• blogTO considers some of the spendthrift things a millionaire could do in Toronto.
• James Bow remembers his 9/11 experience.
• Crasstalk features an essay by a New Yorker reflecting on her 9/11.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog reflects on how white power and white powerlessness can co-exist.
• Language Hat shares one book's evaluation of Neapolitan dialect.

Paul Steyn's National Geographic report about this intelligent bird is terribly sad. May it flourish in protected areas, and perhaps in the diaspora, too.

Flocks of chattering African Grey parrots, more than a thousand flashes of red and white on grey at a time, were a common site in the deep forests of Ghana in the 1990s. But a 2016 study ( Read more... )

NPR's Goats and Soda features an article looking at the rebirth of live theatre in Ghana.

When the military took power in Ghana, imposing a curfew from the early 1980s, theaters in the West African country went dark. By the time elected-civilian government was restored in 1992, many Ghanaians had lost the habit of going out to watch a play ( Read more... )

NPR's Eliza Barclay makes a report that make sense of a lot of press coverage about West African cocoa. Of course there would be heavy recourse to child and slave labour if the cocoa plantations are unrenumative.

[T]he 2015 Cocoa Barometer [is] an overview of sustainability issues in the cocoa sector, written by various European and U.S. NGOs, and ( Read more... )

Africland Post describes the undermining of Ghana's wax-printed fabric industry by Chinese imports. This is a real problem, I acknowledge, yet I also wonder if, as Chinese industry moves up the value-added ladder, these textiles might be something that could be profitably outsourced to a stable middle-income African economy.

As a tailor, Afia Addy ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes that crowd-funded transit might be coming to Toronto's Beaches.
• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly describes her favourite shopping experiences in Paris.
• Centauri Dreams considers the question of how to name planets.
• Crooked Timber discusses predictions for the coming year which descend into Bitcoin debates.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a ( Read more... )

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton describes how, playing the new Elite game, he visited the HD 28185 planetary system that features in his written science fiction.
• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly describes her recent visit to London.
• The Dragon's Gaze notes ways in which close binary stars like Alpha Centauri or Gamma Cephei can develop ( Read more... )

• blogTO shares photos of Nuit Blanche.
• The Dragon's Tales links to a paper suggesting that relatively recent presence of glaciers on some high Martian mountain slopes.
• Eastern Approaches looks at the ethnically riven Latvian election.
• Far Outliers looks at the grim situation for civil rights in early independent Romania and the problematic democracy of ( Read more... )

• 3 Quarks Daily links to an essayist wondering why people talked about Gaza not the Yezidis as a way to dismiss Gaza.
• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly notes how Americans subsidize Walmart's low wages by givibng its employees benefits.
• The Dragon's Tales notes that Chinese plans to reforest Tibet could accelerate the dessication of its watershed ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes the TTC proposal to remove some streetcar stops.
• Discover's D-Brief suggests that one reason humans are physically weaker than other primates is because we sacrificed physical strength to support our brain instead.
• The Dragon's Tales links to a paper suggesting Earth has much more carbon and water sequestered inside than expected.
• ( Read more... )