A Bit More Detail

• Charley Ross reflects on the story of Carla Vicentini, a Brazilian apparently abducted from New Jersey a decade ago.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog reflects on the concept of anomie.


• Far Outliers looks at the southwest Pacific campaigns of 1942, and reflects on Australian-American tensions in New Guinea in the Second World War.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money reflects briefly on the disaster in Houston.


• The Map Room Blog links to two interesting longform takes on maps in fantasy.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer considers the extent to which urban policy has contributed to Houston's issues.


• Roads and Kingdoms tells the story of a Shabbat celebration in Zimbabwe, and of the country's Jewish community.


• Strange Company tells the story of the mysterious disappearance of Lieutenant Paul Byron Whipkey. What was done to him?


• Unicorn Booty reports on how the Supreme Court of India has found people have a legal right to their orientation.


• Window on Eurasia reports on the growing number of Russian citizens with Chinese connections.


• Arnold Zwicky talks about Tom Bianchi's vintage Fire Island photos.

• Vice's Noisey celebrates the life and music of Israel Kamakawiwoʻole, whose medley of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World" outlived him.


• The AP describes how Britain's pop music charts have changed to stop future bouts of Ed Sheeran-style domination.
  
• Hannah Ellis-Peterson reports for The Guardian about how (and why) Sony has opened a new vinyl pressing plant in Japan.


• Carla Gillis reported for NOW Toronto about David McPherson's forthcoming book on the famed Horseshoe Tavern.

• At Apostrophen, 'Nathan Smith writes about the status of his various writing projects.


• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling links to an article examining pieces of software that have shaped modern music.


• blogTO notes the expansion of the Drake Hotel to a new Junction site. Clearly the Drake is becoming a brand.


• Citizen Science Salon looks at how Internet users can help fight illegal fishing in the Pacific.


• Crooked Timber asks readers for new Doctor Who candidates.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper finding that the presence of Proxima Centauri would not have inhibited planetary formation around Alpha Centauri A and B.


• The LRB Blog notes the growing fear among Muslims in the diaspora.


• The Map Room Blog shares a reimagined map of the Paris metro.


• The Volokh Conspiracy and Towleroad have very different opinions on the nomination of Neil Gorusch to the US Supreme Court.


• Transit Toronto reports on the reopening of the TTC parking lot at Yorkdale.


• Whatever's John Sclazi responds to the past two weeks of Trump-related chaos, and is not impressed.


• Window on Eurasia notes that the Russian Orthodox Church carries itself as an embattled minority because it is one, and looks at the future of Russian federalism in regards to Tatarstan.

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly writes about the importance of showing up for major events.


• Crooked Timber looks at e-publishing for academia.


• Dead Things notes that the evolution of the human brain and human teeth were not linked.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to two papers about ocean worlds and greenhouse effects.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the hopeful seasteaders of French Polynesia.


• Towleroad looks at the life of a trans man in the mid-20th century.


• Window on Eurasia shares a Catalonian linguists' argument that linguistic diversity helps minority languages.


• Arnold Zwicky reflects on the gay cowboy scene.

Natasha Boteilho lives in Oahu’s arid Waianae Valley on a jot of land held in trust for native Hawaiians. Here on Hawaii’s most densely populated island—where the highest per-capita homeless population in the United States continues to swell and the average price of a single-family home is three-quarters of a million dollars—that’s no small thing. The turquoise waters that lap against golden beaches lie next to jammed highways. Even the wildlife is exploding: A cacophonous feral-chicken epidemic provides the background noise to islanders’ daily lives.

Boteilho’s property was originally awarded to her grandfather by virtue of a federal law enacted in 1920 to stabilize a Hawaiian race left withering and landless after a century of colonization. Boteilho’s mother took over the land lease next, and then, in 2011, the homestead was passed on to her. A stay-at-home mother of three girls, the 39-year-old Boteilho resides with her husband and children in the three-bedroom house her grandfather built at the base of an eroded shield volcano.

But this is where Boteilho’s familial succession will end. None of Boteilho’s daughters—ages 2, 5, and 10—are eligible to inherit the land their great-grandfather settled in 1951. Simply put: They don’t have enough Hawaiian blood. “If I passed away tomorrow, my children would not be able to get my house,” Boteilho said. “That scares me.”

When Congress passed the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920, the native Hawaiian race was quickly vanishing. The legislation was a reaction to the large numbers of Hawaiians who had been forced off their lands when white businessmen moved to the islands during the early 1800s. The foreigners built sprawling pineapple and sugarcane plantations and imported a new working class to tend to them. The Hawaiians, meanwhile, receded to crowded urban zones where extrinsic diseases, for which they had no immunity, hacked away at their numbers. In 1778, when white men first set foot on the Hawaiian Islands, there were an estimated 683,000 full-blooded Hawaiians living there, according to the Pew Research Center. By 1919, that population was just 22,600. The Hawaiian Homes Commission Act attempted to combat the decline by creating a 200,000-acre land trust to serve as neighborhoods, farms, and ranches for those who could prove at least 50 percent Hawaiian ancestry.

“The Hawaiian race is passing,” testified Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalaniana’ole before the U.S. House of Representatives in 1920. “And if conditions continue to exist as they do today, this splendid race of people, my people, will pass from the face of the Earth.” A born royal and a delegate to Congress, Kuhio was the visionary sponsor of the law that established Hawaiian homesteading. Despite his fight for a lower blood quantum, the law specifies that Hawaiians are eligible to apply for 99-year land leases at $1 per year on the condition that they prove they are at least half-blooded Hawaiians. The law further stipulates that a homestead lease can be passed on to a leaseholder’s child or grandchild—so long as that heir can prove at least 25 percent Hawaiian ancestry.

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly notes the import of journalism, even now.


• Centauri Dreams looks at the bright spots of Ceres.


• D-Brief looks at gravitational wave astronomy in space and notes that fish can recognize faces.


• Dangerous Minds looks at some groovy French playing cards from the 1960s.


• The Dragon's Tales notes the permanent deployment of more Russian forces to the Ukrainian border.


• Joe. My. God. reports a claim by a New York state legislator that a bishop tried to bribe her to drop her support for child abuse reform legislation.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer looks at the claim that perceived anti-Hispanic policies in California helped kill the Republican Party there, and finds it interestingly wanting.


• Savage Minds examines the decolonization of anthropology in the Pacific islands.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that Russians are not interested in fighting over the Baltic States.


• Arnold Zwicky remembers his lovers and the roses he loved.

Eventually Easter’s growing population was cutting the forest more rapidly than the forest was regenerating. The people used the land for gardens and the wood for fuel, canoes, and houses--and, of course, for lugging statues. As forest disappeared, the islanders ran out of timber and rope to transport and erect their statues. Life became more uncomfortable-- springs and streams dried up, and wood was no longer available for fires.

People also found it harder to fill their stomachs, as land birds, large sea snails, and many seabirds disappeared. Because timber for building seagoing canoes vanished, fish catches declined and porpoises disappeared from the table. Crop yields also declined, since deforestation allowed the soil to be eroded by rain and wind, dried by the sun, and its nutrients to be leeched from it. Intensified chicken production and cannibalism replaced only part of all those lost foods. Preserved statuettes with sunken cheeks and visible ribs suggest that people were starving.

With the disappearance of food surpluses, Easter Island could no longer feed the chiefs, bureaucrats, and priests who had kept a complex society running. Surviving islanders described to early European visitors how local chaos replaced centralized government and a warrior class took over from the hereditary chiefs. The stone points of spears and daggers, made by the warriors during their heyday in the 1600s and 1700s, still litter the ground of Easter today. By around 1700, the population began to crash toward between one-quarter and one-tenth of its former number. People took to living in caves for protection against their enemies. Around 1770 rival clans started to topple each other’s statues, breaking the heads off. By 1864 the last statue had been thrown down and desecrated.

For one thing, they could eat rats. As J.B. MacKinnon reports in his new book, The Once and Future World, archeologists examined ancient garbage heaps on Easter Island looking for discarded bones and found "that 60 percent of the bones came from introduced rats."

So they'd found a meat substitute.

What's more, though the island hadn't much water and its soil wasn't rich, the islanders took stones, broke them into bits, and scattered them onto open fields creating an uneven surface. When wind blew in off the sea, the bumpy rocks produced more turbulent airflow, "releasing mineral nutrients in the rock," J.B. MacKinnon says, which gave the soil just enough of a nutrient boost to support basic vegetables. One tenth of the island had these scattered rock "gardens," and they produced enough food, "to sustain a population density similar to places like Oklahoma, Colorado, Sweden and New Zealand today."

According to MacKinnon, scientists say that Easter Island skeletons from that time show "less malnutrition than people in Europe." When a Dutch explorer, Jacob Roggevin, happened by in 1722, he wrote that islanders didn't ask for food. They wanted European hats instead. And, of course, starving folks typically don't have the time or energy to carve and shove 70-ton statues around their island.

[. . .]

Because, say the Hawaiian anthropologists, clans and families on Easter Island didn't fall apart. It's true, the island became desolate, emptier. The ecosystem was severely compromised. And yet, say the anthropologists, Easter Islanders didn't disappear. They adjusted. They had no lumber to build canoes to go deep-sea fishing. They had fewer birds to hunt. They didn't have coconuts. But they kept going on rat meat and small helpings of vegetables. They made do.

In December 1862, Peruvian slave raiders struck Easter Island. Violent abductions continued for several months, eventually capturing or killing around 1500 men and women, about half of the island's population. International protests erupted, escalated by Bishop Florentin-Étienne Jaussen of Tahiti. The slaves were finally freed in autumn, 1863, but by then most of them had already died of tuberculosis, smallpox and dysentery. Finally, a dozen islanders managed to return from the horrors of Peru, but brought with them smallpox and started an epidemic, which reduced the island's population to the point where some of the dead were not even buried.

• blogTO profiles a couple who live on a houseboat near the foot of the Scarborough Bluffs.


• Centauri Dreams hosts an argument making the case for eventual human emigration in interstellar directions.


• Dangerous Minds celebates Brian Eno.


• The Dragon's Gaze shares a paper considering what "habitability" means.


• The Dragon's Tales notes a study suggesting Neanderthals were omnivores.


• Joe. My. God. shares a collaboration between Jean-Michel Jarre and Peaches.


• The NYR Daily considers the ethics of drone killings.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer (here) and Crooked Timber (here) appear to have opposite perspectives on the threat posed by Trump to liberal democracy.


• Discover's Seriously Science notes the recent study suggesting that at least one bird species' calls have syntax.


• The Search explores CUNY-TV's efforts to create durable archives.


• Strange Maps notes that Tokelau is an Internet superpower, based in terms of the number of sites it hosts.


• Transit Toronto maps the proposed route for the Downtown Relief Line, which would stretch from City Hall over to Pape.


• The Volokh Conspiracy considers the context in which it could, or could not, be a crime for a speaker to encourage an audience to attack hecklers.


• Arnold Zwicky looks at the social import of clothes.

• Anthropology notes the latest archeological findings suggesting that Easter Island was not destroyed by war.


• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling notes that Wired will now no longer be allowing people with ad blockers to access the site.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes the likely existence of a substantial gas giant in the disk of TW Hydrae and describes a Neptune-type world found through microlensing.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting, on the basis of the geology of Mars, that the early atmosphere was dominated by carbon dioxide with little oxygen.


• Joe. My. God. links to the audio track of the new Pet Shop Boys single, "The Pop Kids".


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes opposition to the TPP in Indonesia.


• Language Log notes a poster from the Second World War era United States propagandizing against the use of German, Italian, and Japanese.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw contrasts Australia's response to the Syrian refugee crisis with Canada's.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes that Mexico's PEMEX may be in bad shape.


• Spacing Toronto shares John Lorinc's skeptical essay about transit in Toronto. Grand schemes are great, but what about implementation?


• Strange Maps maps Brexit, in various dimensions.


• Torontoist suggests this city can learn from Detroit when it comes to repurposing vacant lots.


• Window on Eurasia notes the growth of separate Muslim and Christian neighbourhoods in many cities.

The new flag uses a silver fern frond as its primary motif, instead of the Union Jack, and keeps the four stars that decorate the bottom right corner of the current design. The official alternative flag has quite a campaign behind it: Lockwood has a robust website about the design, complete with information on voting and donating. As for the silver fern, it’s a known icon in New Zealand with roots that trace back to the Māori, the country’s indigenous Polynesian populaton. Māori legend has it that the silver fern once helped hunters and warriors find their way home, by reflecting the moonlight and creating a path through the forest.

On his site, [designer Kyke] Lockwood writes, “the fern is an element of indigenous flora representing the growth of our nation. The multiple points of the fern leaf represent Aotearoa’s,”—the indigenous name for the island country—“peaceful multicultural society, a single fern spreading upwards represents that we are all one people growing onward into the future.” That last bit is some saccharine symbolism, for sure, but that’s hardly uncommon with flag design.

That said, it’s also a smart design. According to experts in vexillology, the study of flag design, a good flag is one you can both recognize immediately and draw from memory. The frond, as a piece of graphic design, makes both possible. It’s almost like a Matisse cut-out in this way: it has a child-like simplicity, but character that won’t be found on another nation’s flag.