We started with a recent NY Times editorial, “Why Nothing is Truly Alive.” Illustrating his point with Strandbeest, Ferris Jabr argues: “Not only is defining life…
Here’s the frontispiece (if that’s the word) to one of Wynken de Worde’s printings of Lydgate’s Horse Goose and Sheep. You’ll note that it doesn’t…
Today we considered a little-studied genre that comprises animal complaint poetry and animal testaments. Our texts were the late antiqueTestamentum Porcelli, two Middle English works,…
by KARL STEEL The second edition (and perhaps the first?) of Caxton’s 1477 printing of Lydgate’s “Horse Goose and Sheep” has a couple surprise endings:…
Our bit of animal news today is the recent, horrific report about factory-farmed pigs being fed the ground up corpses of piglets. One farmer’s response to this…
We used the Parkinson Edition of the Fables. We started by remarking on the proliferation of animal studies by looking briefly at this round up of articles…
From the sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt. by KARL STEEL Here’s a macaronic, presumably late 15th-century poem from Peniarth MS 356b, which I ran across yesterday in…
A sequence of thoughts: one of the main problems with meat-eating is that the thing with the meat gives us its meat unwillingly one solution…
We started with the story of the Giraffe recently killed, publicly dissected, and then fed to lions by the Copenhagen Zoo. Apart from the practical angles of…
First we thought about Azra Raza’s outcry against “Mouse Models” on The Edge, and Jeremy England’s Thermodynamic account of the origins of life. The first story complicates…
