LONGS: Not a single COVID story!

Hello friends!

This one is coming to you today instead of the usual Friday because I just can not get into it all today. Isn’t it so overwhelming! 

I hope some of these excellent reads will give you something else interesting to look at on your phone so you can stop obsessively checking the news and the group chats.

I took a look at where we’re at with Indonesia for Coconut’s Indonesia Intelligencer, which you can take a peek at here.

Back tomorrow with a look at Malaysia and Singapore.

If you’d like to support this project by becoming a premium member, you can do so here for $6 a  month or $60 for the year:

Thanks so much and please share!Erin Cook

Toba now, care of Wikicommons

🇮🇩 People survived the Toba supervolcano’s global winter after all (Ars Technica)

The Toba supervolcano, I think, gets overshadowed by its cousin Krakatau. Still, when it blasted off 74,000 years ago it seemed like it was enough to end humanity as it was then known. But maybe it didn’t! Archaeologists in India are upending the long-accepted story. Aren’t people so smart!

Today, the Toba supervolcano lies beneath the strikingly scenic Lake Toba on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Seventy-four thousand years ago, it erupted in the middle of an important chapter in humanity’s takeover of the world. One of archaeology’s biggest questions in recent years has been when and how people first spread beyond Africa into different areas of the world; the answers lie in fossilized skeletons, objects left behind, and the DNA of modern people.

Fossil evidence suggests that people had reached the Levant by around 200,000 years ago, the Arabian Peninsula by around 85,000 years ago, and northern Australia by around 65,000 years ago. But the genomes of modern people suggest that the ancestors of modern African and non-African peoples branched off from a common ancestor around 70,000 years ago. At first glance, those lines of evidence don’t seem to agree, and some paleoanthropologists say that’s because a sudden, lengthy period of global cooling changed environments around the world in very drastic ways. The resulting crisis allegedly killed off most of the people alive at the time, leaving only a few thousand survivors.

🇰🇭 The Defiant Ones: ‘Cambodian Rock Band’ Stands Witness to History — and Reclaims It for Our Time (Rolling Stone)

I’m very interested in this review of an off-Broadway play, Cambodian Rock Band, exploring the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge. I would love to see it one day, a great complement to the Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten documentary. 

Starting in Phnom Penh in 2008, the story toggles back and forth in time, to 1975 and then 1978, as Chum, a musician-turned-prisoner (for being in a rock band) comes face to face with his American-born activist daughter, Neary, and the Khmer Rouge war criminal known as Duch she is trying to bring to justice — a real-life Khmer leader who’s still alive and has been imprisoned since 2010 for crimes against humanity. Onstage, the actors double in those roles and perform as a pre-revolutionary garage band on the cusp of success, playing works by Cambodian artists — Yol Aularong, Ros Serey Sothea, and Sinn Sisamouth (“the Elvis of Cambodia”) — all of whom disappeared during the Khmer genocide, as well as contemporary psychedelic tunes by L.A.-based indie band Dengue Fever, and, in a nod to the exact kind of Western influences the Khmer Rouge tried to erase, Bob Dylan. With sizzling bass, drums, keyboard, and electric guitar, searing vocals, and the occasional cowbell, the band swerves from ambient love songs to fiery rockers as Chum, Neary, and Duch snake toward the play’s inexorable collision of past and present.

🇰🇭 Why job of clearing Cambodia’s landmines is giving locals the chance to improve their lives (SCMP)

Mine clearing in Cambodia is a perennial story, but for good reason. This piece from SCMP looks more at what the practice does for the local communities, particularly after confusing changes to the US (who dropped the bombs) policy changes.

The NGOs striving to clear the country’s minefields work with Cambodians like Soy Kossal, giving them expert training in the perilous art of demining.

“Landmines laid during the ousting of the Khmer Rouge in 1979 and throughout the subsequent decades have had a devastating impact on the people of Cambodia,” says Lasha Lomidze, operations manager for Halo Trust, which was set up in Afghanistan in 1988.

“Over 64,000 casualties and more than 25,000 amputees have been recorded in the past 40 years. Around half of Cambodia’s minefields have been cleared and the remaining ones are mainly in the rural northwest of the country, especially in K5.

“As the population grows, families have little choice but to move near mined land, placing themselves at risk, but still living in hope, waiting for things to change.”

🇲🇲 Myanmar's last generation of tattooed headhunters (Agence France Presse)

Just trust me here. Open on your desktop, the photos are unreal.

Ngon Pok remembers his father and grandfather returning triumphantly to his tribal village in Myanmar's far north with a human head - and the agony of the tattoo he was given to celebrate their victory.

He is a proud member of the Lainong, one of dozens of Naga tribes - many with grisly histories - wedged in a semi-autonomous zone near the Indian border.

Ngon Pok, who believes he's around 80, gestures to his six-year-old grandson, saying he must have been about the same age when he received his tattoo.

🇵🇭 A week in Manila with Manny Pacquiao: senator, boxer ... and future president? (ESPN)

I think often profiles of Manny Pacquaio suffer from a very superficial read of the Philippines. Writers always explain his success and support in the country with the same cliches. I don’t know. I’m not picking on this piece, it’s one of my faves I’ve read in ages!, and I think it does a phenomenal job explaining the political background. Anywho, just a thought. The last thing any country needs is a president who has been professionally punched in the head repeatedly for decades though. 

"This is all unfair to the president," Pacquiao says when I mention the killings. It is all so obvious to him, and he has adopted the tone of someone who has explained this a thousand times and is willing to do it just once more. "This is reality: It's unfair to the president that he's criticized by other people and other countries. He's not doing everything they are claiming that he is doing -- the extrajudicial killings."

Of course, Duterte has boasted of killing drug dealers himself. During a meeting with business leaders in Manila in 2016, Duterte said, according to The Manila Times, "In Davao, I used to do it personally -- just to show to the guys that if I can do it, so can you." He claims to have ridden around in a motorcycle "looking for a confrontation so I could kill." When confronted with this fact, Pacquiao dismisses Duterte's rhetoric, saying, "Duterte is very smart, and because of that he is good at psychology. He talks like a warning. That's his style."

🇮🇩 For Australia's Muslims, Indonesian seafaring history gives a sense of belonging (Reuters)

The Australian government is freaking OBSESSED with the traditional trade routes between the now-Northern Territory and Makassar, in Indonesia’s South Sulawesi. It is fascinating but can be rolled out in this weird, forgetting about colonisation way. Ugh makes me feel weird. BUT there is opportunity for non-white settler Australians to find a place in history, which is very cool. 

Now, a voyage in a specially constructed replica boat has rekindled ties between the Makassans from Sulawesi island and the Yolngu clan in northeast Arnhem Land, providing a powerful message about belonging for young Australian Muslims.

The project is the brainchild of the Abu Hanifa Institute, an organization promoting education, identity and inclusiveness for Muslims in Sydney.

“We ran a workshop with young people and we asked them what it meant to be an Australian and many people really could not identify with that concept,” Abu Hanifa’s Sheikh Wesam Charkawi told Reuters.

“They felt that the discourse that they hear on a daily basis - ‘Go back to where you came from’, ‘You don’t belong here’, ‘Love it or leave it’ - that it alienated them.”

🇮🇩 Overlooked No More: Ni Gusti Ayu Raka Rasmi, Balinese Dancer (New York Times)

The NYT is doing this cool series where they fill in the gaps of their obit pages over the decades. Ni Gusti Ayu Raka Rasmi wasn’t even a teenager yet when she led a dance tour to the US in 1952 along with three other young dancers. It sounds like she nailed it and was also very funny. You absolutely must watch the embedded Ed Sullivan clip. 

She first learned to dance when she was 10. She was playing near the rice fields where she helped her family by shooing away birds in the planting season and joining in the harvest.

“I was looking for grasshoppers when the teacher came by and said, ‘Raka, come here, why don’t you hang out with us, why don’t you learn to dance,’ and we danced around,” she said.

At first her parents were against it, she said. “‘Why are you putting on makeup and not helping on the farm?’” she recalled her father asking her. “Sometimes they didn’t give me food.”

But, she said, “After I started bringing in money, they were happy. I was free then. They loved me again.”

🇵🇭 The Origins of Budots, the Philippines’ Catchiest Viral Dance Craze (VICE Asia)

My plan for self-isolation was to learn the Tik Tok dances (at least Renegade) but I think budots might be more fun. But is there a bit more than a fun dance to it? Some argue the dance craze is occasionally exploited by elite lawmakers to look ~cool with the kids, most recently seen with President Duterte. Treat yourself to the video of him back in the Davao City mayor days because that is some a-grade dad moves and then track down the documentary.

The song and dance genre is called budots, slang for “slacker” in the Visayan language, and had been popular in Davao way before Duterte’s video. A contestant on the reality television show Pinoy Big Brother (PBB) rose to fame for performing the dance on nationwide TV in 2008. In 2012, budots was featured in an episode of Philippine news show Kapuso Mo, Jessica Soho.

Budots eventually made its way into parody. In 2017, Philippine electronic music collective BuwanBuwan composed a playlist of budots music with clips from Duterte’s speeches and released it on Soundcloud.

Other politicians have also tried to use it to attract voters, like this year’s senatorial candidate Ramon "Bong" Revilla Jr. who appeared on a national television ad dancing to budots music.

🇮🇩 Soccer-mad Indonesia embraces women’s game with launch of national league, but female fans still face a fight for acceptance (SCMP)

I don’t know much about soccer, but I do know that Katrin Figge is a great writer AND a soccer fiend. She checks in with the growing women’s soccer craze in Indonesia, where the sport is seen as very male. 

Dhanielle Daphne has lost count of the number of times she has been met with incredulous looks and raised eyebrows when people learn she is a soccer player – and a successful one. The 19-year-old is a celebrated midfielder in the Indonesian women’s national soccer team, and a passionate fan who knew she wanted to play the game from an early age.

“My family and friends didn’t really support my decision at first, because nobody in my family plays football and it isn’t seen as a woman’s sport from most people’s perspective,” she says.

Daphne was not ready to give up, and spent years trying to convince her parents that football was the right sport for her.

“My first experience was certainly disappointing, because so many people around me tried to put me down instead of encouraging me to play,” she says. “But it didn’t stop me from trying to prove that I [could]. I knew this was what I wanted to pursue, and I trained hard to show that I could do better than most of the boys on the field.”