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If we want to achieve true animal rights, we need to stop having pets.  That's according to Gary Francione, a law professor who deals with animal rights, and a longtime vegan. He says keeping pets is just another way of exploiting animals.  And he says pets shouldn't exist.

First, the greed: invasion and theft. The Romans invaded Britain in the 1st Century AD and brought their alphabet; in the 7th Century, the Angles and Saxons took over, along with their language. Starting in the 9th Century, Vikings occupied parts of England and brought some words (including they, displacing the Old English hie). Then the Norman French conquered in 1066 – and replaced much of the vocabulary with French, including words which over time became beef, pork, invade, tongue and person.

Illegal public art is in the news. The most notorious instance this summer was the switch of flags on the Brooklyn Bridge, by two German artists, from the Stars and Stripes to all-white versions of the same. Others include a Canadian artist’s scrawls, partly in blood, on a wall in the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum and, in Moscow, the painting of a star ornament atop a Stalin-era tower, in Ukrainian national colors. Internationally, the British midnight muralist Banksy continues his waggish depredations, rivalled of late by a female upstart called Bambi, who likewise stencils images, only with a sexy-feminist spin. The over-all phenomenon could use a name—I propose Stunt art—and some analysis, starting with distinctions.

As a category of volunteer art, Stunt art borders the genres of spray-can graffiti and spectacular illegal sport, such as scaling or parachuting from tall buildings.

Stuntism is to art as weeds are to horticulture: plants in the wrong place. Authorities, social or botanical, define the wrongness, which becomes more arbitrary the more you think about it. Some weeds are as lovely as tulips. A superb gardener I know welcomes the sceptered majesty of common mullein (distinct from the mannerly hybrid varieties) wherever it opts to sprout. So may it be with Stunt art, in a time given to fanatical constraints on human-natural cussedness.

Lately, Johnson draws for pleasure, but for three decades she had a happily hectic career as an illustrator, sometimes presenting clients with dozens of sketches a day. Her playful watercolors once adorned packages of Lotus software; for a program called Magellan, she created a ship whose masts were tethered to billowing diskettes. She made a popular postcard of two red parachutes tied together, forming a heart; several other cards were sold for years at MOMA’s gift shop. Johnson produced half a dozen covers for this magazine, including one, from 1985, that presented a sunny vision of an artist’s life: a loft cluttered with pastel canvases, each of them depicting a fragment of the skyline that is framed by a picture window. It’s as if the paintings were jigsaw pieces, and the city a puzzle being solved. Now Johnson is obsessed with making puzzles. Many times a day, she uses her grids as foundations for elaborate arrangements of letters on a page—word searches by way of Mondrian. For all the dedication that goes into her puzzles, however, they are confounding creations: very few are complete. She is assembling one of the world’s largest bodies of unfinished art.