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Collection of wonders and wanders across the web.

Dr. Janell Green Smith, a midwife who advocated for Black maternal health, dies of childbirth complications (thegrio.com)

Dr. Janell Green Smith, CNM, a South Carolina midwife who was passionate about her work, family, photography, travels, has died from complications related to childbirth.

Proudly calling herself a “Loc’d” Midwife,” she was an advocate for Black maternal health, partnering with the nonprofit organization and app Hive Impact Fund, which acts as a resource for parents during early childhood, for Black Maternal Health Week.

“That a Black midwife and maternal health expert died after giving birth in the United States is both heartbreaking and unacceptable,” the statement said. “Her death underscores the persistent and well-documented reality that Black women—regardless of education, income, or professional expertise—face disproportionate risks during pregnancy and childbirth due to systemic racism and failures in care.”

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Disabled passengers, airport wheelchairs and the pernicious myth of “Jetway Jesus” (theupfront.media)

Let’s get one thing out of the way first. There is absolutely no way for an observer to determine whether a wheelchair user is “disabled or not”, “faking it”, or otherwise judge their needs.

Moreover, physical disabilities are invisible. Many wheelchair users can walk for short distances but not for the often significant distances inside airports. Many disabilities are not predictable in their specific impact on mobility from day to day. And the airport experience itself is not predictable in what mobility barriers or obstacles are presented to travellers from airport to airport, airline to airline or flight to flight.

Similarly, my parents, 84 and 79 years old, are still keen to travel, and are still active retirees, but for the last few years have requested wheelchair assistance whenever they fly. Why? Well, last time they didn’t do so, on a simple nonstop trip between Birmingham and Gran Canaria, my mother’s iPhone logged 5 kilometres (3 miles) of walking, plus the need to use airstairs at the aircraft door. And that was without any delays or other irregular operations.

Being physically able to walk a 5k should not be a prerequisite to be able to travel by air.

It’s all too common for industry executives like newly departed Frontier chief exec Barry Biffle to cite “massive, rampant abuse” of wheelchair services at industry events without providing evidence to back up their claims, or indeed being challenged.

These prejudices and assumptions are unkind, unhelpful, and, indeed, unproductive.

Rejecting the all-too-pernicious trend of passenger shaming is important on an individual level, but if the aviation industry wants fewer passengers to need to use wheelchairs to access its experiences, it should make those experiences more accessible — and offer more types of assistance that do not comprise wheelchairs.

Improving processing time, reducing queueing, and offering adequate seating is a must. So are accurate, predictable estimates of the distances required. So too would be the regular, dependable provision of buggy services. So would designing airports and terminals to minimise, not maximise, walking: every time I am in Heathrow Terminal 5, forced to go out of my way to do a loop of both floors of retail by the design of the passenger flow, I am reminded of the genuinely hostile design of this terminal, and it is not alone.

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Venezuela Is a Gift to Putin (hegemon.substack.com)

In 1941, the conservative thinker James Burnham envisioned exactly this kind of post-liberal order: a world of three “super-states” that would control the sovereignty of weaker nations and ignore it as they wished. George Orwell famously borrowed Burnham’s idea for 1984. But with current American foreign policy, this is what that world looks like in practice. Not a challenge to Russian or Chinese interests, but a demonstration that what happens in your backyard stays in your backyard.

The implicit bargain is that Putin and Xi will be extended the same courtesy. For “smaller” places caught in the gray zones, like Ukraine, Taiwan, the Baltics, even Greenland, this is not an abstract theoretical debate but a question of survival.

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