• 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 shares photos of Toronto streets in the 1960s, cluttered by signage.
• Crooked Timber and the LRB Blog respond to the death of Fidel Castro.
• Far Outliers looks at the exploitative but functional British treatment of servants.
• Language Hat notes the insensitivity of machine translation and examines the evolution of the Spanish language.
• Lawyers, ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes that retail space on Bloor Street in Yorkville is not only the priciest in Canada, but among the priciest in the world.
• Centauri Dreams notes how fast radio bursts, a natural phenomenon, can be used to understand the universe.
• Dangerous Minds looks at a Kate Bush music performance on Dutch television in 1978.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to an ( Read more... )

• The Boston Globe's The Big Picture shares some of that newspaper's best papers from last month.
• blogTO shares Nuit Blanche photos.
• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about the divide between journalism and content creation.
• Centauri Dreams considers the Rosetta probe.
• Dangerous Minds shares photos of the suitcases left by patients at an American ( Read more... )

In "Neither side was quite right on that Dolores Huerta ‘English-only’ shout-down", Washington Post journalist Janell Ross looks at the scandal. Consider myself unimpressed by the standards of Sanders' supporters here.

First off, neither Huerta, the precinct's permanent chair nor the precinct captains for Clinton and Sanders could be reached for ( Read more... )

• blogTO answers the question of why Toronto has "Lower" streets.
• The Dragon's Gaze notes how exoplanets can lose their exomoons if they orbit too closely.
• The Dragon's Tales notes differences in American and Chinese rhetoric about nuclear weapons.
Geocurrents looks at Chavacano, a rare Spanish-based creole language in the Philippines.
• Lawyers, Guns and ( Read more... )

As I'm starting to write fiction again, Savage Minds' guest essay by teacher and anthropologist Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor is inspiring. What she writes about the interactions of different languages, about the power of the ethnographic gaze, gives me hope.

Acquiring Spanish as a second language led me to poetry, and becoming a better poet helped me ( Read more... )

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly asks her readers what work means to them.
• Centauri Dreams considers Saturn's A ring.
• Crooked Timber examines a mid-19th century horror story.
• The Dragon's Gaze reports on the circumstellar disks of supergiants in the Magellanic Clouds and on TW Hydrae.
• The Dragon's Tales reports on the Donbas war.

The Toronto Star's Peter Edwards reports on patterns in Google searches in Toronto. I would suggest that another explanation might be that users of Chinese languages use search engines other than Google, Baidu for instance.

Toronto has a large Chinese community, but there’s not much Chinese-language Googling out of the GTA. But Toronto has a far ( Read more... )

Dylan Baddour blogging for the Houston Chronicle notes that the United States now has more speakers of Spanish than every other country save Mexico.

The United States boasts the world’s second-largest Spanish-speaking population, now that this country’s Hispanic population outnumbers the entire populace of Spain ( Read more... )