• blogTO shares the new face of the Broadview Hotel.
• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly writes about the joys of the unscreened life.
• Dead Things reports on a study suggesting that although humans are violent by the standards of mammals, we are among the least violent primates.
• The Dragon's Gaze reports on the discovery of five sizable planets orbiting ( Read more... )

• The Big Picture shares photos from Rio in advance of the Olympics.
• James Bow remembers Mel Hurtig, the recently dead Canadian nationalist.
• Centauri Dreams considers space-based collection of antimatter.
• Crooked Timber examines the tyranny of the ideal.
• Dangerous Minds looks at a charming early 1980s board game, Gay Monopoly.

• D-Brief looks at a study of the Jomon of prehistoric Japan, noting low levels of violence.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog considers the sociological complexities of effective policing and crime.
• The Frailest Thing's Michael Sacasas reports on the many good things in his life, personal and professional.
• Language Hat considers the origins of the Chinese ( Read more... )

• blogTO takes a look at the reasons for the failure of the Toronto Sushi Festival, a failure that included the blog's own misrepresentation of the event's success.
• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly argues that, in our media-saturated environment, paying attention to everything is exhausting.
• Centauri Dreams and D-Brief react to Dawn's arrival at ( Read more... )

• blogTO shares vintage postcard images of Toronto in the 1970s.
• Centauri Dreams notes a proposed method for detecting exomoons, by detecting the disruptions that they cause in their parent worlds' magnetic fields on the pattern of Io's disruption of Jupiter's magnetic fields.
• The Dragon's Tales notes a new paper suggesting that Enceladus' geysers are ( Read more... )

• Al Jazeera shares Sarah Kendzior's argument that the disappearance of shopping malls will not mean the automatic return of downtowns in many cities, and notes the migration of many young Americans--including Vietnamese-Americans--to a booming Vietnam.
• Business Week observes that in higher education, China wants more people with vocational degrees ( Read more... )

The news that Vince Li, the Greyhound passenger responsible for the unusually gruesome July 2008 killing of Tim McLean on board a Greyhound bus, will be allowed unsupervised visits has gotten wide coverage. (The reporting by the CBC is typical.)

I'm not surprised that the victim's mother is upset. As I noted in 2009, though, Li committed the crime ( Read more... )

The Toronto Star recently published a guest editorial by urban student Richard Florida making the point that although Toronto may be less violent than many cities its size, it's violent enough. More, the violence is concentrated in certain neighbourhoods in a very North American pattern.

Just two months into the New Year, four people under the age ( Read more... )

• At Geocurrents, Asya Pereltsvaig takes on the provocative, if apparently ill-founded, thesis that Ashkenazic Jews trace their ancestry to the medieval Khazars of the Russian steppe by taking a look at the structure of the Yiddish language.
• Language Hat claims that, with the advent of electronic communications which make them difficult to insert into ( Read more... )

The Ahmadis are adherents of the Ahmadiyya, an Islamic sect founded in British India in the late 19th century and currently numbering in the millions. For a variety of theological reasons, not least of which is controversy over the exact status of the movement's founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, despite Ahmadis' self-identification as Muslim they are ( Read more... )