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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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Temporary workers for the US Forest Service work in areas like timber, wildlife, watershed, botany, recreation, and visitor services. Facing budget woes, the agency has confirmed it has put a hiring freeze on all seasonal positions until further notice. | US Forest Service via Flickr This story was published in collaboration with High Country News. Americans visit hiking and camping areas managed by the US Forest Service more than 150 million times each year.  If you have climbed a peak or hiked in a golden aspen forest, paddled a protected river or visited a cultural site on any of the hundreds of millions of acres of public national forest land, there’s a good chance any federal workers you encountered were not full-time employees.  The agency relies on a large, often underappreciated army of seasonal or temporary workers who clean bathrooms and campgrounds, empty trash cans, maintain trails, welcome people at visitor centers, and do critical research work on the environment.  These employees help monitor the health of the public waters and forests the agency oversees, clearing brush and trees that pose wildfire danger and monitoring the health of Alaska’s sockeye salmon. The Forest Service-managed portions of the Appalachian Trail that were damaged by Hurricane Helene will likely be repaired by temporary workers. (Hikers are currently advised to stay off over 800 miles of the Appalachian Trail.)  Next summer, however, most of these tasks will be performed by other staff — or not done at all.  Due to a looming budget cut, the agency will not be hiring seasonal staff for the next fiscal year, leaving thousands of people out of work and putting essential conservation and biodiversity work at risk. The spending bill recently passed by the House gave the agency around half a billion dollars less than it requested, meaning that the Forest Service, within the Department of Agriculture, faces a large budget cut. Most other environmental and science-based federal agencies also face large cuts. Meanwhile, the money the agency received from the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate law, has already been spent.  All of this, combined with recent cost-of-living increases for staff, means the agency is feeling strapped for cash. The next year “will not likely be a very robust budget environment,” said Forest Service Budget Director Mark Lichtenstein during an all-staff call in mid-September. This decision does not apply to the more than 11,000 temporary firefighting positions that the Forest Service hires every year. An agency spokesperson said the Forest Service hired more than 2,500 non-fire temporary employees in fiscal year 2024. In the all-staff call, Forest Service Chief Randy Moore acknowledged that the agency will be forced to struggle without its seasonal workforce.  “I know that this decision will affect your ability to get some of the critical work done,” he said. “It’ll also be felt deeply by managers and units all across the agency.” In the days before the call, news of the hiring freeze spread rapidly through the ranks of temporary seasonal employees. Some heard about it directly from their supervisors. Others found out on Reddit, where a letter announcing the hiring freeze from the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest region had been posted. Temporary workers who feared for their futures filled the comment sections. “I was really banking on (seasonal work next summer),” said one temporary employee in an interview, asking that her name not be used, since she is still employed by the agency. “I was also banking on seasonal winter Forest Service positions to get me through the off season, and all of a sudden, all of that was completely nixed.” Temporary employees often face this sort of precarity, piecing together work for the winter when they lose their jobs and health care benefits and then returning to seasonal work for the summer. In many cases, they depend on the agency not only for paychecks, but for housing, living in buildings owned or subsidized by the Forest Service. The budget cut’s impact on hiring extends beyond seasonal workers. The agency also announced that, with very few exceptions, it won’t be hiring external candidates for any position within the agency, meaning that open positions will have to be filled by current employees. And since seasonal work is a common stepping stone to a permanent role, many temporary workers who hoped for a career in public land management now find themselves at a loss.  News of the hiring freeze left longtime seasonal and permanent workers shocked and angry. In a recording of a mid-September staff meeting shared by an employee and reviewed by Vox and High Country News, staff at the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in southern Washington stressed the importance of seasonal labor. One man, who identified himself as Trevor, said his “entire program” relies on a “large seasonal crew” and wondered how he would be able to do his job in the future. Another employee referenced years of insufficient funding from Congress that have diminished agency morale. She added the loss of temporary workers would have “agency-wide” negative impacts. “We cannot operate without our seasonal staff,” she said. Seasonal workers symbolize the backbone of the Forest Service’s labor force They might be “temporary” in name, but the Forest Service’s seasonal employees are a vital source of institutional and local ecological knowledge for the agency.  Many return season after season, often to the same forests, despite the low pay — often around $15/hour for an entry-level position. Several workers interviewed for this story said they stay on in hopes of snagging a permanent role. These workers are especially vital for field operations, said Jamie Tommins, who worked for several years as a trails and wilderness lead for offices in Wyoming, New Hampshire, and Washington.  “It takes most people many years of seasonal work to land a permanent job, and those higher-grade seasonals are where you find all the most knowledgeable field workers,” he said. “Permanent employees may be as highly trained, probably from being seasonals themselves first,” Tommins said, “but they’re usually busy under their own administrative load and aren’t always available to get out in the field or train the newer folks.” From building and maintaining trails to planting trees and removing dangerously flammable invasive species like cheatgrass, seasonal employees shoulder much of the work of maintaining the national forests. “I just can’t fathom all the skill and know-how the Forest Service is about to lose,” he said. In practice, temporary employees often wind up doing work far above their pay grade. James Bardo, a biological science technician who works with plants, said this summer in Oregon’s Fremont-Winema National Forest, due to understaffing, he found himself doing rare plant work that would be better suited to an agency botanist. “I’d never been to southern Oregon,” he said. “I never worked in southern Oregon or anywhere near there. And I was the authority for taxonomy there, and it was just like, I really shouldn’t be.” Bardo worries what cutbacks to the agency’s already paper-thin workforce will mean for important ecological work like preserving threatened species. “It can be problematic when you’re going to be working in the forest, cutting down trees,” he said. “Do you know that this rare plant species is actually there? Or is it easily confused with something else? … It’s very concerning as a conservation botanist.” Next summer, this loss of expertise will be felt in countless ways. During the all-staff call, Moore said the agency would scale back services rather than demand more of its reduced workforce.  “We just can’t get the same amount of work done with fewer employees,” he said. “So, in other words, we’re going to do what we can with what we have. We’re not going to try to do everything that’s expected of us with less people.” But there are some tasks that can’t be set aside easily. A temporary employee, who asked that her name not be used, works in the visitor center at the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. She described basic chores like emptying trash, weed whacking around buildings to reduce fire risk, and directing overflow parking at the popular site. All these tasks, if left undone, could cause chaos next summer.  She estimates two permanent employees will be left to do the work of five people, once the seasonal positions are cut. She imagined the possible consequences: locked gates and closed recreation access, and trails or camping sites left inaccessible. She called it a “disservice to the public” as well as to the employees who will have to deal with the fallout.  “You always get people coming in complaining about things,” she said, “but if we’re shutting things down, and there’s trash everywhere, that’s just going to increase, and it’s very unfair to the workforce that will remain.” Important work will grind to a halt In recent years, the Forest Service has attempted to reduce its reliance on seasonal employees, converting approximately 1,400 temporary workers to permanent status. But even those newly permanent employees will feel the budget cutbacks.  Many of these new positions are known as “permanent seasonal” roles. In a recent Substack post about the agency’s hiring woes, Tommins compared the job to that of a public school teacher: “a permanent employee with a long” break, although that break is during the winter, not the summer. In normal years, employees can extend their terms, adding hours or taking on new work for some extra money. But in its announcement of the hiring freeze, the Forest Service made it clear that permanent seasonal workers will not be able to extend their terms in the coming fiscal year. Meanwhile, many promised promotions are on hold, and some external hiring offers will have to be rescinded.  Scott Schell, the executive director at the Northwest Avalanche Center, worries what the cutbacks will mean for his organization, a public-private partnership that works with the Forest Service to provide weather and avalanche data in Oregon and Washington. In addition to vital avalanche data for backcountry skiers and ski resorts, the NWAC also contributes to climate research and weather forecasts for Interstate 90, one of the nation’s major transcontinental highways, which crosses the Cascade Mountains in Washington. Schell said his office had received an allowance from the federal government to bring on a handful of seasonal employees to do avalanche forecasting, but fewer than in years past.  “We’re basically going through a kind of triaging matrix,” he said. “There is no way we can do the work we did last year.”

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.”

Is bad behavior in marriage back? In fictional marriage, I mean. For years, heterosexual matrimony in American novels has seemed rather like it’s become a trap for the female protagonist: Unhappy or misunderstood by her spouse, she may act out or seek retribution; whatever her behavior, though, readers are meant to see that it’s attributable to her environment—in other words, that she’s not really in the wrong. For this plotline to work, the wife must be attuned, sometimes newly so, to herself, her unhappiness, her desires—a fictional extension of the powerful, if reductive, idea that women can protect themselves from harm by understanding their own wants and limits.In daily life, of course, human desires and boundaries are changeable. The feminist philosopher Katherine Angel writes, “Self-knowledge is not a reliable feature of female sexuality, nor of sexuality in general; in fact, it is not a reliable feature of being a person. Insisting otherwise is fatal.” Self-awareness has certainly killed sex (and sexiness) in a lot of novels; it’s killed a lot of novels, in fact. A story without badness isn’t much of a story, and a story whose hero has perfect self-knowledge is a story utterly devoid of suspense.Stories about marriage are no exception to this rule. There’s an unbearable flatness to any book whose protagonist is always justified in her actions—or, for that matter, always able to justify them to herself. After years of reading such dead tales, I found both delight and hope in the critic and memoirist Lauren Elkin’s debut novel, Scaffolding, a tale of two slippery adulterers who consider understanding oneself an impossible—or, at best, incompletely possible—task. Its protagonists, Anna and Florence, are psychoanalysts who live in the same Parisian apartment nearly five decades apart, in the 2010s and 1970s, respectively. Both women have crises of faith in language, in intellectualism, in their role as a therapist and as a wife. Neither wants to leave their marriage, but both launch intense, clandestine affairs.Anna and Florence don’t totally understand their motivations for cheating. They act on impulse—in Anna’s case, for what seems like the first time in her life—and yet each seems to recognize that her affair is a voyage of discovery. Elkin writes these events as complicated adventures in wrong decisions—which, crucially, she neither justifies nor condemns. She lets her characters be bad yet ordinary, bad yet sympathy-inducing, bad yet worthy of a good life. In a sense, their badness improves their situation. Their lack of self-awareness, their tendency or ability to submit to their id, gets them closer to what they consciously want: some privacy within their marriage. Just as Scaffolding argues that we can’t know ourselves fully, it makes plain that we can never completely know one another—and that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with that, even when it leads to bad behavior; even when it breaks our hearts.Scaffolding is about feminism as much as it is about marriage. Florence, its ’70s protagonist, is a psychoanalysis student who spends her free time with consciousness-raising groups. She commits herself to flouting convention, even though her marriage is fairly traditional: She cooks and cleans, and is busy redecorating the apartment that she and her husband, Henry, inherited from her grandmother, who survived the Holocaust. Elkin swiftly makes apparent to readers that Florence’s feminist rebellion is also a rejection of the (largely Christian) “Franco-Français” society that deported her family—something Florence herself seems not to notice. She’s too busy thinking about the affair she’s having with one of her professors. Anna, in the 21st century, is less rebellious and much less happy. She’s suffering from depression after a miscarriage, spending hours immobile in bed, “as if a large sheet of cling film were pinning me in place.” Sexually, she’s shut down; her husband, David, is working in London, and she declines to go with him and struggles to engage in any intimacy when he visits her in Paris. Her only live connection—very live, it turns out—is with Clémentine, a feminist artist in her 20s who grows determined, and successfully so, to draw Anna out of herself and into the world.[Read: How should feminists have sex now?]But even as Anna begins recovering from her depression, its effect on her career is devastating. Formerly devoted to her analysis practice, she’s now stopped valuing her profession. “Why look in other people’s narratives for the metaphors, the gaps, the gaffes, the subtexts, that point you to what they themselves may or may not realise?” she asks herself. “Maybe the words merely point to themselves.” Readers see her apply this feeling to her own life, expending less and less effort on making sense of her behavior. Florence follows a similar trajectory, though as a result not of trauma but of going to Jacques Lacan’s lectures and having an affair with a Lacanian psychology professor. (Don’t worry: Although Lacan famously deconstructed language, which led, in his case, to highly abstruse writing, Scaffolding does not. Elkin’s prose is elegant and straightforward, with just enough experimentation to suit its ideas.) “We have to absorb what we’re learning without passing it through language,” she tells a friend—no easy job for a shrink. But both Florence and Anna learn to see conscious thought as a scaffold, with impulse and desire as the real, substantial building it encases and supports.Florence tries and fails to explain the intensity of her feelings for the professor she’s having an affair with; she tells herself he’s a stand-in for something but has no idea what. At the same time, she’s mystified by the fact that the affair is a “big, big deal” to her when she’s out and about in the daytime, but the moment she returns to her “evening life” with Henry (a cheater himself, not incidentally), thoughts of her lover either vanish or fuel the sex life that is the core of her marriage. Secrecy and deception as aphrodisiac—this may not be moral, and yet, Florence decides, it’s “exactly how [marriage] should work, and exactly not how it is supposed to work.”Anna, for her part, keeps more secrets from herself than from David. She nurtures an attraction to her neighbor Clémentine without permitting herself to notice, though the reader can’t miss it: Anna, otherwise cut off from her body, is so physically attuned to her friend’s presence that she describes her as “her own charged atmosphere.” It’s through Clémentine, in fact, that Anna reencounters an ex whom she desires so intensely, she sleeps with him almost instantly, even though doing so means betraying both David and Clémentine. Unlike Florence, Anna doesn’t attempt to explain her feelings or actions to herself. She knows her behavior is wrong, yet she also knows how alone she’s been, how solitary and isolated from her husband her depression has made her. Having an affair punctures her cling film. It might be bad, but it also returns her to her marriage and her life.Scaffolding isn’t really suggesting that adultery and secrecy are good for a marriage. Rather, the novel treats these things as bad but normal and manageable—and preferable to a total loss of connection. When Clémentine cheats on her boyfriend, she tells Anna the cheating is a disruption that can be “absorbed back into the relationship.” Novels that leave wrongdoing out of their worlds imply that no transgression, marital or otherwise, could be that small, and that for a character to do something genuinely harmful would bring their whole life crashing down. Our broader cultural impulse toward hyperconsciousness is rooted in the same idea. It reflects an inability or unwillingness to tell the difference between big bad things and the small bad ones—and, by extension, to forgive the latter.[Read: A grim view of marriage—and an exhortation to leave it]Elkin puts some big badness in Scaffolding to draw out this distinction. Clémentine is part of a brigade of women who graffiti anti–domestic abuse messages on Paris’s walls. Their work presents a vision of feminism very different from the one in Florence’s consciousness-raising groups, which are all about knowing oneself: For Clémentine, protest is the only way women can resist misogyny. Anna’s first positive emotion in the novel is a response to the graffiti: “Aren’t they incredible?” she says, pointing one out to David on one of his visits from London. Florence, meanwhile, isn’t just involved in raising her own consciousness. She also keenly follows the Bobigny trial, France’s equivalent of Roe v. Wade. Both characters are highly aware of how dangerous life can be for women. Compared with unsafe clandestine abortions or spousal violence, some cheating means nothing; but compared with the flatness of Anna’s day-to-day life and the conventionality of Florence’s marriage, their affairs have immensely high stakes.Scaffolding strikes this balance well. Elkin is deft but clear in reminding readers that there’s a distinction between badness and evil, or badness and hate. She writes Florence’s and Anna’s marriages as immensely loving ones, despite their holes and wobbles; in such relationships, the novel seems to argue, it is conceivable—though not guaranteed—that almost anything can be forgiven or absorbed.Neither Florence nor Anna knows why they cheat on their husband. Perhaps more important, neither of them knows why they love their husband. In a novel less invested in psychological mystery, this would signal crisis for the fictional marriage. In life, it’s the most normal thing there is. Complete self-awareness is both an unattainable standard and a false promise, as is complete transparency with someone else, no matter what your wedding vows say or suggest. Accepting this fact is terrifying. It turns commitment into suspense. In reality, many of us prefer not to acknowledge that, which is more than reasonable: Who goes into their marriage wanting deception and drama?Novels, though, are built to let us test-drive uncertainty—to feel it without living it. Where marriage is concerned, this is an important option for many of us to have. Marriage stories whose protagonists never slip up don’t give readers this option; if anything, they flatten our views of intimacy rather than letting us expand them through imagination.

JVP executive director Stefanie Fox reflects on a year since October 7, demanding accountability in place of impunity.

The industry has poured unprecedented sums into shaping the 2024 elections. Will it work?

The Qantas crew's selection of the racy drama "Daddio" was a surprise to many, and to the airline, which apologized.

National Hurricane CenterFlorida-bound Hurricane Milton’s top wind speed slowed to 155 miles per hour in the early morning hours Tuesday, and the storm dropped to an “extremely powerful” Category 4 hurricane, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC).Rain and wind from the storm began lashing Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula on Tuesday, and it’s forecasted to head toward Florida on Wednesday.“Milton is expected to grow in size and remain an extremely dangerous hurricane when it approaches the west coast of Florida on Wednesday,” said the NHC, in an advisory issued Monday evening. “A large area of destructive storm surge will occur along parts of the west coast of Florida. This is an extremely life-threatening situation and residents in this area should follow advice given by local officials and evacuate immediately if told to do so.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for discoveries and inventions that formed the building blocks of machine learning.

Two-month-old pygmy hippo Moo Deng tries to bite her keeper’s knee at Khao Kheow Open Zoo. The cute little hippo has become an internet sensation in Thailand and other Asian countries because of its funny faces. The number of visitors to the zoo has doubled since its birth in July. | Carola Frentzen/dpa/Getty Images Moo Deng. Pesto. Nibi.  The three are a pygmy hippo, king penguin, and beaver, respectively, and they’re some of the latest celebrities to captivate the internet.  Moo Deng — a 2-month-old pygmy hippo known for her sass and moistness — is perhaps the most viral of the trio, and has attracted upwards of 33 million views across platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Based in Khao Kheow Open Zoo in Thailand, Moo Deng is often seen playfully biting her zookeeper with an exasperated expression, spawning hundreds of memes and a Saturday Night Live segment. Viral videos show Moo Deng biting her zookeepers, but that’s nothing new for the global sensation https://t.co/e8pALAoyZg— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) October 3, 2024 Pesto, meanwhile, is a fluffy king penguin chick who’s risen to fame for just how large he is. He lives at the Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium in Australia and is already twice his parents’ size despite only being 9 months old. He’s been the subject of numerous social media posts and developed a dedicated fan following of millions. Move over Moo Deng — Pesto is the fat penguin stealing hearts: ‘Chonky king’ https://t.co/O9wkko50ko pic.twitter.com/nNe8TScmyG— New York Post (@nypost) September 27, 2024 And Nibi is an adorable and vivacious 2-year-old beaver who was rescued as a baby — and is the subject of a recent Massachusetts court battle. At issue was whether Nibi, who resides at Newhouse Wildlife Rescue, had to be returned to the wild. According to Newhouse, Nibi would die if they released her, because she doesn’t yet have the skills to survive. Roughly 29,000 people signed a petition calling for Nibi to remain at the rescue, and Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey has since issued a permit allowing her to do so.  Following public outcry and involvement from Massachusetts’ highest office, Nibi, an orphaned 2-year-old beaver, will not be sent back into the wild and be allowed to become an educational beaver.https://t.co/WEfSEEnbVj pic.twitter.com/PI6Ao3AmpA— Boston 25 News (@boston25) October 3, 2024 There are a lot of cute animals out there, and humans tend to be attracted to them because of something scientists call “baby schema,” the idea that humans generally feel warmly toward creatures that resemble babies because of how protective they are of infants. “Mammals are favorably inclined toward individuals that have infant-like traits: large heads, big eyes relative to those heads, rounded features, and typically an awkward gait,” David Barash, a psychology professor emeritus at the University of Washington, told Vox. “These traits are characteristic of human babies and toddlers, so it’s adaptive for us to treat them favorably, to see them as especially cute.”  Baby schema alone can’t explain why Moo Deng, Pesto, and Nibi have become so popular, however. While they benefit from their infant-like appearances, they also likely garnered a sizable degree of attention because they have unique personalities that reflect essential parts of the human experience, from frustration at things outside our control to delight in small pleasures. Exposure to animal content, in general, has also been found to provide stress relief, comfort, and escapism at a time when Americans in particular are more stressed than ever.  Why so many people are drawn to these animals The cuteness factor has always been a big reason that people are drawn to animals — but the internet’s latest faves seem to have achieved a rare type of animal celebrity. And a big part of that could be tied to each animal’s strong personality. Researchers have found that people are attracted to content and characters that validate their own experiences, and that reflect their own beliefs or feelings.  “We do like to see characters that are going through the same thing we’re going through,” Matthew Grizzard, a communications professor at The Ohio State University, previously told the BBC. When it comes to Moo Deng, for example, her expression of apparent frustration — which commonly takes the form of open-mouthed yelling — embodies the stress and annoyance that many of her fans are experiencing amid ongoing uncertainty in the world. “I love that Moo Deng is fucking annoyed all the time. I can relate,” as one online Moo Deng fan wrote.  Nibi, too, has been described as a “diva” for her mischievous behavior and playful facial expressions, both of which have resonated with supporters, because they show off a certain aspirational swagger. In one TikTok post, comedian Danny Murphy compared her to that of other “2024 icons” like Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter.  And Pesto, in addition to his unique identity as a “chonky king,” — a title some fans have given him — has also become known for how much he enjoys food. According to his keepers, Pesto consumes roughly 25 to 32 fish a day, prompting internet observers to share their similar love of fish and sushi. “If you can assign this sort of unexpected emotion to an animal, it’s effective,” Roger Dooley, a consumer marketing expert, previously told the Christian Science Monitor, about the appeal of memes like Grumpy Cat, a feline known for his dour facial expression. “I think we don’t expect our animals to be grumpy, so as a result you have that novelty factor at work too.” Broadly, animal content has also been found to have a soothing effect on people that can help relieve stress by providing distraction or comfort. A 2019 University of Leeds Study, for example, found that showing college students preparing for finals a 30-minute montage of cute animal content helped reduce anxiety, blood pressure, and heart rates.  “There’s no doubt that people turn to all sorts of escapist options when they’re anxious,” Barash told Vox, noting that pet adoptions and purchases also spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic when more people had heightened stress levels and were looking for support.  Like other viral animals that have come before them, Moo Deng, Pesto, and Nibi have gained a following both because their cuteness can be pleasing, and because they’re appearing to convey emotions that reflect how many people are feeling at the moment.

The Post's Larry Brooks previews the 2024-25 NHL season.

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A decade after the Flint, Michigan water crisis, the President has set a new target to ensure all U.S. drinking water is safe.

If Kamala Harris defeats the former president, a struggle for the GOP would ensue. But there are reasons to be hopeful about the party's future.

Activist group Community Change Action displays a banner supporting child care funding near the Capitol, in December 2023 in Washington, DC. | Brian Stukes/Getty Images for Community Change Action Caregiving policies are having a moment in the 2024 election. Back in June, before President Joe Biden exited the race, the first presidential debate moderator asked both candidates how they’d help families better afford child care, noting that prices averaged over $11,000 per child in 2023. (Both Biden and former President Donald Trump dodged the question.) New care policy proposals then surfaced on the campaign trail over the summer, as vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance endorsed an expanded child tax credit (CTC), followed by Vice President Kamala Harris endorsing her own expanded credit on top of a new CTC for families with newborns. Both campaigns have said they’d fight for paid family leave and Harris recently said she’d cap child care costs at 7 percent of a family’s income.  If some of these ideas sound familiar, it’s because the push for “care economy” policies — ranging from paid family leave and an expanded CTC to affordable child care, universal preschool, elder care, and higher wages for care workers — was a central focus for advocates and Democrats during the 2021 Build Back Better Act negotiations. However, those talks fell apart after Democratic leadership failed to reach a deal with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who had concerns over the size and scope of the package. The following year, care policies were ultimately excluded from the $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act Democrats passed into law. Advocates are now pressing politicians to redouble their commitment to care legislation — citing polling that suggests such investments are not just good policy but smart politics. Care organizations are particularly pinning hopes on Harris winning in November, as a Democratic victory increases the chances for significant new federal spending. But should Harris actually win and advocates get another opportunity to push for federal policy, what, if anything, would they do? How, if at all, are they reflecting on their last failed push, and preparing for the future, especially given the strong chance that Republicans win the Senate? The odds of a Democratic trifecta are low.  Over the past several months Vox has been speaking with lawmakers, strategists, philanthropic funders, congressional aides, think tank experts, and leaders of care advocacy groups to gauge the future of federal care policy. The interviews revealed a simmering debate over whether advocates should narrow their focus to one or two agenda items in a future legislative push or whether compromise represents premature capitulation, a sign of adopting a limiting “scarcity mentality.” Beyond the tactical debate, deeper tensions have surfaced over whether future efforts should focus on the most vulnerable families or build out new programs for more people, and broader questions have emerged about who sets the agenda in Democratic policymaking, and whether there’s room in the party for real dissent. Should Democrats have prioritized more? In the summer and fall of 2021, as congressional negotiations for Build Back Better were heating up, activists saw a major opportunity to push new investments in paid family leave, child care, elder care, universal preschool and an expanded CTC. How exactly to describe this sweeping legislation wasn’t clear. “Cradle-to-grave” social welfare? A jobs and climate package? Human infrastructure? While Sen. Manchin had signaled he opposed spending as much as the White House and House Democrats were prepared to invest ($3.5 trillion over 10 years) and that he disapproved of budget tricks including temporary programs he suspected leaders would try to make permanent later on, advocates were optimistic that with enough pressure, Manchin would come around on most things. Manchin had also emphasized that he opposed expanding the CTC in a way that eliminated its connection to work, but activists believed he’d ultimately cave on that as well, given emerging research that showed how a CTC without work requirements successfully reduced child poverty by 30 percent during the pandemic. Both the White House and Senate Democrats were staking out political capital in declaring an extension of the pandemic CTC to be their top priority, too.  So when negotiations for Build Back Better ultimately collapsed in late December 2021, care advocates, White House officials, and Senate Democrats insisted there was ultimately nothing else they could have done, that Manchin had been disingenuous and never intended to strike a deal in the first place. (Manchin had expressed openness to policies like a permanent expansion of preschool and a larger CTC with a work requirement.) By the time January rolled around, care advocates were loath to adopt any new strategy, insisting they just needed to keep fighting and that eventually Manchin would come to his senses. Inflation was soaring by that point. Anyone who challenged this strategic consensus faced consequences. In February 2022, Patrick Gaspard, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, acknowledged in a memo that the House’s version of the Build Back Better Act had no path in the Senate, and urged lawmakers to focus on lowering health care costs, addressing the climate crisis, and reducing child care expenses through initiatives like universal pre-K. Shortly after, a coalition of care advocates voted to expel CAP from their group for throwing its weight behind a proposal that didn’t include an expanded CTC.  Also in February 2022, representatives from an umbrella group representing large, private child care providers spoke with Manchin about possibly moving forward on expanding the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) — a longstanding federal program aimed at reducing child care costs for low-income families. Other care economy advocates grew furious, and accused the group of sabotaging their larger, more progressive agenda. (While CCDBG has bipartisan support in Congress and is massively underfunded, many liberal child care advocates oppose its work requirement and want to see policymakers increase public subsidies to all or most families, not just poor households.) “That was probably one of the ugliest negotiations I’ve seen in terms of stifling folks,” said one child care advocate who requested anonymity to describe their private coalition calls. People who held very senior positions in the Obama administration on child care were saying the same things about moving forward on CCDBG, the advocate added, “and were being met as some sort of public enemy #1.” A Democratic Senate aide, speaking on anonymity to describe their own private conversations, recalled hearing through the congressional grapevine in the winter of 2022 that Manchin might be open to a deal on expanding CCDBG. This sounded encouraging to the aide, who had already accepted that the window for some sort of investment on the scale of the House’s version of Build Back Better had passed. But when this aide broached the idea of a new path forward with care advocacy groups, they too were met with backlash. “We had some really tough conversations with outside advocates when we tried to change course and got some very bad reactions,” the aide told Vox. “The idea to expand and pump out CCDBG, I think, fell really short of what they were trying to do.” The aide had hoped that, given their boss’s record on championing care policies, advocates would have been more understanding about a strategic pivot, and see it more as an effort to be nimble and respond to an evolving situation, and not about throwing groups under the bus. “Honestly those were very bad conversations and I look back at that time with a lot of sadness,” the aide said.”These things can get kind of intense and personal.”  Finally, after more than five months of resisting a new plan, and more than three months after Manchin expressed openness to reviewing a proposal on expanding CCDBG, Sens. Patty Murray and Tim Kaine released a proposal to expand CCDBG aid for more than a million new children. But most political observers felt it was too little, too late, and that the door for reaching a deal had closed.  “I mean, it was like a Hail Mary, you could see the window was closing and that’s finally when [advocates] came to try and find some compromise,” said one leader who supported pivoting much earlier. “There was this mentality that if you show your willingness to compromise early it’s going to kill your chances, and I think it was ultimately their unwillingness to compromise earlier that killed it.”  When does perfect become the enemy of good? The last few years seem to have revealed that within the Democratic Party, there’s not much space for debating competing care policy ideas. In the fall of 2021, as advocates began circling the wagon to get their policies through congressional negotiations, Matt Bruenig, the founder of the left-wing People’s Policy Project, came out with a number of critiques about the package — for instance, that the Senate’s paid leave bill would exclude at least 30 percent of new parents, that the House’s version was full of giveaways to insurance companies, that the proposed child care bill could lead to massive hikes in cost for middle-class families, and that pre-K and child care bills were crafted in ways that made adoption by Republican states unlikely. Democratic lawmakers and care advocates “mov[ed] quickly to dull a dagger,” as Politico put it at the time. Child care proponents publicly dismissed Bruenig, arguing he wasn’t closely reading the legislation and was spreading “a viral set of misinformation.” Paid leave advocates similarly declined to raise any concerns. “I trust the judgment of the Ways and Means Committee and of politicians who need to square the fact that there are lots of different interests at play,” one national paid leave advocate told the American Prospect when questioned about the insurance giveaways. Another said they were not “choosing fights” as negotiations progressed. Bruenig wasn’t the only person to notice weaknesses in the bills. When another think tank analyst raised issues, they were similarly told to keep quiet. Anyone raising concerns at this vulnerable negotiating stage was letting perfect be the enemy of good, or not grasping that this was the best possible version lawmakers could pass at this time, and that modifications could always be made later.Except a few weeks after Bruenig’s critique about rising child care costs for unsubsidized families, Senate Democrats quietly revised their bill, significantly raising the income threshold to address that concern. Similar dynamics emerged the next year when attempts to strike a new deal with Manchin were met with fierce outcry. The incentives to keep one’s head down and go along with the coalition were real. Bruenig has called this policymaking apparatus both dysfunctional and undemocratic. “If this nightmarish process actually generated good policy that was put into law, maybe you could forgive people for engaging in it,” he wrote in May of 2022. “But in reality, it keeps generating extremely broken policies that mostly don’t pass anyway and that fail to live up to expectations even when they do.”Even if some believe it’s unwise to debate legislative details during ongoing negotiations, since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, there’s been little space or energy to explore alternative ideas. “Now is allegedly supposed to be the time when people are to say, ‘Okay, let’s hash it out,’ but it still doesn’t happen,” Bruenig told Vox. Care advocates think they deserve more credit for coming close As it became even clearer over the summer of 2022 that child care investments were not going to be part of what ultimately became the Inflation Reduction Act, child care advocates began ramping up threats of economic calamity. A letter sent that July from 26 national organizations warned lawmakers that omitting child care aid from the reconciliation package would push the early childhood sector “closer to a catastrophic funding cliff that will affect America’s entire economy” and “preven[t] countless moms from pursuing economic security — let alone economic success.” These warnings continued to escalate over the next two years. The following summer, advocates warned that if Congress failed to renew expiring Covid-19 child care funding, then 70,000 child care programs would likely close, resulting in 3.2 million children losing access to care, and mothers in particular would be forced to quit their jobs or work part-time. This “child care cliff” idea originated with the left-wing Century Foundation and was echoed by Democratic and union leadership like Sen. Murray and AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. It was repeated in more than a dozen national news outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Axios, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and MSNBC. As I reported at the time, leading experts quietly disagreed with the scope of the projected closures, but were staying quiet so as to not upset others in their child care coalition. And indeed, industry-wide collapse never followed, while more moms with preschool and school-age children subsequently joined the labor force. Jobs in the child care sector continued to grow, too.  Looking back, White House aides maintain they did all they could have done to reach a deal with Manchin on care policies, as evidenced by the fact that they were ultimately able to negotiate successfully with him on climate change. Leading care advocates also deny any missteps. They say that, upon reflection, they are proud of all they have accomplished over the last four years, despite losing the bruising reconciliation fight. They point to wins like the new Biden administration rule to lower child care costs, a new law protecting nursing parents, and that care agenda policies have remained a top priority lawmakers regularly highlight.  “In the Build Back Better fight, the care community was able to get care policies out of the US House, even though that was not assured for quite a long time, and we lost by just one vote in the US Senate,” said Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, the executive director of MomsRising, a national advocacy group. “As a community we were punching above our weight. We did get care through the administrative level and through the House so what that means is we have to double down now.”  In a post-mortem of the Build Back Better fight published by the progressive think tank New America, care leaders interviewed similarly praised the coalition for being small and mighty. “While the outcome of the Biden administration’s Build Back Better (BBB) social agenda is widely known, much of the progress care advocates made given their minuscule financial resources is a big success story that deserves more attention,” the report said. Though some have argued advocates erred in refusing to pick one or two policies to focus on, activists publicly maintain that they are ultimately stronger if they push multiple programs all together.  In their own post-mortem of the American Rescue Plan, the Century Foundation pointed to historic levels of funding for child care and home care as evidence that “a holistic framework across care movements and strategies is impactful.” The liberal think tank argued that trying to silo aspects of the care agenda from one another “creates a scarcity myth and a fight for resources and helps maintain unfair power structures.” What care advocates see in the climate movement Elliot Haspel, the author of Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It, says part of the challenge of figuring out strategy is that child care advocacy does not have a single leader or single organization. “In some ways [this] means more voices can be heard, more small-d democratic, but it also can create challenges,” he told Vox, contrasting this with the 1990s, when the Children Defense Fund, and specifically its leaders Marian Wright Edelman and Helen Blank, “were basically the child care points of contact.” Past legislative battles may offer insight: following the defeat of universal health care under President Bill Clinton and cap-and-trade for carbon emissions under President Barack Obama, advocates for health care reform and climate went through years of painful reflection and recalibration of their tactics and goals. To get legislation through the legislative process, leaders agreed, they’d have to change course.  Health care proponents had to figure out how to bypass a strong suspicion of socialized medicine. So, with the past failed health care push top of mind, lawmakers drafted the Affordable Care Act to allow for a market-based approach with industry buy-in. Meanwhile, climate advocates realized that they had overestimated the power of businesses in the GOP coalition  An influential 2013 report by a Harvard scholar helped push the climate movement in its next decade to embrace grassroots activism, while practical experience led climate groups to negotiate more concertedly with Manchin in 2022 to get the IRA over the finish line. The care movement has had no comparable recalibration, at least yet. If anything, top care leaders point to the climate movement not as a coalition that had to make tough strategic compromises but as an example of the power of big political spending and a commitment to fighting over many years. “What’s the difference between the climate change movement and the care movement?” Rowe-Finkbeiner, of MomsRising, asked in the New America report. “Tens of million dollars and several decades [of concerted organizing].”  The report noted that the top three environmental lobbying groups outspent care lobbying groups in 2021 and 2022 about three to one. In addition to investing more political dollars, the New America review recommended building a bigger coalition including more faith leaders and businesses, working with Hollywood to feature more diverse characters and storylines about caregiving, and getting serious about publicly battling the opposition, such as large industry groups that fight corporate tax increases. An aide for Sen. Murray also pushed back on the idea that there’s not enough room to update ideas, noting their boss’s Child Care for Working Families Act, which has 42 co-sponsors, has evolved based on feedback, with newer changes including the expansion of eligibility and increased grants to providers.  “This was the product of countless discussions with other Senate offices, unions, policy experts, and other stakeholders,” the aide said. “Murray wanted to write a bill that could win the most possible support to actually get passed into law.” Where things might go after the election In interviews with advocates, aides and policy experts, I’ve tried to glean a clearer sense of what might happen with care policies should Harris win in November. Some activists declined to discuss hypothetical scenarios at all, saying they would not “negotiate against themselves” by publicly signaling what they might compromise on, but others were willing to get more specific.  Assuming Harris wins but lacks a Washington trifecta, the two most commonly cited ideas I heard were an expansion of the CCDBG program for low-income families — as that’s something Republicans generally support — and an expansion of the child tax credit, as that bipartisan program is also set to expire next December, so Congress will likely plan to reauthorize it in some form.  One area of tension will likely be over whether to expand the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC), which helps parents offset the cost of child care. Supporters of expanding the credit say it will make any deeper investments in the CCDBG go further, by making child care both more affordable and more accessible. Rates for CDCTC were last set in 2001, so they have not kept up with inflation and other increases in care costs. “There is a monumental opportunity that should not be squandered,” said Radha Mohan, the executive director of the Early Care and Education Consortium, which is lobbying for the expansion of the CDCTC. Other progressive child care groups have opposed it, as they see it as further entrenching a child care financing system they want to ultimately move away from. The White House declined to endorse expanding the CDCTC in its latest budget, favoring a new child care entitlement instead, though Biden did support increasing the tax credit in the American Rescue Plan.Aides say there is a real sense within the Democratic caucuses that lawmakers need to do something on care, since it was so clearly left on the cutting room floor in 2022. Some child care advocates worry that lawmakers might try to frame existing proposals to expand the CTC as sufficient. The National Women’s Law Center put out a brief last week on this concern, arguing that the CTC and child care should not be seen as interchangeable.  (There’s no doubt that many of these policies and acronyms can be confusing. In the first presidential debate, Biden mistakenly referred to the CTC, which can be used for any costs associated with raising kids,  as a “child care tax credit” — causing stress among child care advocates that the two will continue to be conflated.) Other care advocates are looking at the expiration of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act next year as a fresh opportunity for advancing their own priorities, since Republicans likely will agree to new social spending in exchange for renewing their business tax breaks. The real question is how much money will exist to support care policies given other commitments. Harris, for her part, has already pledged to bring back the pandemic-era CTC and create a new CTC for newborns, two items that could cost up to $1.6 trillion over 10 years. Some experts say lawmakers should not be afraid to go back to the drawing board. There is a tendency for groups to become “path dependent” on old ideas, even if there are better, more effectively designed policies out there.  Bruenig, for example, advocates for universal free child care along with home care allowances for those who don’t want to send their kids to day care. He believes these policies would be easier and fairer to implement than  Democratic proposals aimed at capping costs at 7 percent of a family’s income. He also says there’s no reason all the Democratic paid leave bills have to exclude nearly a third of new parents. In the next session of the Maryland state legislature, Democratic Del. Vaughn Stewart, with Bruenig’s help, will be introducing a bill to close that loophole in Maryland’s paid leave law. A divided government may force advocates to embrace more bipartisan solutions, and there are some signs that such work has already started. A new bipartisan working group of 30 child care experts and analysts convened throughout 2023 to try and find common ground, and new bipartisan working groups in the House and Senate also launched last year to focus on paid leave. Whether advocates would push for some or all of their care priorities together remains an open question. Rowe-Finkbeiner stressed that it’s important “the policies move together,” saying it’ll take a combination of them to  help families the most. Sen. Murray is optimistic that if Democrats win the Senate, it will be a Democratic majority that’s “markedly different” from the last time, and one that’s ready to make serious, long-term investments in child care. But if they don’t win the Senate, Murray told me, Democrats will still act. “I will always talk to anyone and everyone to make progress on child care in every single way possible,” she said. This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

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