The farm sits on a hill an hour northeast of Knoxville. It encompasses sixty acres, but only one and a half are devoted to garden produce—beans, kale, corn, squash, carrots, onions, garlic, basil, et cetera. Another six are pasture for the two cows, three pigs, six sheep, and fifty or so chickens. The rest is woods. The farm is owned by a couple in their mid-thirties who live there with their 4-year-old son and a beagle named Barney. They sell most of their produce through a CSA, and the rest at a weekly farmer's market, along with meat, eggs, and baked goods. At the moment I'm the only intern. Read More

Cătălin Avramescu. An Intellectual History of Cannibalism. Translated from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth. Princeton University Press. April 2009.

In July 2008, while travelling on a Greyhound bus between Edmonton and Winnipeg, Vincent Li beheaded his sleeping seatmate, a man he had never met, with a butcher knife. Li held up the head in crazed triumph as the bus screeched to a halt and the other passengers rushed out. He then began to pace back and forth along the aisle, witnesses report, tearing off the ears, gouging out the eyes, pulling out the tongue, and eating them. 

This event, as well as Li's recently concluded trial—not guilty by reason of insanity—might serve as an opportunity to take measure of the present state of cannibalism studies, mostly a minor academic industry, though one not without its star performances and its polarizing debates. For a long time, the field was dominated by a curious variety of négationnisme, most famously spelled out by William Arens in his 1980 book The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. According to Arens, cannibalism is nothing more than a projection of fear-induced fantasies upon unknown others, and in the past 500 years this projection has served as part of the ideological soundtrack to the European conquest of the rest of the world. As the incident on the Greyhound reminds us, however, sometimes people really do eat people. Read More

In late September, while speculation regarding the financial crisis dominated news outlets worldwide, the German media found itself distracted by a comparatively local story: the untimely death of Berlin Zoo employee Thomas Dörflein.

Dörflein was a man so beloved in his home city that he could hardly leave his apartment without being swarmed by groupies, but the real celebrity was his animal charge, Knut, a polar bear cub born in the Berlin Zoo in December 2006. Rejected at birth by his mother, Tosca, Knut lost his twin brother four days later to infection. Under Dörflein's care, the 810-gram whelp nonetheless became Berlin's first Eisbär to survive infancy in over thirty years. He enjoyed a prolonged period of international stardom—complete with action figures, product endorsements, theme songs, remixes, magazine covers, TV segments, and feature films—before maturing from plush toy to ferocious carnivore. Knutmania, as the press dubbed it, centered around the "Knut and Tom Show," a one-hour, twice-daily attraction during which Dörflein frolicked with his ursine protégé beneath the fusillade of appreciative cameras. The pair drew paparazzi and admirers from all over the world. Read More