Marina Bolotnikova
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mbolotnikova.bsky.social
Marina Bolotnikova
@mbolotnikova.bsky.social
13K followers 1K following 130 posts
editor for Vox thinking about factory farming & animal rights, agriculture, science & its discontents, cities, housing, transit and ✨ideas✨. [email protected]. Skeptical of epistemic authority~
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mbolotnikova.bsky.social
until quite recently, I had never thought much about fish, but now they're all I think about

Please read my piece about FISH MINDS! the great fish pain debate, and what it tells us about science and ourselves. gift link in reply!
screenshotted text: "....unsettled because pain is a subjective feeling that science cannot prove definitively. And so, even as experimental evidence that fish experience pain has accumulated over the last quarter-century, some prominent skeptics continue to doubt it. The great fish pain debate shows us how scientific knowledge is shaped not just by linear progress, but also by historical contingency, cultural biases, philosophical roadblocks, and internal ethical paradoxes. And it reflects back a story about us humans — our endeavor to find sentience in our fellow creatures, and our countervailing impulse to deny morally important qualities in them."
November 21, 2025 at 4:15 PM
mbolotnikova.bsky.social
I will never quit this industry

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/b...
screenshotted text: The American penny died on Wednesday in Philadelphia. It was 232. The cause was irrelevance and expensiveness, the Treasury Department said. Nothing could be bought any more with a penny, not even penny candy. Moreover, the cost to mint the penny had risen to more than 3 cents, a financial absurdity that doomed the coin. The final pennies were minted on Wednesday afternoon in Philadelphia. Top Treasury officials were on hand for its final journey. No last words were recorded. In its heyday, the penny had immense cultural impact. It was the going rate for thoughts. It was a symbol of frugality, saved and/or earned. It could sometimes be pretty and other times arrive from heaven. And how many ideas would never have come to light without a penny dropping?
November 12, 2025 at 7:43 PM
mbolotnikova.bsky.social
Everything you actually need to understand about the Consumer Reports protein powder report (threading a gift link!) -- plant-based protein powders are fine, and do not, ffs, allow them to push you to get whey protein
screenshotted text: times lower than minimal known unsafe levels) to arrive at 0.5 micrograms of lead per day as its reference level. This is an unachievable safety target, significantly below the lead you get from average daily food consumption, especially for people who eat more legumes, fruits, and vegetables, all of which grow in the soil and inherently pull in some amount of heavy metals. As one clinical dietician I spoke with told me of the Prop 65 level: “You literally can’t eat food from the Earth if you want to achieve this.”
October 22, 2025 at 2:59 PM
mbolotnikova.bsky.social
Y'all will be hearing more from me about this "feminization of society" horseshit
October 16, 2025 at 11:24 PM
mbolotnikova.bsky.social
Just the absolute worst people in American life, and unfortunately they are the intellectual foundation, to the extent there is such a thing, of our politics now
October 16, 2025 at 7:15 PM
mbolotnikova.bsky.social
It would really be terrible if my $300-a-head restaurant were to "exclude people"!

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/d...
screenshotted text: Eleven Madison Park, the elegant, internationally acclaimed Manhattan restaurant whose climate-minded move to an all-vegan menu four and a half years ago was hailed as both brilliant and baffling, is bringing back meat. Its chef, Daniel Humm, said in an interview that he wanted to draw more diners to the restaurant, both for financial reasons and as an act of hospitality. “I very much believed in the all-in approach, but I didn’t realize that we would exclude people,” he said. “I have some anxiety that people are going to say, ‘Oh, he’s a hypocrite,’ but I know that the best way to continue to champion plant-based cooking is to let everyone participate around the table.”
August 13, 2025 at 2:03 PM
mbolotnikova.bsky.social
One way you could read this chart: Animal ag is so inefficient—and it comes at an unthinkable moral cost, AND it might start the next pandemic—that it would be the definition of lunacy to squander global carbon budgets to produce an ever-greater share of our food this way
www.vox.com/future-perfe...
Infographic comparing land use to food output. Top bar: “Agricultural land.” A large orange block—“80 % Livestock: meat, dairy, textiles (38 million km²; 6 million km² cropland for feed + 32 million km² grazing)”—dominates, next to a small blue block—“16 % Crops for food (8 million km²).” Dashed lines point to two stacked boxes: Global calorie supply: orange 17 % from livestock vs. blue 83 % from plant-based food. Global protein supply: orange 38 % from meat & dairy vs. blue 62 % from plant-based food. Overall message: livestock occupies most farmland but yields a minority of the world’s calories and protein.
August 12, 2025 at 3:33 PM
mbolotnikova.bsky.social
I'm just passive aggressively sending this killer @morallawwithin.bsky.social piece to a bunch of as yet unconverteds

morallawwithin.substack.com/p/how-to-be-...
screenshotted text: "The animals wouldn’t exist if we didn’t raise them to become food.” Such a thought would never occur to someone for whom eating animals is not a foregone conclusion. There is no worldview from which “It’s okay to bring someone into existence so you can slit their throat and eat them, just as long as they wouldn’t have existed otherwise” seems like a thought someone would think in order to discover new truths, except a worldview that is antecedently committed to slitting the throats of those who wouldn’t otherwise exist. No one would say such things in the case of humans: “We should breed some people so that we can harvest their organs later, so long as their lives are still worth living and they wouldn’t exist otherwise.”
July 8, 2025 at 10:17 PM
mbolotnikova.bsky.social
Rachel Fobar has a great story for us today on what the hell is going on with animal experimentation under the Trump administration, balancing a lot of threads very well - give it a read!

www.vox.com/future-perfe...
screenshotted text: Money and resources are powerful incentives in scientific research; allocate them in the right way, and scientists will be pushed to innovate in whatever direction is deemed important for societal progress. Evolving beyond the pervasive use of animals in science undoubtedly ought to be one of those priorities: Lab animals experience immense suffering in labs, living in intensive confinement and undergoing painful experiments involving blood draws, tube feeding, forced inhalation of substances, and other procedures. Finding alternatives that would end this agony would be one of American science’s most important achievements. It’s unclear whether a moonshot for alternatives to animal research can emerge from an administration that’s imposing widespread austerity on science. And there may be reason to worry that the Trump administration’s broader anti-regulatory approach could have negative consequences for the welfare of animals that still remain in labs. But many advocates of animal-free methods are willing to take the bet, hoping that they can use this uncertain, unsettled moment in American science policy to help usher in a paradigm shift in how the US uses animals in science.
May 14, 2025 at 4:41 PM
mbolotnikova.bsky.social
A certain fitness writer has brain-poisoned women of my generation into thinking they need 1g protein per lb of bodyweight to gain muscle, they can't be fully plant-based, etc. It's all horseshit (as a muscular girlie, I would know!). So I decided to write about protein science🏋️‍♀️
Vox piece with headline: "You’re being lied to about protein" and description: "Yes, protein builds muscle. No, you don’t need as much as lifting influencers say." It has an illustration of several people shoving steak and a chicken leg into a giant prop stomach. Salami and other meats are on the ground surrounding.
May 7, 2025 at 3:05 PM
mbolotnikova.bsky.social
Coca-Cola-owned Fairlife has become hugely popular for its "ultra-filtered" high-protein milk & that's incredibly sad because horrific animal abuse has been found at its supplier farms multiple times. There's a better high-protein milk & it's made of soybeans!

www.vox.com/future-perfe...
screenshotted text from a Vox story: "Some companies have even introduced “ultra-filtered” cow’s milk that’s higher in protein than regular milk. The Coca-Cola-owned milk brand Fairlife, which has seen massive growth in recent years thanks to the popularity of its high-protein products, was recently the subject of an undercover investigation by the animal advocacy group Animal Rescue Mission. The group found appalling animal abuse at two Fairlife supplier farms in Arizona, including cows and calves being beaten, dragged, chained, and shot. A 2019 investigation found similar abuse at another Fairlife supplier, and Coca-Cola in 2022 settled lawsuits alleging that it falsely advertised Fairlife milk as coming from humanely raised cows."
March 7, 2025 at 4:02 PM
mbolotnikova.bsky.social
If you haven't already, now is a great time to sign up for Processing Meat, our biweekly newsletter bringing you the best reporting and analysis available anywhere on how meat, dairy, and factory farming shape everything around us 😎

www.vox.com/pages/proces...
illustration with the text "Processing Meat" showing an illustration of a piece of red meat in the shape of the continental US on a black plastic tray under plastic wrap.
February 25, 2025 at 1:26 AM
mbolotnikova.bsky.social
In this stunning trove of FOIAed emails, a former NIH director is disturbed by footage of NIH-funded monkey experiments & privately mentions "the pointlessness of much of the research being conducted on non-human primates."

But later 1/

www.peta.org/wp-content/u...
February 22, 2025 at 5:12 PM
mbolotnikova.bsky.social
These are so good (and even better when refrigerated overnight) — I am once again asking why all desserts aren't vegan by default

www.pickuplimes.com/recipe/the-b...
Screenshot of a recipe for "the best brownies ever" on the cooking site Pick Up Limes
January 15, 2025 at 12:11 AM
mbolotnikova.bsky.social
The most important context for current discussions about California's water shortage: it's the cows (h/t @umairfan.bsky.social)
January 9, 2025 at 9:26 PM
mbolotnikova.bsky.social
Many doubts about whether the federal dietary guidelines will actually do this of course but this is so slay
screenshotted text: "screenshotted text: "Formerly, beans, peas and lentils were a subgroup of the vegetable food group, but the new report recommends moving these foods to the protein food group to encourage more plant-based protein consumption. Specifically, the committee proposes reorganizing the the protein food group to feature: First: Beans, peas, and lentils Second: Nuts, seeds and soy products Third: Seafood Last: Meats, poultry and eggs"
December 23, 2024 at 6:30 PM
mbolotnikova.bsky.social
will be thinking about this deeply interesting @hsouvainehorn.bsky.social piece for a long time (also, I need to subscribe to this magazine!)

newrepublic.com/article/1867...
screenshotted text: "These are all good ideas. But there is another, related way out of this crisis: to sever the link in this country between paid work and the provision of a basic social safety net. Other countries have already done this, particularly via publicly funded health care. Yet America’s work fixation lies at the center of this entire narrative—an origin story for Social Security’s inequities and a fig leaf for attempts at privatization. Workism is closely tied to ableism, and is often deployed in political contexts for deeply racist purposes. It overlooks and stigmatizes unpaid caregiving, often performed by women, and drives the “welfare queen” stereotype, used by politicians to discredit the provision of public assistance to impoverished Black people. There’s considerable evidence that work requirements for food stamps exacerbate poverty. And the idea that only people who work really matter is exacerbating the cultural forces that drive many seniors to despair and cause elite seniors to cling to power."
November 18, 2024 at 8:41 PM
mbolotnikova.bsky.social
me getting bsky followers
(meme format by @khoavuumn.bsky.social)
Trojan horse meme where the trojan horse is "climate starter packs," the payload is "factory farming & animal rights beat," and the city it's entering is Bluesky
November 13, 2024 at 4:22 PM
mbolotnikova.bsky.social
One of the wildest details to me behind the escaped monkey story: There's a colony of wild macaques on an island in South Carolina that the federal govt uses as a reservoir for lab monkeys, allowing a private company to oversee it & pluck monkeys for medical testing

www.vox.com/future-perfe...
screenshotted text: "it turns out that it’s perfectly possible to live as a free-roaming rhesus macaque in South Carolina, where a more than four-decade-old population of the monkeys resides on the state’s Morgan Island, also known as “Monkey Island.” Originally relocated from Puerto Rico between 1979 and 1980, the Morgan Island macaques now serve as a kind of reservoir of lab monkeys for the US government. Last year, Alpha Genesis won a federal contract to oversee the monkey colony there — in fact, the 43 escaped macaques had originally lived as “free-range” monkeys on the island before they were taken to be used for testing and research purposes, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told CBS News in a statement. While these monkeys may not be able to rejoin the Morgan Island colony on their own, the fact that they came from a wild population strengthens the view of them as animals who not only can live in the wild but who deserve to be free." Below the text is a photo of a mother rhesus macaque sitting on a tree branch cradling an infant macaque
November 12, 2024 at 6:23 PM