Tag
Animals
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B-Sides: Lydia Millet’s “Oh Pure and Radiant Heart”
What if you wanted something a bit more from the giants of the past: to force them to look at what they’ve done, to hold them accountable for the world we now inhabit, thanks to them?
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Public Thinker: Gabriel Rosenberg on Industrial Agriculture’s “Brutal, Violent Heteronormativity”
“Much of the anxiety around conversations about meat is a more fundamental horror that we lack a moral language to adequately describe.”
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Andrea Hornick and Timothy Ingold: Designs for the Anthropocene
“We bring our own creativity into what we see—the seams get filled in, smoothed over, by our looking.”
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Anticipating Extinction in the Tales of Two Fish
Deciding to not order the tuna or eel at a restaurant won’t save those dying species. But imagining a new kind of “multispecies thriving” might.
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What Birders Don’t See
Rather than studying birds—and birders—in isolation, the time has come to see both as linked to the crises of racism and climate change.
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Why Seek Impossible Foods?
The Impossible™ burger does pollute less. But does this matter, in the face of capitalism’s continued control of the global food system?
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When’s the Beef?
In Terry Bisson’s 1991 sci-fi story, “They’re Made Out of Meat,” two characters discuss alien life-forms that have been attempting to make contact with their species. The conversation returns again and again to the baffling paradox that these life-forms are sentient and intelligent—“relatable” in most ways—yet ineffably alien, because “they’re made out of meat.” If…
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The Posthuman Enlightenment
What does it take to think beyond the human? Can we imagine our human selves in other lives? And should we? While contemporary answers to these …
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The Book That Made Me: An Animal
The Lives of Animals was the first book I read in college—or at least the first book I read in a strange, amazing seminar that rewired my brain in the first semester …
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QUIZZICAL: Famous Writers, and Their Pets!
Behind many celebrated writers is a canine, feline, reptilian, or avian pal. Do you know the domestic creatures that have kept these novelists, playwrights, poets …
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Saboteurs in the Modern Academy
What hope remains for the masses of disillusioned graduate students, unemployed PhDs, and embittered faculty who still, despite everything, believe in …
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“Protest Can Be Beautiful”: Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane
In 2007, the Oxford Junior Dictionary, one of the standard reference works …
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Against Cuteness: “Bambi” @90
Felix Salten’s Bambi: A Life in the Woods—which first appeared in English 90 years ago this summer—is now better known as the inspiration for Disney’s charming …
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The 2018 “Animal Studies” Contest!
::: UPDATE 6/5: To find out the winners, please subscribe to our newsletter ::: Do you have a pet who loves to read? Send us their photo for a chance to win a McNally Jackson gift card and PB swag for you and your pet. The Rules: Submit a photo of your literary animal by Wednesday,…
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B-Sides: David Garnett’s “Lady into Fox”
The publication of David Garnett’s first novel, Lady into Fox, shot the author into literary stardom, winning both the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tate …
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Reading to Children to Save Ourselves
My youngest son’s favorite book, this month, is called Little Blue Truck. If you read as much children’s literature as I do, you are well acquainted with the book’s …
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The Author with Birds in His Head
Antonio Di Benedetto’s dreamlike, uncategorizable novel Zama was published in English translation for the first time last year, its arrival long awaited by readers …
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Keyword of the Week: Animals
It’s nonhuman appreciation week at Public Books. This week’s Public Bookshelf features four PB articles about animals, on topics ranging from animal sentience to the anthropomorphic world of Zootopia. What Is It Like to Be an Elephant? 12.15.2016 Matt Margini The Harambe incident demonstrated one coherent principle: when nonhuman animals lose political representation, as they inevitably do, it often becomes the…
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What Is It Like to Be an Elephant?
Why did Harambe become a meme? In a post-election landscape that demands we acknowledge Internet trolling as a practice with world-historical consequences …
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How to Live in Uncertain Times
Doomsday is a messy affair. We fix our anxious gaze on the horizon, awaiting the moment when the air will prove too warm, the sea too toxic, the ground unfirm. We live in a time we are calling the Anthropocene, an epoch in which our presence on Earth is inscribed in the geological record. We…
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Walking the Venetian: Miami, FL
To get to Publix for supplies, walk east on the pink sidewalk of Venetian Way, which links five man-made islands between Miami and Miami Beach. Biscayne Bay glitters green …
