Welcome to Our Hen House.

This is Jasmine Singer.

And this is Marianne Sullivan.

And on this week's show, Marianne will be chatting with Marina Balotnikova, a reporter who is pursuing a remarkable freelance career reporting on animal rights and the factory farming industry.

That's so cool. I love when we talk to media people.

Well, I was so anxious to do this interview. I've been following Marina on Twitter for a while.

She's amazing. I didn't even know this was possible that you could be a reporter and just kind of carve out

this kind of freelance career and get assignments from different magazines.

And everything she's writing is amazing and really in depth and on all the issues you want to

hear about.

I love talking to her.

That is so cool.

All right, well, I can't wait to hear it because this is one of my very favorite subjects

is like media people making animal rights their focus.

But before we get to that, we do have a few updates for people, a few things we wanted to chat about.

I wanted to start with Puerto Rico, because as everyone knows, Puerto Rico is currently experiencing yet another great tragedy.

Do you want to talk about it a little bit, Marianne?

Well, I don't think I need to talk

about the hurricane. We all know about that. It's just another disaster, complete disaster.

Apparently, none of the infrastructure updates that were supposed to be done after Maria were done,

or very little was done, and the island is devastated. Once again, is this something we're just going to

get used to? Anyway, we have a very dear friend, Yolanda Alvarez. She's been on the podcast before.

...