DINNER PARTY INTEL: Typical iceberg terroir

1. Unscrambling colonial Africa

Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, a Congolese-US philosopher who challenged the way the West thinks about Africa, died this week aged 83. His book The Invention of Africa became the standard text in African studies courses, deconstructing what he called “the colonial library”: the accounts of Africa by European anthropologists, explorers and missionaries in the 1800s and early 1900s which, in Mudimbe’s view, sought to support colonialism.

2. Delicious, bland vintages

Connoisseurs tasted about 1,000 bottles at an event in Atlanta, Georgia, at the weekend. There wasn’t a cab sav or chenin blanc among them; at the Fine Water Summit, you were more likely to come across a bottle of rainwater from Tasmania that had never touched the ground. Organiser Michael Mascha, whose motto is “fine water is a natural product with terroir that holds experiences”, brought iceberg water-bottled rain “that fell 4,000 years ago”. The highlight of the annual summit of fine-water sommeliers was a “food & water pairing experience”.

3. Ashes to moon dust

For 55 years the ashes of Willy Ley, a science writer known as the “prophet of the space age”, lay forgotten in the basement of a New York apartment building. In 1944 the German-born Ley predicted astronauts would one day land on the moon, and a lunar crater was named after him. Now, after his ashes were found last year during a decluttering exercise, there are plans to send them into space. His other predictions, regarded as fanciful at the time, included construction of the Chunnel between England and France and the development of wind and solar energy.