• blogTO reports on the history of Toronto's Wellington Street.
• Dangerous Minds introduces me to the grim American gothic that is Wisconsin Death Trip. What happened to Black River Falls in the 1890s?
• The Dragon's Gaze links to hypotheses about KIC 8462852, one suggesting KIC 8462852 has four exoplanets, another talking about a planet's disintegration.
• ( Read more... )

• blogTO tries to pit the west side of Toronto against the east side.
• Centauri Dreams describes an inventive plan to launch a probe to rendezvous with Proxima Centauri.
• Crooked Timber looks at the idea of civil society in the age of Trump.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper that aims to explore why Neptune-class exoplanets are so common.
• Marginal ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes the Distillery District's Toronto Light Festival.
• Border Thinking Laura Agustín looks at migrants and refugees in James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia.
• Centauri Dreams suggests that Perry's expedition to Japan could be taken as a metaphor for first contact.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a report about how brown dwarf EPIC 219388192 b.
• The LRB Blog ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes the rapid expansion of A&Ws across Toronto's neighbourhoods.
• Centauri Dreams reports that none of the exoplanets of nearby Wolf 1061 are likely to support Earth-like environments, owing to their eccentric and occasionally overclose orbits.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper looking at high-temperature condensate clouds in hot Jupiter ( Read more... )

At Filipino news site Rappler, JC Punongbayan and Manuel Leonard Albis argue in their "Were it not for Marcos, Filipinos today would have been richer" that the Marcos regime had a lasting and very negative effect on the development of the Filipino economy.

Although imperfect, GDP per capita is widely recognized as a useful proxy for measuring ( Read more... )

• At Apostrophen, 'Nathan Smith talks about how he made a tradition out of Christmas tree ornamentation over the past twenty years.
• blogTO notes that Toronto's waterfront has major E Coli issues.
• Crooked Timber notes the potential for the recent by-election in London, fought on Brexit and lost by the Tories, to mean something.
• The Dragon's Gaze reports ( Read more... )

• Beyond the Beyond quotes a Vladimir Putin statement on geopolitics.
• blogTO shares photos from Yorkdale's expansion.
• Centauri Dreams looks at more evidence for Planet Nine.
• Dead Things notes evidence that right-handedness has been predominant among hominins for some time.
• The Dragon's Gaze reports on the discovery of three hot Jupiters.

Bloomberg reports on the economic hit Singapore is taking from an economic downtown in its shipyards.

Customers have dwindled by the week at Indian Masala Hut, a curry stall in Singapore’s shipyard heartland. Manager K. Muralidoss blames the slump in oil rig-building that led to the elimination of thousands of jobs, many held by workers from India ( Read more... )

Bloomberg's Pooja Thakur Mahrotri and Frederik Balfour report on how the two Chinese-majority city-states in East Asia are dealing, differently, with real estate prices.

On the surface, the property markets in Singapore and Hong Kong have much in common. The two Asian financial hubs have both moved to rein in runaway home prices in recent years ( Read more... )

• At Antipope, Charlie Stross imagines what might become possible with cheap heavy spacelift.
• blogTO notes the vandalization of the iconic Toronto sign during Nuit Blanche.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper considering the detectability of interstellar comets.
• Language Log looks at Chinese language transcriptions for Obama, Hillary, and Trump.
• Marginal ( Read more... )