A C. T U. A L. L Y

You may have heard that Barcelona is the latest victim of mass tourism:   twenty million visitors a year, many of them flying in on budget airlines like Ryan Air, Easy Jet, or Vueling and staying in Airbnb apartments that have put pressure on the rental market and changed the character of some neighborhoods.   It’s a familiar story, and in Barcelona’s case, it’s partly a self-inflicted wound.   After the global crisis of 2008, Madrid and Catalonian policy makers encouraged a tourist boom, and Barcelona enthusiastically marketed itself   “as an especially fun European destination, with good weather, pretty beaches, lively night life, and just enough in the way of museums and architecture to provide diversion without requiring an onerous cultural itinerary.”   You can read all about the touristification of Barcelona in this fine New Yorker article, quoted above:   https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/29/the-airbnb-invasion-of-bar...

This year the London Zoo celebrated Pride month — and its six gay Humboldt penguins — with a banner in the penguin exhibit that said “Some penguins are gay, get over it.” According to Wiki , Aristotle (384–322 BC) gets the prize for the earliest written mention of non-human animal homosexuality; namely, his citation of same-sex copulation between pigeons, partridges, and quails.   But Aristotle’s observations on animal homosexuality, if they focused on males and copulation, would have been limited by his times.  Aristotle lived during the Classical period in ancient Greece, when sex between men and boys was ho hum, no biggie.   But non-human animal homosexuality is much bigger than boys and it’s about more than just sex.   M odern biologists like Bruce Bagemihl describe animal homosexuality as a broad spectrum of same-sex behavior between female and male pairs consisting of courtship, affection, sex acts, pair-bonding, and parental activities.  In fa...