Author: Andrew Sullivan

The birds are struggling to adapt to a warming world:

[Stephen] Kress [who set up a “Puffin Cam” to live-stream baby Puffin Petey’s development] soon noticed that something was wrong. Puffins dine primarily on hake and herring, two teardrop-shaped fish that have always been abundant in the Gulf of Maine. But Petey’s parents brought him mostly butterfish, which are shaped more like saucers. Kress watched Petey repeatedly pick up butterfish and try to swallow them. The video is absurd and tragic, because the butterfish is wider than the little gray fluff ball, who keeps tossing his head back, trying to choke down the fish, only to drop it, shaking with the effort. Petey tries again and again, but he never manages it. For weeks, his parents kept bringing him butterfish, and he kept struggling. Eventually, he began moving less and less. On July 20, Petey expired in front of a live audience. Puffin snuff.

“When he died, there was a huge outcry from viewers,” Kress tells me. “But we thought, ‘Well, that’s nature.’ They don’t all live. It’s normal to have some chicks die.” Puffins successfully raise chicks 77 percent of the time, and Petey’s parents had a good track record; Kress assumed they were just unlucky. Then he checked the other 64 burrows he was tracking: Only 31 percent had successfully fledged. He saw dead chicks and piles of rotting butterfish everywhere. “That,” he says, “was the epiphany.”

Why would the veteran puffin parents of Maine start bringing their chicks food they couldn’t swallow? Only because they had no choice. Herring and hake had dramatically declined in the waters surrounding Seal Island, and by August, Kress had a pretty good idea why: The water was much too hot.

The big picture:

Life would go on without puffins. Unfortunately, these clowns of the sea seem to be the canaries in the western Atlantic coal mine. Their decline is an ominous sign in a system that supports everything from the last 400 North Atlantic right whales to the $2 billion lobster industry.

(Photo by Andy Morffew)

Adding to this reader’s comments, a Colombian reader further contextualizes the debate surrounding the racy breastfeeding campaign in Mexico City:

Many of the protesters of the campaign were against it because it stigmatized those women who choose not to breastfeed for valid reasons. In Spanish, the expression used has multiple meanings that were intentional: Rebecca Cullers’ literal translation fails to capture the contrast meant. Giving your back is equal to be selfish or lazy, and giving your breast also means to be brave (dar el pecho = to face a problem).

Meanwhile, Mya Frazier suggests that bra manufacturers could hold the key to normalizing public breastfeeding:

Fantasy and lust, as embodied in its annual televised Fashion Show, define the Victoria’s Secret brand, but it is also an innovator in bra design, with new product launches a key part of its marketing efforts. Yet while Victoria’s Secret works on a bra with “improved nipple concealment,” other companies appear to be dominating innovation in the nursing bra category. There’s a patent application for a nursing bra that would hold a thin circular heating/cooling device to provide “relief from engorgement, plugged ducts, mastitis and other general nursing pain.” There’s even a patent for a device to connect a breast bump to nursing bra for “hands-free” pumping.

In her book, Breastwork: Rethinking Breastfeeding, Alison Bartlett argues for the acceptance of breastfeeding as a potentially erotic experience, asking: “If it’s generally acceptable or even desirable in Western culture to have sexy breasts available for public viewing, what would be the effect on that set of values and meanings if we regarded lactating breasts as sexy?” Could a brand like Victoria’s Secret use its multi-million dollar advertising budget to disrupt the carefully constructed borders between the sexualized breast and the maternal breast? Millions of babies and their mothers might be better off for it.

To widen the thread further, here’s an excerpt from Chavie Lieber’s piece on “men who drink breast milk”:

Some men who drink breast milk, like Anthony, cite reasons of health or nutrition. Jason Nash, a 55-year-old father of four, started drinking breast milk after the birth of his first child. “It occurred to me that breast milk could be just as healthy and tasteful for adults as infants,” Nash said. “I believe it has kept me from getting sick all these years.” His wife isn’t thrilled, but doesn’t mind as long as the milk comes from a safe source.

For other men (not least those in adult-nursing relationships), breast milk is a kink. “All I’ll say is it’s a fetish for me,” wrote another man, whose post on Only the Breast identified him as a “nice, harmless man in New Jersey seeking breast milk from healthy, non-smoking mom.”

A reader protests:

Did your readers, who I look to as a refreshingly open-minded community, even read Coates’ article? To quote him:

Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution.

And we devolve into half-serious talk about half-black children and then curl up in the fetal position and say, “It makes my head hurt”?

Coates himself realizes, I think, that we may never have a day when white folks are writing checks to black folks. And that’d probably do more harm than good anyway.  But what we can do is help the people who have been harmed decade after decade with jobs and healthcare and whatever else we can think of to bridge the gap. But importantly – acknowledge aloud that we are acting out of a sense of obligation to right a wrong we have the capacity to try and fix.

Another passes along “three handy tips to help you suss out folks who haven’t actually read” TNC’s essay. Number one: “They talk a lot about slavery.” Another concurs:

I admire what Ta-Nahesi Coates is doing by revisiting the argument for reparations. And I am also deeply disappointed reading comments on The Dish and around the internet that can’t get past the year 1865. This is not just about slavery. If I understand him correctly, this is a thought exercise to update the reparations claim through the 20th century (and 21st) that moves past slavery to implicate North and South, as well as immigrants who arrived after the Civil War. Sharecroppers working white land after a landless emancipation, black maids and sharecroppers denied Social Security, decades of African Americans paying taxes for FHA loans they couldn’t have and for freeways to those white Levittowns that tore through black neighborhoods and forced African Americans into projects.

I believe Coates wants his reader to look at every stop on this reparations tour and make his or her case for where they would get off, to argue where they would draw the line. But once they see the route he is taking, all I read is, “Oh, slavery, that’s my stop. Would’ve been nice for money back then, but what can you do?”

Another is on the same page:

In synthesizing for his readers the tremendous work done over the past two decades by historians about how suburbia was created as a white’s-only domain, Coates is making two different arguments about the logic for reparations that we normally hear when slavery’s at its center. He’s arguing first that the material effects of racial inequality, effects underwritten by federal policy, are far more recent than the usual “slavery was a long time ago” argument. There are no antebellum slaveowners alive, but there are millions of people who were suburban homeowners between 1938 and 1968.

Second, he’s showing, again mainly in the Lawndale sections, how suburban segregation created the conditions whereby blacks could be defrauded by contract sellers who dramatically increased home prices and held the deed so they could evict people on any pretenses in order to resell their homes, multiplying their profit many times over. Beryl Satter, whose work Coates is drawing from, estimates that contract selling stripped one million dollars a day out of Lawndale alone.

People asking Coates how reparations would work have a duty to actually consider the argument he’s making. Are so many unwilling to do so, and so willing to fall back on “75 percent of southern whites didn’t own slaves,” because it’s too uncomfortable to look at their parents’ or grandparents’ houses as spaces of Jim Crow?

Previous Dish on the reparations discussion here, here, and here.