Monday Cup Of Links #59 - Maori in Antarctica, Lakshadweep, Barnes and Noble
And an ancient Egyptian baldness cure!
Happy Monday!
If you have flu symptoms these days, the hospital doesn't anymore send you out the door with tylenol in a couple of minutes. As I learned, they do a dozen or more tests on you to make absolutely sure it’s not Covid. I suppose I might have gotten a bunch of extras given I’m Indian, but I’m glad they went to the trouble and aren’t taking the virus lightly.
Several years ago, I read this book by Jessica Valenti called Why Have Kids?. At that point, I was wondering about the reasons feminist bloggers would think having kids is justified, and picked it up. The book mostly went into Internet-style arguments for not having children, and left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable - back then, I didn’t know enough to refute the book.
I revisited the book a few days ago. The discourse in the book is peak Internet. It takes the craziest voices on the other side of every argument and “destroys them with facts and logic”. Plus, it seems to view parenting from the lens of the first year of a child’s life (given topics like breastfeeding and diapers), which is actually a very small part of the parenting experience. And it doesn’t really talk to actual happy parents very much to understand why they had children.
It’s frustrating to me that the mainstay of my late teens and twenties, Gen X and elder millennial women writing on the Internet about topics relevant to women, is somewhat coming apart when I reexamine it now. I hope to explore this topic this Thursday, so keep an eye out for that!
Onto our links!
The Maori might have been the first people to reach Antarctica, in the 7th century!!!!!!!!!! There’s several news articles about this, but I’ve linked the original paper, which is quite an easy read. Researchers have put together oral histories as well as literature together to arrive at this conclusion. Polynesian oral histories talk of Hui Te Rangiora and his crew on the ship Te Ivi o Atea sailed very far south, and set eyes on Antarctica. The descriptions include the frozen ocean, which they compare to a sea of arrowroot shavings, and of southern ocean bull kelp, which is described as the female that dwells in those mountainous waves, whose tresses wave about in the water and on the surface of the sea. And the story also talks about the sailor’s return. This tale is also carved into various stones!
It might be funny to think of Europeans claiming to have ‘discovered’ things that other people had known for aeons, but it was a very real thing that was backed by a Papal bull - the Doctrine of Discovery. Under it, any land not ruled by Christian rulers was available to be “discovered”, claimed and exploited by Christian rulers. This was a very strong force behind legitimizing colonialism.
In any case, as an Indian, who sees and feels so much denial of our history, it is good to learn about how others, especially in America and the Pacific Islands, have dealt with their histories being rewritten and their oral histories disparaged, so we can spot it when it’s happening with us.I came across this really nice blog post about the Lakshadweep islands, and how they were acceded to India. This story involves Magellan, the Portuguese, Tipu Sultan, the German battleship Emden, Jinnah and Sardar Patel. Did you know Jinnah wanted the Andamans for Pakistan (as it was en route to erstwhile East Pakistan), and Australia wanted it too? But India said its claim was stronger as a lot of our freedom fighters had been imprisoned at Port Blair. And we could have gotten Diego Garcia as well, but it stayed with the British, and then was turned over to America. A great slice of history that would often go unnoticed.
ICYMI: My novel chapter about raiding a printing press that was attempting to publish the history of the First War of Indian Independence. It has some action, and some sneaking around and spying. Go read it! I enjoyed writing this chapter so much.
I hadn’t thought much about how physical bookstores could beat Amazon, but this Reddit comment eviscerates Barnes and Noble for not doing enough to compete with Amazon.
I’m interested in retail and ecommerce, and I originally thought there was nothing physical bookstores could really do other than become event hosting spaces, because they can’t compete with the inventory that a warehouse could have. But this comment talks about all the things B&N could have done to be formidable competition, but they didn’t. LikeSocial media presence, online ads, podcasts with famous authors as guests.
Competing with Goodreads
National platform for emerging authors (I mean, yes. They won’t even consider self-published authors, it’s really so backward).
Award ceremony
Used book market
Curation.
They could have done all of this quite easily, and they didn’t. Now I’m mad too. All they have now is a giftwrap station and funko pops. Which you can buy for cheaper on Amazon, so great going, B&N!
Artifact of the week: A hedgehog from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, currently at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University.
So hedgehogs hibernate underground during times of scarcity and pop back up when there’s abundance, so the Egyptians associated the animal with rebirth, and hedgehog figurines were common in tombs. And they even used hedgehog spines in a potion to cure baldness!!