Alphonso Lingis is writing a book about pigeons. Most of you know he wrote a couple of essays (okay, the same essay with different titles) for the early edited collections of continental animal studies books, and I'd like to see more of his work on the animal question.
AAAARG is back up, at a different website. Good for them!
This article on eating synthetic animal flesh is interesting. Hopefully I will more on this later, but I never really get around to doing that when I say I will, so I never said I will write more on this later.
In the Middle has an interesting post on the ways blogging has changed medieval studies. I think this applies to lots of us in the humanities. Well worth the read.
This NY Times article seems to be another in a long line of stories about stopping cheating. It goes through several different means. I never know how I feel on such things. I am certainly part of those who are uncomfortable as enforcer rather than educator, and also who feels sites like turnitin violate students' intellectual rights. On the other hand I tend to teach classes where cheating is hard by their very structure. I might feel differently if I taught different classes.
I was tempted to just completely ignore this recent Chronicle rant against veganism, but I feel the need to raise a few questions. I could spend a while responding to the whole thing, but it is such a poorly written attack against an obvious strawman I don't see the point. If you have things you want responded to, let me know and I will. Otherwise, I am curious why it got printed? This is clearly the sort of thing that should belong to blogs and not to articles. Moreover, why did the author feel the need to write this now? There is nothing in the piece that explains why this article, which contains zero new arguments, is worth being written and read now. Also, make sure to read Peter's brief response.
Lastly, this is another Take Away Show, staring Amanda Palmer covering Jacques Brel's "Amsterdam" (she doesn't actually start singing until about 1:20 into the video). It's really wonderful.
The agony of the rat or the slaughter of a calf remains present in thought not through pity but as the zone of exchange between man and animal in which something of one passes into the other. - Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?
