In 2011, I was living in Crown Heights, commuting to a job at Columbia. I took the train at 5:55 AM, wedged in between custodians and cooks all heading into Manhattan. We shared a comradely exhaustion, dozing off on each other’s shoulders, perusing newspaper of your neighbor. I was reading a 1981 novel by Ted Mooney called Easy Travel to Other Planets , a fictionalized account of midcentury scientist John C. Lilly’s dolphin research, and particularly of the relationship between one of the researchers, Margaret Howe, and one of the dolphins, Peter. A woman in her mid-50s was placidly reading along next to me until, around page fifteen, we both ran into the novel’s first instance of graphic human-dolphin penetrative sex. I slammed the book closed and we rode the rest of the commute in rigid propriety. No one reads Easy Travel to Other Planets anymore. They should.…