Editorial: Rot
Editor Julia Cavicchi introduces Rot, a section of The Learned Pig exploring multispecies creativity through modest tales of collaboration and coexistence.
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Holding Hands with the Land
They mix, knead, pour, roll, and pinch off hidden tastes. They leave streaks of butter on my glasses or fingerprints of flour on my clothes. Scattered burns, cuts, and calluses…
The Night Horse and the Holy Baboon
Victoria Rance and I met at Newcastle University in 1980. We were studying Fine Art and English Literature respectively and have remained friends ever since. We share an interest in…
A New Map of Berlin
I am an inexperienced cyclist. As far as possible, I avoid Berlin’s main arteries and stick to the backstreets. Bike lanes constricted by car traffic, tram tracks and intrusion from…
A New Map of Berlin
Fehrbelliner Strasse intersects the indefinite, porous border between the old East Berlin neighbourhoods of Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg. Forming a T with the sloping green space of Volkspark am Weinbergweg,…
The Barometer of My Heart
On 20th February 2002, at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), in Paris, philosopher Jacques Derrida asked an audience of students the following question: “The phallus, I…
Ignaz Semmelweis and Anthropogenic Global Warming
Mortality rates in mothers from childbirth in Europe were shockingly high during the mid-19th century. Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician working in the General Hospital of Vienna, was curious as…
Scabies
We holidayed through its incubation. Time spent with family, the large, extended swell of us, in a rented house by a winter sea. What we shared that Christmas would…
Editorial: Clean Unclean
My side of the desk is scrupulously clean. The other half is a mess of dust and papers, temporarily abandoned books, a pair of tights, a lump of local granite….
The Junior Doctor
In the middle of a cabbage farm, an hour’s drive from the Andean town of Otavalo, Ecuador, is a small radio station on the ground floor of a farmhouse. Radio…