General | Platypus

Broilers That Can’t Even Fend for Themselves: Mother Hens and Production Infrastructures

 Maria Isabel Trivilin  October 19, 2026

Este conteúdo também está disponivel em português.

‘chickens take care of themselves, they live all around, withstanding by themselves’; they know how to ‘eat lizards, crickets, just to withstand and stay around here’ — João Karitiana, apud Vander Velden (2025) Among the Karitiana, a people from the southwestern Brazilian Amazon, there is a specific way of referring to certain animals raised in large numbers. Translated as “to grow,” kerep designates, among others, chickens, animals that do not need to be cared for directly by humans, managing on their own to find food. Even in domestic backyards, someone feeds them, which does not prevent them from finding earthworms and other things around them. But survive they do. In rural Brazil, chickens are raised free-range, fed corn or cracked corn, scratching freely around the yard. As Vander Velden explains, drawing on João Karitiana’s words, chickens take care of themselves, regulate their own rhythms and maintain a relatively independent existence. They “withstand on their own” and remain, in a way, apart from the human community they live in. (read more...)

Listening with Whales: Song, Grief, and Obligation Across Ways of Knowing

 Marie Comuzzo  October 15, 2026

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Whether through awe and wonder or death and grief, human-whale relations throw into relief important epistemic, ethical, spiritual, legal, and scientific tensions. Because whales migrate across oceans and have long been in relation with humans across the globe, they inhabit multiple and often conflicting worlds of meaning and obligation. What happens in the aftermath of a whale’s death, when a whale might simultaneously be an ancestor, a source of scientific knowledge, and a potential threat to the continuation of a local ecotourist economy? (read more...)

Softmaxxing Skepticism: How Looksmaxxing Culture Recruits the Mainstream

 Tiffany Prendergast  October 2, 2026

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Sitting in a parked car, phone propped up on the dashboard, recording, he takes a bite of his Chipotle bowl between sentences about a metabolic drug meant to make him eat less. Almost three months into retatrutide, he’s not sure it’s worth it anymore. The drug is still locked in Phase III clinical trials, nowhere near FDA approval, meaning sellers have no legal standing to market it for human consumption (Eli Lilly and Company 2026). He tells his viewers that he briefly looked into the gray market. (read more...)

Beyond Deficit: Toward a Strengths-Based Approach to Male Infertility

 Juan Camilo Ospina Deaza  September 28, 2026

Este contenido también está disponible en español.

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Concerns about declining sperm quality and male reproductive capacity have become increasingly prominent in scientific, clinical, and public discussions of fertility. Yet infertility has historically been located within women’s bodies and treated primarily as a women’s problem, placing women under disproportionate reproductive responsibility, scrutiny, blame, and clinical intervention. This framing has also contributed to men’s reproductive bodies and experiences receiving comparatively limited attention. Growing concern about male reproductive capacity has been accompanied by increasing attention to how male fertility might be preserved, improved, and optimised, alongside broader demographic narratives that frame declining reproductive capacity as a potential threat to future populations. Within these discussions, men are increasingly constituted as reproductive subjects whose bodies can be monitored, modified, and enhanced. Yet this emphasis on improving male reproductive capacity sits alongside a strikingly different representation of men once infertility is diagnosed. Across clinical and social accounts, male infertility is frequently approached through the language of deficit, loss, vulnerability, and incapacity. What would it mean to develop a strengths based approach to male infertility? (read more...)

Transnational Solidarity: Exploring Alternate Global Imaginaries of Work

 Lucy Pei  September 23, 2026

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One day in November 2022, I was meeting with Carolina, one of the main activists of the gig worker union Frente de los Trabajadores de los Plataformas Digitales del Ecuador (FRENAPP) in Ecuador. Carolina was using Canva (a free online graphic design website) to create sample book covers. She had just found a template featuring an epic-looking rendering of the Earth. “Let’s add the different types of gig workers to the top of the world,” she said. She took her time scrolling through different free clipart websites until she was satisfied with the images she pasted on top of the globe (Figure 1). She inserted a placeholder title for the book: “La Precarización en las Empresas de Plataformas a Nivel Mundial” (Precarization in Digital Platform Companies at the Global Level). She included slogans at the top of the sample book covers which translated to “An exploitation with a new economy,” and “If the precarization is global, the fight is international.” She credited the slogans to an international alliance of gig worker organizations of which FRENAPP was a part. In the sample book cover Carolina created, the viewer and the clipart gig workers lie outside of the stylized image of the whole earth. The globe becomes the prominent scale, superseding national borders, buildings, and neighborhoods. Images such as this call the scale of the global into being and visually assert the connection between the cause of gig workers and the scale of the world as a whole. The title of the book reinforces the idea of the global scale. (read more...)

Time, Virtuality, and the Digital Sacred

 Fatima Tariq  September 18, 2026

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In Season 2 of the show Ramy, two Muslim American men perform umrah (the minor pilgrimage to Mecca) while sitting in an Atlantic City hotel room. Ramy is known for its bold and subversive humor in the way it addresses Muslim American identity and experiences. In this episode, two of his friends wear VR headsets. One of them, Mo, tearfully embraces the wallpaper, which his goggles have transformed into the Ka’ba, Islam’s holiest site. His friend Ahmed whispers, “It’s a miracle, subhanallah,” then adds, “and you don’t have to worry about your sandals getting stolen at the haram!” Ahmed’s joke about germs and stolen sandals acknowledges the absurdity. Mo’s tears—while also absurd—demand that we take the scene a bit more seriously. Can a pixelated Ka‘ba elicit immanence (divine copresence) or does it mostly just parody a sacred ritual? If time resists digitization even as space becomes malleable (McGlotten 2013, 46), and “time is not a semiotic isolate” (Agha, 2007, 320) how might the concept of chronotope, the intrinsic connection between time and space be useful in thinking about religious practice and the digital? Through this seemingly absurd example of a VR pilgrimage, we might better understand the notion of chronotope as it relates to the digital and how, through affect and copresence, the sacred becomes immanent (and perhaps transcendent) in new configurations, even as time “resists” digitization. (read more...)

Beyond Delivering Food: Networks, Risk, and the Hidden Infrastructure of Gig Work

 Ambar Reyes  September 16, 2026

Este contenido también está disponible en español.

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I was picking up an order on 67th st and Columbus Ave when I saw the guy get on my bike and start to ride away. I got out of the shop and grabbed him; he said, “Sorry, I thought it was my bike.” A friend helped me hold onto him so we could call the police. The guy tried to break free and reached into a DoorDash bag he was carrying… Suddenly, he pulled out a syringe and started threatening us with it. I let go of his shirt but kept holding onto a backpack he was wearing; eventually, he slipped out of the backpack and ran away. I called the police to hand over the backpack and the DoorDash bag (which contained multiple syringes and a knife), but they never showed up. (read more...)