Free Republic

George Orwell might have been amused. Academia is well on its way to quite literally becoming Animal Farm. Indeed, the very first day of the latest Modern Language Association (MLA) convention featured a panel on "New Animals: Critical Theory After Posthumanism." "The animality of the dog is very different from the animality of the whale," Moira Weigel, a Ph.D. candidate from Yale explained. She is trying to "present alternatives to the language of domination and violence that still dominates the treatment of animals in films." "Moira's academic interests revolve around the intersections of film, literature, and philosophy," her web site...

Every year we hit the road to find out what English Departments are up to at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention and always come back depressed. A look at some of the panels we have to look forward to at the next MLA meeting may give you some idea of why their annual confabs induce such profound melancholy in us: ~ Sublime Bodies, circa 1730-1830; ~ Touching Disability: Crip Theory in the Archive; ~ Teaching Animal Studies; ~ Queer Theory's Bad Objects; ~ Speed Mentoring; ~ The Pornographic and the Literary (this might be a good alternative title for...

Examination of neurological disease research shows pervasive ‘significance bias’. A statistical analysis of more than 4,000 data sets from animal studies of neurological diseases has found that almost 40% of studies reported statistically significant results — nearly twice as many as would be expected on the basis of the number of animal subjects. The results suggest that the published work — some of which was used to justify human clinical trials — is biased towards reporting positive results. This bias could partly explain why a therapy that does well in preclinical studies so rarely predicts success in human patients, says...