Chicken Stars

Who’s Afraid Of A Spatchcocked Chicken?

C. Pam Zhang | Eater | 3rd October 2023

English words for meat are peculiarly squeamish: when alive, a cow is a cow, but on the plate it becomes "beef", as if this linguistic separation can disguise that the food is an animal's flesh. Mandarin is different — pig is always pig. "I still thrill at an old, laminated menu that offers 'cow stomach' or 'pig bung'; I trust more a place that doesn’t attempt to dissimulate with 'offal' or 'tripe'" (1,300 words)

Marked by Stars

Anthony Grafton | Public Domain Review | 12th October 2023

The work of 16C polymath Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa blends the occult and the scientific. His De occulta philosophia is a manual of "learned magic", full of daemons, talismans and angels. This was stuff that had unfrocked generations of clerics, yet it also made it possible to navigate the stars. His is "a grand, schematic plan of the cosmos, rather like that of the London Underground" (2,660 words)