Jonathan S. Blake at the LARB:
Bringing nonhumans into our democracies may be less radical than it first appears. Nussbaum is quick to clarify that attending to the political voices of animals does not mean giving them a vote in our elections, which “would quickly become absurd.” Her vision is not of beleaguered pets marching down our grand boulevards demanding the vote for every Sparky, Buddy, and Princess. Rather more modestly, she proposes that “duly qualified animal ‘collaborators’ should be charged with making policy on the animals’ behalf, and bringing challenges to unjust arrangements in the courts.” The goal is not to force animals with “little interest in political participation in the human-dominated world” to suddenly take part in “elections, assemblies, and offices.” Nussbaum’s ambition, rather, is for expert guardians to give the “creatures who live in a place […] a say in how they live.”
The “creatures” at the heart of her account are individual, often named animals—Virginia the elephant, Lupa the dog. “[T]his is a book about loss and deprivation suffered by individual creatures, each of whom matters,” Nussbaum states. “Species as such do not suffer loss.”
more here.
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From a very young age, Murata never thought of her body as her own. “The grownups would always talk about whether Sayaka had childbearing hips,” she recalls. “It was almost like they were keeping an eye on my uterus, which was something that existed not for me, but for them, for the relatives.” No matter how much she tried to resolve the conflict of motherhood in her fiction, she has never escaped “this idea of being expected to reproduce for the good of the village”.
“Restaurants will break your heart” is something that I often hear myself saying. It has become a mantra. When did I start saying it, I wonder. Maybe it was when I first discovered the criss-crossed lines of affection; falling in a crash-out kind of love with a fellow line cook because he helped me with my mise en place. Maybe it was when my sous-chef first called me mediocre; we all watched slices of chocolate cake I cut pile up in the garbage because of my disappointing quenelles. Maybe it was the first time that I had to fire a kitchen assistant over the phone, hearing him quietly murmur in response, “Okay.” Maybe (definitely) it was the time I got fired—the bad news sandwiched between my manager saying I was “amazing” and also “so great.” Maybe it was the first time I watched a plate of food I made go out and I understood, profoundly, that I would never know who might eat it.
1. ESA’s Euclid Telescope Unveils Millions of New Galaxies
Bates’s score rings out — a wobbly, synthetic chime of sorts — you’d swear someone had pressed a power button in the orchestra pit. On Friday evening at the Kennedy Center, the Washington National Opera opened its production of Bates’s opera with a libretto by Mark Campbell — its tenth since the opera’s premiere at Santa Fe Opera in 2017. Guest conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya led the Washington National Opera Orchestra and Chorus in this revival of Tomer Zvulun’s production, here directed by Rebecca Herman.
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New research has identified 
My favorite thing to do at Krispy Kreme to stave off the boredom is stack the donuts on top of each other and then squish them down into a “sandwich.” When they are hot, they flatten in an extreme way. I can get about twelve in the pile before things get messy. Some days, this donut sandwich is all I eat, other than maybe one other thing, a giant slice of pizza from Sbarro or orange chicken from Panda Express in the mall across the vast parking lot, which I pay for with my meager tip money. I also drink excessive amounts of the whole chocolate milk we sell. This anorexic, sugary diet means I weigh just under 110 pounds and am always jittery.
For hard as it still may be to believe, let alone process, in barely one hundred days we have already fallen into a form of governance in which legally resident individuals (currently by and large immigrants of one sort or another—mothers, fathers, students with entirely current green cards or asylum claims—but with every indication that such tactics will presently be getting extended to full-fledged citizens as well) are literally being spirited off the streets by masked men in unmarked cars and, without the slightest due process or the most tenuous access to any sort of recourse, whisked off to prisons, both at home and abroad, seemingly beyond the sanction of any sort of judicial oversight (the rulings of judges flagrantly ignored and the judges themselves now starting to get subjected to arbitrary arrest as well simply for even having expressed them), the legislative branch cowed into impotence by the abject servitude of its barely majority party, the executive branch a whipsaw of whims and tantrums, with no end in sight.