A Thinking Reed

  • VB6 (DTW)

    Lately I’ve been trying–with some success–to follow Mark Bittman‘s “vegan before six” (or vegan before dinner) regimen, with one qualification: only during the week. On the weekends I like to leave open the possibility of eggs for breakfast or a grilled cheese sandwich with fresh tomatoes from the farmers’ market for lunch, or what have…

  • What Big Food has to worry about

    Not a leftie, organic-arugala loving Obama administration, writes Tom Laskawy at Slate, but the constraints imposed by Mother Nature herself: The one threat that Big Food hasn’t proven itself very adept at handling, however, is the multiheaded hydra of climate change, drought, and the shrinking supplies of various natural resources. The industry is not ignoring…

  • Violence and social change

    I didn’t think I had anything to say on the murder of Dr. George Tiller, but one issue that has come up repeatedly is whether pro-lifers are being hypocritical in condemning the murder. After all, the reasoning goes, didn’t Tiller’s murderer simply take the pro-life reasoning to its logical conclusion? Here’s something I wrote all…

  • Friday metal–double header edition

    These guys are from Topeka, Kansas, where–as the joke goes–the zip codes start with ‘666’: And here’s God Forbid, “War of Attrition”:

  • Department of making me feel old

    Twenty-five years of “Purple Rain.” Ulp! Not that long ago, my wife and I re-watched the movie, and I can’t say it holds up quite as well as the album, though there are some memorable moments (I’ve always been taken with Morris Day’s performance as Prince’s unscrupulous rival).

  • Who will stand up for the rat?

    A history of lab animals and the fitful attempts to provide them some modicum of protection. Rats and mice, by far the most widely used animals in laboratory experiments, are afforded no protection under the Animal Welfare Act (i.e., they don’t count as “animals” for the purpose of the law). Now, rats don’t exactly elicit…

  • The coming anti-meat tipping point

    This article suggests that we’ll be forced–by resource and environmental constraints, among other things–to give up eating meat, except perhaps the very rich, and that this will lead to a rapid moral revolution in our treatment of animals. It’s an interesting argument and pretty much the reverse of how we usually imagine these things go:…

  • Animal-blogging elsewhere

    Some new blog finds dealing with, inter alia, animal issues: Theoria Critical Animal (Not sure how active that second one is, but there’s lots of interesting stuff there.)

  • Toward a homophilic Christianity

    This sounds like an intriguing series of books.

  • Whence the cat?

    Fascinating article about how and where cats were first domesticated. Not Egypt as you might think. I think it was Jeffrey Masson who said that cats are the only animal to truly benefit from domestication (as any cat owner can attest!).