• blogTO looks at deserted Mirvish Village.
• Crooked Timber reenages with the Rachel Carson and DDT myth.
• The Crux looks at the Mandela Effect, exploring false memories.
• Dangerous Minds makes the case for the musical genius of Bobbie Gentry.
• From the Heart of Europe's Nicholas Whyte recounts his visit to Albania's bunker museum.

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly considers the quiet power of the candle.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining horseshoe patterns in protoplanetary disks.
• The Dragon's Tales looks at the impact of human civilization on the Amazonian rain forest and looks at the negative impact of a 6th century volcanic eruption on the Maya.
• Language Log ( Read more... )

CBC News' Kim Brunhuber tells a heartbreaking story of Haitian migrants stranded on the US-Mexican frontier.

Every day, more Haitians arrive, famished. They've been on the road for three months to get here ( Read more... )

• Apostrophen's 'Nathan Smith has a two part review of some of the fiction that he has recently read.
• blogTO looks at Casa Loma lit up for the holidays.
• Dangerous Minds notes The London Nobody Knows, a documentary of the grim areas of late Victorian London.
• Language Hat looks at how 16th century Spanish linguists represented Nahuatl spelling.
• Lawyers, ( Read more... )

• blogTO looks at Toronto's old neon signs and its still-visible ghost signs.
• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly looks at Donald Trump as a bully.
• Dangerous Minds shares vintage photos from the set of Labyrinth.
• The Dragon's Gaze notes a not-unexpected non-detection of Proxima Centauri b.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog looks at the presidential debates ( Read more... )

• Bloomberg talks about Poland's problems with economic growth, notes that McMansions are poor investments, considers what to do about the Olympics post-Rio, looks at new Japanese tax incentives for working women, looks at a French war museum that put its stock up for sale, examines the power of the New Zealand dairy, looks at the Yasukuni ( Read more... )

Bruno Carvalho's Open Democracy essay looks at the impact of the Olympics on Brazilian urbanism as manifested in Rio de Janeiro.

In the mid-1990s, amid a crisis of rampant violence in Rio de Janeiro, an influential Brazilian journalist, Zuenir Ventura, published a book with the title Cidade Partida. The expression could be translated as broken or ( Read more... )

Guilherme Leite Gonçalves and Sérgio Costa's Open Democracy essay looks at the changing functions of the port of Rio de Janeiro. In some of its broad outlines, the story that it tells is familiar.

The port district of Rio de Janeiro is one of the areas most affected by urban interventions connected to the August 2016 Olympics. Until very recently ( Read more... )

The Globe and Mail carries Alonso Soto and Leonardo Goy's Reuters article describing the interest of China in reviving plans for a high-speed rail route connecting Sao Paulo with Rio de Janeiro. The idea appeals to me, but is it actually viable, economically and politically?

Chinese firms are pushing to revive an $11-billion high-speed-train ( Read more... )

• blogTO writes about the impending installation of snooze stations across Toronto.
• Centauri Dreams considers the astrobiological implications of stromatolites.
• D-Brief notes that Titan has methane-flooded canyons.
• The Dragon's Gaze looks at the Kepler-444 system and notes studies of HR 8799.
• The Dragon's Tales notes an assassination attempt against a ( Read more... )