A Bit More Detail

• JSTOR Daily examines ch'arki, an Andean food like jerky.


• JSTOR Daily reports on how Peru and Chile contest claims to being the origins of pisco.


• JSTOR Daily explores the X-ray craze of 1896, here.


• JSTOR Daily explores the "lavender scare" of the 1950s that saw dozens of queer men purged from the American government.


• JSTOR Daily looks at how linguists are using Urban Dictionary to study the evolution of language.

• Architectuul notes the recent death of I.M. Pei.


• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes what, exactly, rubble-pile asteroids are.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly writes about definitions of home.


• Centauri Dreams considers white dwarf planets.


• The Crux notes how ultra-processed foods are liked closely to weight gain.


• D-Brief observes that a thin layer of insulating ice might be saving the subsurface oceans of Pluto from freezing out.


• Bruce Dorminey notes the critical role played by Apollo 10 in getting NASA ready for the Moon landings.


• The Dragon's Tales notes the American government's expectation that China will seek to set up its own global network of military bases.


• Andrew LePage at Drew Ex Machina reports on the Soviet Union's Venera 5 and 6 missions to Venus.


• Far Outliers looks at the visit of U.S. Grant to Japan and China.


• Gizmodo notes a recent analysis of Neanderthal teeth suggesting that they split with Homo sapiens at a date substantially earlier than commonly believed.


• io9 notes the sheer scale of the Jonathan Hickman reboots for the X-Men comics of Marvel.


• Joe. My. God. shares the argument of Ted Cruz that people should stop making fun of his "space pirate" suggestion.I am inclined to think Cruz more right than not, actually.


• JSTOR Daily notes the wave of anti-black violence that hit the United States in 1919, often driven by returned veterans.


• Language Hat shares a recognizable complaint, written in ancient Akkadian, of bad customers.


• Language Log shares a report of a village in Brittany seeking people to decipher a mysterious etching.


• This Scott Lemieux report at Lawyers, Guns and Money about how British conservatives received Ben Shapiro is a must-read summary.


• Benjamin Markovits at the LRB Blog shares the reasons why he left his immigrant-heavy basketball team in Germany.


• Marginal Revolution looks at one effort in Brazil to separate people from their street gangs.


• The NYR Daily looks at how ISIS, deprived of its proto-state, has managed to thrive as a decentralized network.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw tells of his experiences and perceptions of his native region of New England, in southeastern Australia.


• The Planetary Society Blog notes how the Chang'e 4 rover may have found lunar mantle on the surface of the Moon.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes that while Argentine president Mauricio Macri is polling badly, his opponents are not polling well.


• Roads and Kingdoms shares a list of things to do in see in the Peru capital of Lima.


• The Signal examines how the Library of Congress engages in photodocumentation.


• Van Waffle at the Speed River Journal explains how he is helping native insects by planting native plants in his garden.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes how scientific illiteracy should never be seen as cool.


• Towleroad notes the questions of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as to why Truvada costs so much in the United States.


• Window on Eurasia notes how family structures in the North Caucasus are at once modernizing and becoming more conservative.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell notes how the distribution of US carriers and their fleets at present does not support the idea of a planned impending war with Iran.


• Arnold Zwicky examines the tent caterpillar of California.

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait considers the possibility that interstellar objects like 'Oumuamua might help planets consdense in young systems.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly explains the genesis of news stories.


• Centauri Dreams explores a remarkable thesis of somehow intelligent, living even, mobile stars.


• Citizen Science Blog reports on an ingenious effort by scientists to make use of crowdsourcing to identify venerable trees in a forest.


• The Crux takes a look at the idea of rewilding.


• D-Brief takes a look at how active auroras can lead to satellite orbits decaying prematurely.


• Bruce Dorminey reports on a new finding suggesting that the suspected exomoon given the name Kepler-162b I does not exist.


• JSTOR Daily takes a look at the incident that led to the concept of Stockholm syndrome.


• Language Log takes a look at the idea of someone having more than one native language. Is it even possible?


• Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at how trade war with the EU is hurting the bourbon industry of the United States.


• The LRB Blog reports on the aftermath in Peru of the startling suicide of former president Alan Garcia.


• Marginal Revolution links to a paper suggesting that rising health care costs have hurt the American savings rate and the wider American economy.


• Russell Darnley takes a look at the innovative fish weirs of the Aborigines on Australia's Darling River.


• The NYR Daily takes a look at Russian Doll and the new era of television.


• The Planetary Society Blog notes the formal end of the Mars rover expeditions. Spirit and Opportunity can rest easy.


• Drew Rowsome praises Out, a one-man show at Buddies in Bad Times exploring what it was like to be out in the late 1970s.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes that a search for dark matter has revealed evidence of the radioactive decay of pretty but not perfectly stable isotope xenon-124.


• Window on Eurasia considers the likely impact of new Ukrainian president Volodymir Zelensky on Ukrainian autocephaly.


• Arnold Zwicky celebrated the penguin drawings of Sandra Boynton, starting from her World Penguin Day image from the 25th of April.

• Centauri Dreams considers the possible roles and threats posed by artificial intelligence for interstellar missions.


• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber makes the point that blaming Facebook for the propagation of fake news misses entirely the motives of the people who spread these rumours, online or otherwise.


• The Crux looks at the factors which led to the human species' diversity of skin colours.


• Dangerous Minds reports on a new collection of early North American electronica.


• Far Outliers reports on the salt extraction industry of Sichuan.


• JSTOR Daily notes how inbreeding can be a threat to endangered populations, like gorillas.


• Language Log examines the connection of the Thai word for soul with Old Sinitic.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at divisions on the American left, including pro-Trump left radicals.


• Caitlin Chandler at the NYR Daily reports on the plight of undocumented immigrants in Rome, forced from their squats under the pressure of the new populist government of Italy.


• Spacing takes a look at the work of Acton Ostry Architects.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel looks at the ten largest non-planetary bodies in the solar system.


• Strange Company looks at the very strange 1997 disappearance of Judy Smith from Philadelphia and her latest discovery in the North Carolina wilderness. What happened to her?


• Strange Maps looks at the worrisome polarization globally between supporters and opponents of the current government in Venezuela. Is this a 1914 moment?


• Window on Eurasia suggests that Russia and Venezuela share a common oil-fueled authoritarian fragility.


• Arnold Zwicky looks at the camelids of Peru, stuffed toys and llamas and more.

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait tells the story of how the Andromeda Galaxy ate most of its Local Group partner two billion years ago, M32p.


• Centauri Dreams looks at what the preponderance of water worlds--worlds with vast amounts of water--mean for life.


• Corey Robin at Crooked Timber links to an essay of his noting that the Avital Ronell scandal reveals deep problems inside academia.


• D-Brief notes reactions involving protons that play a major role in powering neutron stars.


• Bruce Dorminey shares five questions about the universe that bug--productively, I think--astrobiologists.


• The Dragon's Tales examines the challenges facing the proposal by Modi for the creation of a manned Indian space program within a decade.


• Colby King writes at the Everyday Sociology Blog about challenges facing students building social networks. How broad and diverse can they be?


• David Finger at the Finger Post writes, and shows, a one-day trip to Cuzco.


• Hornet Stories starts a fun discussion on heroic monsters. I'm pleased to say that the Addams Family ranked highly.


• Information is Beautiful shares a new infographic exploring what, exactly, a trillion dollars is.


• JSTOR Daily looks at how, not just the concept of the Mediterranean as a unified region, but of the Mediterranean as uniquely attractive, came about.


• The LRB Blog reports from the Edinburgh Fringe, where the Brexit-themed play Leave. To Remain is playing.


• Ryan Holmberg at the NYR Daily looks at how manga in Japan have dealt with nuclear danger before and after Fukushima, looking particular at the work of Susumu Katsumata.


• Strange Company tells the story of the strange hauntings that beset, in mid-19th century Normandy, the Château des Noyers.


• Towleroad shares a video of older gay men reacting to the definitely out videos of queer pop singer Troye Sivan.


• At Understanding Society, Daniel Little takes a look at the arguments of Andrew Hopkins regarding safety culture in an enterprise versus safety behaviour.


• Window on Eurasia notes a continued Russian threat, post-Crimea, to Ukrainian sovereignty in its territorial waters on the Sea of Azov and elsewhere.


• Arnold Zwicky notes the impending end of summer, between flowers and sex and more.

• Anthrodendum considers the difficulties of the anthropologist in the context of a world where their knowledges are monetized.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about two days she spent in Montréal, with photos.


• Crooked Timber starts a discussion about the justice, or lack thereof, in Harvard denying convicted murderer Michelle Jones entry into their doctoral program now that her sentence is over.


• D-Brief looks at the changing nature of the global disease burden, and its economic consequences.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that Equifax's terribly lax data protection should mark the endgame for them.


• The Map Room Blog considers the use of earth-observer satellites to predict future disease outbreaks (malaria, here, in Peru).


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes how quantum mechanics helps explain nuclear fusion in our sun.


• Window on Eurasia notes a report that Muscovites live on average 12 years longer than non-Muscovite Russians.

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.

• Crooked Timber wonders what Nietzche would have to say about immigration.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining the atmospheres of different exoplanets orbiting different kinds of stars.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that Pluto and Charon may have iron cores.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Martin Shkreli's newly-overpriced drug is being vastly underpriced by a new competitor.


• Language Hat notes a Yiddish translation of a Chinese song.


• Languages of the World argues that the Indo-Europeans are an identifiable people.


• Marginal Revolution considers the nature of Chinese economic growth.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer looks at the fiscal constraints of Brazil and notes the interactions of the vulture funds with Peru.


• Bruce Sterling on his tumblr shares a post looking at an American shantytown.


• Supernova Condensate enthuses about Enceladus.


• The Understanding Society Blog's Daniel Little considers how to model organizational recruitment.


• The Financial Times' The World blog wonders if the German economy will benefit from Merkel's open door.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell notes the menace of coordinated hype cycles.

[E]vident in [Hans] Rosling’s animations is the great breakout to much-higher living standards that the U.S., Canada, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand made in the 1800s, followed by the great catchup in Asia since the middle of the 20th century. Some African countries have begun making big strides, too, although sub-Saharan Africa remains the world’s poorest region by far.

Then there’s Latin America and the Caribbean, whose part in this story has always intrigued and saddened me. In the 19th century, some of the countries and colonies to the south of the U.S. were among the world’s most affluent. In the 20th century most of them have become much more affluent in an absolute sense (Haiti is the tragic exception). They have nonetheless lost relative ground, especially during the past half-century, as rich countries just got richer and Asian nations broke through to wealth.

[. . .]

Compared to these other, more dynamic economies, Latin America seems to have been making hardly any progress. I’m not even going to try to go into all the possible reasons for this, in part because they vary greatly among countries. I am willing to go out on a limb and say that I don’t think either U.S. imperialism or persistent bad luck is a satisfactory explanation for Latin America’s slow growth. Clearly these -- with the possible exception of Chile -- have not been among the world’s best-managed economies. And that really is too bad.