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The Issue: FEMA’s failure to help people trapped by floodwaters across the state of North Carolina. I am not surprised that the victims of Hurricane Helene are complaining about FEMA (“On their own in NC,” Oct. 6). In 2021 some residents of my town lost their homes because of Hurricane Ida. As the Greenburgh town...

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CNNNot for the first time, a CNN panel erupted into a heated exchange between participants on whether Donald Trump is a racist.The bitter war of words came on Monday night’s edition of NewsNight with Abby Phillip after Scott Jennings, a former GOP strategist, said it was “perfectly fine to acknowledge” some people are “genetically predisposed to violence.”“All he is commenting on is the violent murderers who are in the country,” Jennings added of Trump’s suggestion earlier in the day that migrants who commit murder in the U.S. do so because “it’s in their genes.” “It’s simply not true what is being said about him today.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

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A rainbow parrotfish swims in the shallow waters of Bonaire, a small Dutch island in the south Caribbean. The ocean is full of strange creatures. The parrotfish is no exception. Its teeth are fused into a sharp beak, giving it a birdlike appearance. It’s hermaphroditic, changing sex partway through its life. And to sleep, some parrotfish engulf themselves in a mucus cocoon. Odd and awkward-looking as it may be, this creature is a true hero of the ocean. Rising global temperatures, various diseases, and coastal development have been killing off the world’s coral reefs, iconic ecosystems that support as much as a quarter of all marine life. By some estimates, the live area of coral globally has declined by half since the 1950s. But the situation would almost certainly be worse if it weren’t for parrotfish. A stoplight (left) and queen (right) parrotfish on a coral reef in Bonaire. There are dozens of parrotfish species worldwide. Parrotfish are essentially janitors who are very good at their jobs. While cruising around the reef, these animals — which live in oceans all over the world — scrape colonies of bacteria and algae off rocks using their beaks. If left unchecked, that algae can grow out of control, smothering reefs and preventing new corals from growing. And that makes it hard for reefs to recover after a bout of, say, extreme ocean warming kills off a bunch of coral. So where you find hungry parrotfish, coral has more room to grow. The problem is that, on many reefs, the number of parrotfish — and especially large ones in the Caribbean — has plummeted. Other algae grazers like sea urchins, meanwhile, have vanished, too. Some scientists say that’s why Caribbean reefs have failed to recover following climate-related impacts like bleaching and superstorms; there’s simply too much algae for coral to regrow. On the flip side, these dynamics offer a bit of hope for an ecosystem that seems all but doomed: By protecting parrotfish, alongside efforts to rein in climate-warming emissions, countries might have a better shot at saving reefs. Reefs are turning green If there’s one thing people know about coral reefs it’s that they’re colorful — an intricate mosaic of blues, reds, pinks, and oranges.  But more and more, just one color is starting to dominate: green.  In step with the decline of coral is the rise of algae, or seaweed. When corals die, this green, plant-like organism grows quickly on top of their skeletons. And as it spreads, that seaweed can prevent corals from regrowing.  Baby corals, which start their lives swimming in the ocean, need a bit of bare rock to grow on and harden into adults. When the seafloor is covered in algae, larval coral has nowhere to develop. Seaweed can also release chemicals that harm coral and, when it grows abundantly, shade out reefs.       “The biggest enemy of corals is really seaweed,” said Nancy Knowlton, a marine scientist and author, formerly with the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “It goes without saying that reefs will recover better if they don’t have to deal with lots of seaweed.” Research shows that in the last 50 years or so, algae has proliferated in coral reefs worldwide, and especially in the Caribbean.   Algae thrives on human waste, such as sewage, and runoff from farmland. This water pollution is full of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus that algae need to grow. So as it runs into the ocean, algae booms. Plus, one of the most voracious algae-eaters, the long-spined black sea urchin, began dying in the Caribbean in the 1980s, likely from a waterborne pathogen. Caribbean reefs lost, on average, more than 90 percent of their urchins in a matter of weeks, and those populations have yet to recover. Now, the important job of constricting algae — of giving corals a better shot at growing and recovering from die-offs — has fallen to certain vegetarian fish, including the parrotfish. In some parts of the Caribbean, parrotfish may be the only thing standing between a relatively healthy reef and one shrouded in green noxious gunk. Parrotfish to the rescue The life of a parrotfish mostly consists of munching on rocks and dead corals, grinding it into sand, and releasing it through their rear ends. Some of the world’s beaches are largely made of parrotfish poop. It’s not totally clear what parrotfish are actually eating. Research suggests that their main source of food is colonies of bacteria including cyanobacteria and other microbes that live on rock surfaces, often alongside more visible clumps of seaweed. Parrotfish likely don’t seek out the seaweed itself — the stuff known to be harmful to coral growth and recovery. But when they’re grazing on microbes, they still end up removing it from rock surfaces, according to Andrew Shantz, who studies parrotfish at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.  “Irrespective of what they’re targeting, they end up removing algae from the reef,” Shantz told Vox. “That gives room for corals to come in and settle or grow and occupy that space.” It’s kind of like how you might weed a garden before planting seeds to give your seedings room to develop. This story was produced in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center This is the third story in an ongoing series on the future of coral reefs as they face threats from climate change and disease. It was supported by the BAND Foundation and a grant from the Pulitzer Center. Read the first two stories here: This coral reef has given scientists hope for years. Now they’re worried. These beloved sea creatures are dying. Can human medicine save them? A number of studies have shown that when you exclude large fish including parrotfish from a reef, it gets covered in more algae, and that appears to limit the growth of some corals. One study in Belize, for example, documented less algae and more baby corals when large parrotfish were around.  Similarly, a 2017 study in Nature Communications linked parrotfish to reef growth in Panama by examining historical records of fish teeth and coral fragments. The study relied on reef sediment cores: tubes of material extracted from the seafloor that contain layers of coral, sea shells, and animal remains. Those cores allowed researchers to see how fast the reef was growing and — by looking at the number and shape of teeth — how many parrotfish were on the reef.   Studies like this support the simple idea that parrotfish help coral reefs, yet the relationship between fish and coral is complex and somewhat controversial in marine biology. Smaller parrotfish, for example, don’t seem to limit the amount of seaweed, even if there are a lot of them. Some studies have also failed to find links between fishing restrictions — which typically lead to more parrotfish — and the amount of algae and live coral. Parrotfish also snack on live coral to an extent, though scientists don’t suspect this causes much damage to reefs. “The effect of parrotfish on reef dynamics is not always clear,” said Joshua Manning, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies parrotfish. “It’s still safe to say that parrotfish are good for the reef.” What a reef full of parrotfish looks like People have been eating parrotfish for centuries in the tropics, and it’s still common today in many coastal communities throughout the world. (They taste like sweet shellfish, according to a quick Google search). While global population data is sparse, it’s clear that overfishing has caused parrotfish — and especially large parrotfish, which are favored by fishermen — to decline in some of these regions, like Jamaica and Micronesia.  These declines have almost certainly contributed to the rise of algae.  But there are also places that have protected parrotfish for decades, where these animals are still abundant and apparently doing their job well. The Dutch island of Bonaire, for example, has banned spearfishing — a common method for catching parrotfish — since the early 1970s. The island, which is just east of Curacao in the south Caribbean, also outlawed the harvest of parrotfish altogether in 2010. While some of Bonaire’s large parrotfish have still declined, it has at least double the number of parrotfish compared to most other Caribbean reefs, according to a 2018 report by the Dutch Caribbean Nature Alliance, a nonprofit.  Scenes underwater in Bonaire, home to what some scientists consider the healthiest coral reef in the Caribbean. All those parrotfish help limit the growth of algae on Bonaire’s reef, according to Robert Steneck, professor emeritus at the University of Maine, who’s been studying Bonaire’s reef for more than 20 years. That in turn has helped the coral here survive, he said. Indeed, while much of the Caribbean’s coral has died off in recent decades from bleaching and disease, the reef in Bonaire is still intact; parts of it are still thriving. What’s more, Bonaire’s reef has been able to bounce back from large-scale die-offs in the past, according to Steneck’s research. Parrotfish essentially make this ecosystem more resilient, he said. The reality is more complicated. There are a number of reasons, beyond the abundance of parrotfish, why Bonaire’s reef is healthier than other parts of the Caribbean. The island lies below the path of most Atlantic hurricanes, for example. Bonaire’s coral is also not nearly as healthy as it once was. Bleaching has been harming the reef for years. And in the spring of 2023, a wildlife disease started sweeping through and killing off hundreds of corals, some of which were centuries old. Against these mounting threats, parrotfish can do very little. When coral die-offs are unrelenting and pollution continues to flow into the ocean, reefs get overcome by seaweed. Once that happens, parrotfish can’t do much to bring them back to life, Manning said. “At some point, with the intensity and frequency of these disturbances, the parrotfish grazing is not going to be able to keep pace,” he said. Nonetheless, reefs are still better off with more of them. Saving coral reefs depends, above all, on policies and corporate efforts to slash carbon emissions, but that doesn’t mean effective fishing regulations don’t also help. What parrotfish reveal is that individual components of an ecosystem matter. Take one piece out and the system starts to fail. “We need to protect them, even if only to give reefs a chance,” Manning said. “As long as we have parrotfish, we might have a chance at least prolonging the potential for reefs to come back.” 

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On a rainy Saturday late last month, Mondaire Jones was doing his best to convince a crowd of supporters that his campaign was going great. “We’ve got so much momentum in this race,” Jones said. “It has been an incredible week.”It was a tough sell—not only for the dozens of Democrats listening to Jones in Bedford, New York, but also for the many others who have spent millions of dollars to help him defeat a first-term Republican, Representative Mike Lawler, and win back a district he gave up two years ago. The suburbs surrounding New York City have become a central battleground in the fight for Congress, and Jones’s race against Lawler is among the most competitive in the country—one that could determine which party controls the House next year.Democrats need a net gain of four seats to win the majority, and New York has four of the country’s most vulnerable Republicans, who are all newly representing districts that Joe Biden carried easily in 2020. Yet the traditionally blue bastion is proving to be rough terrain for Democratic candidates, who must distance themselves from the deeply unpopular Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City’s recently indicted mayor, Eric Adams.[Read: Don’t assume that Eric Adams is going anywhere]Jones’s curious claim to momentum was based on a poll his campaign released that had him trailing Lawler by four points—not exactly a strong showing in a district that has 80,000 more Democrats than Republicans. As for his incredible week: It began with him apologizing to Hochul for telling a reporter that he didn’t want his state’s governor to be “some, like, little bitch.” Jones said he was not referring to Hochul and told me that his comments were “taken out of context.” (Jones’s prospects did brighten the following week, when it was Lawler’s turn to apologize after The New York Times uncovered photos of the Republican wearing blackface in college as part of a Michael Jackson Halloween costume.)Democrats are hoping that the enthusiasm Kamala Harris’s campaign has generated will help them reverse the gains Republicans made in New York in 2022. Hochul’s victory that year was so underwhelming—she won by fewer than seven points, a margin that her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in his three elections—that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi blamed her performance for costing Democrats the House.Pelosi’s successor as Democratic leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, has prioritized the purple districts in his home state as he seeks to become the nation’s first Black speaker. But Democrats’ prospects in New York aren’t looking much better than they did two years ago. Hochul’s approval ratings have sunk to new lows, and the federal corruption charges against Adams—who runs the city where many of Jones’s would-be constituents work—won’t help. Polls show Harris beating Donald Trump by fewer than 15 points statewide; in 2020, Biden won by 23.Lawler has hammered Jones on the same issues that helped get him elected two years ago—the high cost of living and the influx of migrants straining local government resources—while appealing to the district’s large Jewish community by championing Israel and criticizing pro-Palestinian campus protesters. He’s supporting Trump for president while vowing to stand up to him—at least more than most Republicans have. (He’s refused, for example, to parrot the former president’s 2020 election lies.) “I’m not going to be bullied by anybody,” Lawler told me.Key to the Democrats’ strategy against Lawler—as with many Republicans—is abortion. Party strategists believe that after the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, GOP candidates fared better in blue states such as New York and California because voters there did not see a legitimate threat to abortion rights. Hoping to spur greater turnout, state Democrats have placed a measure on the ballot this year that would further enshrine abortion rights into New York law, and they’re warning that victories by Lawler and other swing-district Republicans could empower the GOP to enact a national ban. “I think people see the threat. They’re taking it much more seriously,” says Jann Mirchandani, the local Democratic chair in Yorktown, a closely divided town in New York’s Hudson Valley. But she wasn’t sure if Lawler could be beaten. “It’s going to be tight.”Jones’s first stint in Congress was cut short, in part, by an electoral game of musical chairs. Because New York’s population growth had flatlined, the state lost a seat in 2022, two years after his election. In response, a newly vulnerable senior Democrat, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, decided to run in Jones’s district, so the freshman moved to Brooklyn in hopes of holding on to office there. He didn’t make it out of the primary, and then a few months later, Lawler beat Maloney by only about 1,800 votes.To try to reclaim the seat he once held, Jones is shedding some of his past progressivism. He’s renounced his support for defunding the police and no longer champions Medicare for All or the Green New Deal. His biggest break with the left came in June, when he endorsed George Latimer, the primary opponent of Jones’s former colleague, Representative Jamaal Bowman, a member of the left-wing “Squad,” because of Bowman’s criticism of Israel after October 7. In retaliation, the progressives’ campaign PAC rescinded its endorsement of Jones. When I asked him whether he would try to rejoin the Congressional Progressive Caucus if he won in November—he was a member of the group during his first go-round in the House—he said he didn’t know. But he told me he was planning to join the more moderate and business-friendly New Democrat Coalition. Do you still identify as a progressive? I asked. “I am a pragmatic, pro-Israel progressive.”[Read: Why Jamaal Bowman lost]Jones’s rift with the left has hurt him in other ways as well. Lawler and Jones are the only candidates actively campaigning in their district, but they won’t be the only people on the November ballot. A relative unknown named Anthony Frascone stunned Democrats by beating out Jones for the nomination of the left-leaning Working Families Party after earning just 287 votes.Democrats say they were the victims of a dirty trick by the GOP, pointing to two seeming coincidences. Frascone, a former registered Republican, has ties to powerful conservatives in the district, including his longtime lawyer, who serves as a county chair. And, as Gothamist reported, nearly 200 voters registered with the party in conservative Rockland County just days before the deadline. Few residents are eligible to vote in the WFP primary, which typically rubber-stamps the Democratic candidate. So when Frascone got on the ballot at the last minute, the Jones campaign didn’t have many supporters it could even attempt to turn out.If it was a ploy by Republicans, it worked brilliantly. In a close race, Frascone might siphon enough votes from Jones for Lawler to win. “The combination of the surprise primary and us having a very public fracture with Mondaire created a perfect storm,” Ana María Archila, a co-director of the New York Working Families Party, told me.Now the WFP has the awkward task of telling supporters not to vote for its nominee. Meanwhile, state Democrats are suing to get Frascone off the ballot, and the Jones campaign is devoting time and money to ensuring that a ghost candidate won’t cost his party a crucial House seat. A poll released yesterday by Emerson College found Lawler ahead of Jones, 45–44, with Frascone taking three percent of the vote, suggesting that he could play the role of spoiler.Lawler told me he had nothing to do with Frascone’s candidacy. “He has no ties to me,” he said. “If Mondaire couldn’t win a Working Families Party primary with 500 voters, that’s on him.”Democrats appear to be in a stronger position in other New York swing districts. Representative Brandon Williams, a first-term Republican, is seen as a slight underdog to retain his seat around Syracuse after Democrats redrew his district in 2022. In a Long Island district that Biden carried by double digits, the Democrat Laura Gillen’s campaign got a boost when The New York Times reported that her opponent, Representative Anthony D’Esposito, had given congressional jobs to both his lover and the daughter of the woman he was cheating on. Farther upstate, in New York’s Nineteenth District, which is currently the most expensive House race in the country, an early-September poll by a Republican-leaning firm found that the GOP incumbent, Representative Marc Molinaro, was three points behind his Democratic challenger, with a larger group of voters undecided.Elsewhere on Long Island, Representative Tom Suozzi is favored to win again after his special-election victory in February, when he flipped a GOP-held seat by talking tough on the border and assailing Republicans for blocking a bipartisan immigration bill at Trump’s behest—a message that Democrats from Harris on down are adopting this fall.But Suozzi also benefited from his being the only race on the ballot; Democrats bused in canvassers from across the New York metropolitan area to knock on doors for his campaign, and he won by nearly eight points. Now the same organizations that powered Suozzi’s win are trying to convince party activists and volunteers that their local elections are just as important as the one for the White House. “One of those races gets more attention than the other, but it turns out that Kamala Harris is going to need a Democratic Congress,” Jones told the supporters gathered at the event I attended in Bedford.[Read: What Tom Suozzi’s win means for Democrats]I met two Democrats there who said they would vote for Jones but not canvass for him. One of them, Joe Simonetti, said he was still “deeply, deeply, deeply disappointed” by Jones’s effort to unseat a Black progressive in Bowman. “I just can’t get out there with full-throated support,” Simonetti, a retired social worker, said. Roger Savitt, a 70-year-old retiree and former Republican, told me that he was hoping to get on a bus to Pennsylvania to volunteer for Harris for a day. Why not knock on doors for Jones too? I asked. Savitt had nothing against Jones, he said, but “I have a less strong view of the congressional race.”Indeed, part of Jones’s dilemma is that some Democrats in the district have a grudging admiration for Lawler. “Lawler’s done a halfway-decent job,” Rocco Pozzi, a Democratic commissioner in Westchester County, told me. “But we need to get the majority back.” A former political consultant, Lawler is visible both in the community and on cable news, where he tries to position himself as a reasonable voice amid the warring factions in Congress. “You have seen him on Morning Joe, where he never gets asked tough questions,” Jones complained to the Bedford crowd at one point.As their party embraced Trump, moderate Republicans in blue states have occasionally found a receptive audience among Democrats looking to reward politicians willing to criticize their own party. In Vermont, the Republican Phil Scott has for years been among the nation’s most popular governors. Massachusetts twice elected the moderate Republican Charlie Baker as governor, and in Maine, Senator Susan Collins won reelection in 2020 even as Biden easily carried the state.Lawler is eyeing that same path to statewide office in New York; if he wins reelection, he told me, he might run for governor against Hochul in 2026. “It’s certainly something I’ll look at,” Lawler said.Yet despite his image, Lawler is more conservative than the Republicans who have demonstrated cross-party appeal in nearby Democratic strongholds. Although he has vowed to vote against a national abortion ban, he opposes the procedure except in cases of rape or incest and told me he would not vote with Democrats to restore Roe v. Wade. Lawler also said he’d vote against the bipartisan immigration bill that Harris has promised to pass if elected.Those positions offer openings for Jones, who needs the Democrats that still dominate the district to recognize the importance of his race to the national balance of power. Lawler isn’t making it easy for him. A couple days after Jones’s rally in Bedford, I saw Lawler speak a few miles northwest in Yorktown at a commemoration of the October 7 attacks. The event wasn’t partisan, and Lawler spoke for only a few minutes, but attendees in the largely Jewish audience came away impressed.Nancy Anton, a 68-year-old retired teacher and artist, said she had “definitely” been planning to vote for Jones before she came, but now she was leaning the other way. She supports Harris for president and wants Jeffries to be speaker, she told me, but she might vote for Lawler anyway. “I’m hoping in these other districts the Democrats win so we retake the House,” Anton said. I asked her if she’d have any regrets come November if a Lawler victory allowed Republicans to retain the majority. “Oh yes,” she replied. “That’s a terrifying thought.”