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This Ars Technica article looks at the promise--sadly unfulfilled--of pioneering blogging platform Livejournal. It really could have been a contender. I was on it from 2002; it had, in embryonic form, a lot of the elements common to the most popular social media around now. Poor management just...

I encountered the Mandela Effect for the first time in my own life a couple of days ago, when I discovered that, rather than being executed as a traitor following a court-martial, Benedict Arnold survived the American Revolution to spend the remaining two decades in exile. I'm reconciled to the...

Reddit's imaginarymaps forum recently hosted one interesting map, imagining a Finnish mandate of Ovamboland. The inspiration for this seems to have been the OTL historical presence, from the late 19th century on, of Finnish Lutheran missions in this region in what is now the far north of...

The first sentence of a recent tweet made me wonder about Donald Trump as a source of alternate histories--real alternate histories, of course, uchronias. The idea of a European Military didn’t work out too well in W.W. I or 2. But the U.S. was there for you, and always will be. All we ask is...

Reddit's imaginarymaps forum has a post of perhaps particular interest, one including a map from an alternate 1980 from the World Bank illustrating trends in African economic development. The POD seems to be some time in the 1950s, with a Soviet-American clash, a surviving French Community...

Dmitri Travin has written, at rosbalt.ru, an interesting imagining of what Muscovy would have become had it not managed to conquer Novgorod, and after Muscovy eastern Europe. "Let's return to our example. Remain Muscovy a small state, lost in the forests, no imperial syndrome of the Muscovites...

What would Algeria look like, starting off as an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire, if it had been spared the French conquest of 1830? This is plausible enough—had the 1830 revolution happened just a bit earlier, Charles X might not have had the time to launch the conquest and present...

Is Wales an independent country in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Unless there is a tradition at the United Nations of displaying the flags of subnational entities, it seems this is the case. The big question is how this has happened. By some metrics, Wales is exceptionally distinctive, with...

When I was in New York City on Friday, I was somewhat surprised that one of the MTA ticket machines gave me one-dollar coins in change. I did not know that they were actually in circulation. I was more surprised to find out later that, much unlike Canada with its loonie, the United States has...

For Thanksgiving, Jacobin Magazine reposted a provocative essay by Suresh Naidu, imagining what the United States would be like if its indigenous population had not died or been killed. Certainly it would have been fundamentally different. Some of his demographic assumptions, as have been...

This Atlas Obscura story about a Japanese diver who has been friends for 25 years with a fish, a sheepshead wrasse, is an awfully cute story. It also makes me wonder about changing human perceptions about fish. Until relatively recently, the consensus both scientific and popular seems to be...

Over in the blogosphere, Arnold Zwicky shared a map of the regional languages of France, with a link to an interesting site with recordings. In our timeline, France ended up becoming almost entirely Francophone, most of these regional languages ending up getting quite marginalized. Partly...

As I was walking through Toronto's Trinity Bellwoods Park this evening, I passed by a bust of Simon Bolivar, the one by Dundas and Shaw that had been given to Toronto in the early 1980s. As I passed it, as is my wont, I considered how Bolivar's dreams—of a strong Colombia, of a strong...

Yesterday at his sociology blog Understanding Society, Daniel Little considered a fraught question: what paths to modernization were open for China in the 1930s, before the People's Republic? He identified, in addition to the pathway of OTL involving the establishment of a one-party Communist...

It's Toronto Fringe Festival time, and I've been spending much of the past week attending high-quality indie theatre. Last night, I went with a friend to catch a new show that deserves the high ratings it has gotten from critics and audiences, The Seat Next To The King by local playwright Steven...

The Washington Post was just one of many news sources to note a recent report provided by the National Vital Statistics System of the Centers for Disease Control, "Births: Provisional Data for 2016"</u></a> (PDF format). This report noted that not only had the absolute number of births fallen...

In The Atlantic back in 2014, Uri Friedman interviewed Harry Turtledove about alternate history, starting with the possibility of a failed War of American Independence. I'm not sure about Turtledove's thesis that a British Empire including the Thirteen Colonies would necessarily have been an...

This afternoon, I dropped by the Toronto Reference Library to browse its shelves. As one would expect, Toronto's central library has a very large collection of materials in languages other than English, ready for lenders to pick up. Out of curiosity, I stopped by to see what the Scots Gaelic...

Yesterday, the blog Window on Eurasia linked to a Russian-language article reporting that Stalin wanted to drain the Caspian Sea, the better to exploit the offshore oil reserves of Azerbaijan. That the waters, particularly of the Volga, would be diverted to Central Asia to irrigate the...

A recent post at the always-interesting blog Language Hat linked to a fascinating post by Lameen Souag at his blog Jabal al-Lughat about the relatively late survival of a recognizable Romance language in medieval Tunisia. in the towns of southern Tunisia, the former Bilad ul-Jarid, Latin was...