Professor Child’s presentation was not explicitly concerned with space exploration or Mars, which is not surprising since her area of expertise is indigenous education and history. She told us that indigenous people have travelled extensively – specifically, by canoe – and mentioned some indigenous people who travelled to Europe in earlier eras, though not by canoe.

A panel of woke scolds share their thoughts on space travel – which turn out to be rather limited and not of obvious use. They do, however, have thoughts, many thoughts, on how terrible able-bodied white men are.

Janice Fiamengo takes notes:

In niche eatery news:

A feminist-owned and operated cafe that made headlines around the world after introducing an 18% “man tax” on male customers will be closing its doors at the end of the month. Handsome Her, a vegan establishment located in Melbourne, Australia, will be going out of business on April 28, according to an announcement on its website.

It turns out that “brazen public discussions of structural inequality and oppression,” rules about women having “priority seating,” and serving turmeric lattes with macadamia milk, isn’t in fact the basis of a thriving business. Even in Brunswick, Melbourne. However, the empowered proprietors insist that the mockery aimed at their pricing policy merely “showed us how fragile masculinity is and solidified the necessity for us to confront and dismantle patriarchy.”

Via Orwell & Goode.

Via Dicentra, a tale of the severely educated. Screengrab here. 

Down-thread of which, I spotted this:

Something to ponder.

Added via the comments, a possible explanation. And a footnote of sorts.

Also, open thread.

Further to recent rumblings in the comments, Captain Nemo steers us to the Twitter feed of Library Journal, a “global community of more than 200,000 librarians and educators,” and which proudly directs its readers to the mental exertions of Ms Sofia Leung:

Our library collections, because they are written mostly by straight white men, are a physical manifestation of white men ideas taking up all the space in our library stacks. Pause here and think about this.

Ms Leung, an academic librarian, is unhappy that public libraries in the US, a white-majority culture with a white-majority history, tend to have, among other things, lots of books by authors with pale skin. This, we’re told, is an “interesting mini-eureka moment” that our Queen of Intersectional Rumination feels compelled to share. When Ms Leung discovers that public libraries in China and South Korea have quite a few books by Chinese and Korean authors, I’m sure she’ll be equally aghast. Every bit as offended.

Ms Leung airs her distaste for “white men ideas” – as if they had been uniform across continents and throughout history – while reminiscing about attending a “white AF conference” two years earlier. I was unsure what the “AF” might refer to and searched for some literary or scholarly explanation. It then occurred to me that a “white AF conference” is, to borrow the woke vernacular, a white as fuck conference. Which is how not-at-all-racist academic librarians convey their thoughts, apparently.

If you look at any United States library’s collection, especially those in higher education institutions, most of the collections (books, journals, archival papers, other media, etc.) are written by white dudes writing about white ideas, white things, or ideas, people, and things they stole from POC and then claimed as white property… When most of our collections filled with this so-called “knowledge,” it continues to validate only white voices and perspectives and erases the voices of people of colour.

At which point, things get a little breathless and intermittently grammatical. However, readers may wish to ponder how synthesising insights from around the world, and from cultures long gone, and preserving those insights, in libraries, is somehow a bad thing. Readers may also wish to ponder the implications of a librarian and self-styled educator, schooled at the University of Washington and Barnard College, New York, and who is offended, something close to enraged, by the existence of “white ideas” and the “so-called ‘knowledge’” of “white dudes.”

As if sensing that her thoughts aren’t sufficiently lurid and unhinged, Ms Leung then shifts into higher gear:

In Snow, the artist creates an abstraction of a dreamlike physical and sensual act. We hear and see sugary snow falling and popping on female genitals.

Behold ye. We’re also assured that the artist in question, Ms Aasa Ersmark, will explode our tiny heathen minds with her “intriguing duality” and references to pornography, thereby bringing us within sniffing distance of “female desire, lust, pleasure and climax.”

For those now engorged with artistic appetite, an earlier effort, titled Volcano, can be found here.