Condair AG’s factory provided a good living for its 41 workers. Then in November 2014, beset by high manufacturing costs, the company decided to ( Read more... )

Walter Mayr's Spiegel article about the political ambitions of Austrian-Canadian billionaire Frank Stronach fills me with bemusement. His whole personality-driven political movement reminds me of nothing so much as his daughter Belinda Stronach's flirtations with Canadian political life.

Wiry despite his advanced age, the billionaire is bustling ( Read more... )

San Francisco mass transit, the rhetoric of the taxpayer, young adult fiction, and more!

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton takes a look at San Francisco's streetcar system.
• blogTO shows how the now-trendy Distillery District was, earlier in the 20th century, a neighbourhood that lived up to its name.
• The Burgh Diaspora notes that population ( Read more... )

Space and Culture had a great post contrasting the use of urban space in two cities at the opposite ends of the Hapsburg empire, Salzburg and L'viv.

Eastern Europe ’s cities are an education in different regimes of public space. Within the spatialisation Lefebvre describes as modernist, rationalized ‘Abstract Space’ public areas of cities are ( Read more... )

• Otto at Otto's Random Thoughts ruminates on the fact that many diasporas--the Volga Germans, for instance--are the product of multiple displacements. He also considers the case of Koreans in Central Asia, who shifted for various reasons from Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan.
• Bill Poser at Language Log is surprised that a couple of rude Hispanophone workers ( Read more... )

Not too long ago, Expatica carried the news that Slovaks were moving in large numbers to Austria. These Slovaks aren't the typical (or rather, stereotypical) migrants to rich western Europe, however.

When the Iron Curtain between the then Czechoslovakia and Austria tumbled 18 years ago, residents of the grey, run-down and impoverished Bratislava ( Read more... )