• blogTO notes city opposition to a new subdivision in Weston.
• The Dragon's Gaze reports on KIC 7917485b, a massive gas giant found in close orbit of a star.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog dissects the idea of this being a season of giving.
• Joe. My. God. notes Clinton's vote lead over Trump surpassed two million.
• Language Log looks at Chinese transcriptions ( Read more... )

• Dangerous Minds notes a remarkable Japanese magazine featuring photos of rock stars from the 1970s and 1980s.
• Joe. My. God. notes the death of drag legend Lady Chablis.
• Marginal Revolution notes the exceptional skepticism of some with the idea of a guaranteed minimum income in Kenya.
• The NYRB Daily interviews Chinese documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming ( Read more... )

• Beyond the Beyond links to an exhibition of art by a Brazilian inspired by War of the Worlds.
• blogTO shares photos of Vaughan's new library.
• Centauri Dreams reports on the difficulty of reaching Proxima b.
• The Dragon's Gaze reports on KS-39b, a hot Jupiter orbiting a subgiant.
• False Steps reports on a proposed late Soviet space shuttle.

• D-Brief reports on Ceres' bright spots.
• Dangerous Minds celebrates the video game arcades of the 1980s.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper speculating that tightly-packed globular clusters might be good cradles for life.
• The Dragon's Tales examines the processes by which gravel is formed on Mars and Titan.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog wonders about the ( Read more... )

• Centauri Dreams looks at the earliest mentions of Proxima Centauri in science fiction.
• D-Brief notes that early oceans could moderate chemical reactions that could lead to life.
• The Dragon's Gaze notes that most super-Earths around red dwarfs may not be close enough to burn off their excess hydrogen/helium envelopes.
• The Dragon's Tales looks at the ( Read more... )

At New York, Mark Jacobson uses the high-profile case of the arrest of two Uzbek immigrants on charges of supporting ISIS to illustrate the much larger Uzbek immigrant community in New York City.

This ISIS business is a problem for us, but we want everyone to know it does not define all Uzbeks in this country,” Farhod Sulton told me recently, not ( Read more... )

• blogTO reports on the mysterious alleged new neighbourhood of Bricketowne.
• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly wonders whether things or fun are ultimately preferable.
• The Dragon's Tales provides updates on the war in the Donbas.
• Commenters at Joe. My. God. have fun with the Catholic priest who compares gay sex to trying to eat a bagel with your ears.
• ( Read more... )

Tara Isabella Burton of National Geographic describes life for the vanishingly small remnant of Bukharan Jews who remain in their homeland of Uzbekistan. The near-totality of the community has emigrated, to Israel and New York City.

Under the secularist Soviet Union, remembers Abraham Ishakov, cantor at the old town’s synagogue, carrying out the ( Read more... )

The Diplomat's Stephen Blank argues that in post-Soviet Central Asia, even in Kazakhstan, the Russian language is waning. This has obvious consequences for Russian soft power on the ground in the region.

[I]t has been clear for some time, and recent news reports confirm it, that the Russian language is steadily losing ground in Central Asia in ( Read more... )

The Inter Press Service hosts a multiply-authored Eurasianet article talking about the impact of the Russian economic slowdown on Central Asian migrant workers. (The lure of access to the Russian labour market may have been raised as a way to seduce migrant-exporting Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to join the Eurasian Union.)

According to Russia’s ( Read more... )