Poor Mojo's Newswire

The all-mighty New York Times has done it. They’ve pissed me off! And I’m not the only artist. Lots of cartoonists are pissed. Why, because the giant NYT wants artists, seasoned and professional artists, to work for them for FREE. That’s right, to spend their valuable time and talent working for free producing cartoons which will never be printed. It shows that while the NYT wants your work, they don’t feel it has any value. Let me explain. On Monday, February 6th, the New York Times (NYT) sent an insulting email to the top editorial cartoonists around the United States. This email is indicative of how many large institutions view our creative work. They want it, but they don’t want to pay for it. At first glance, the email is quite positive. It states that the NYT will start running a political cartoon again each Sunday, starting on February 26th. The good news stops there. . . .

Harper’s is trolling. And who can blame them? Nothing like a salvo in the “mommy wars” to boost your readership. The article title on the March cover certainly caught my eye: “The Tyranny of Breast-Feeding: New Mothers vs. La Leche League.” It’s an excerpt from Elisabeth Badinter’s forthcoming book The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, and what bothers me about it isn’t the perspective. I expected to be at least a little sympathetic. No, what bothers me is the article’s sloppy argumentation—the way it tries to push buttons without bothering to build its case. (The official name for this, as I learned from the New Yorker, is “contrarian feminism.”) Some necessary background, for those of you not up on the latest in high-stakes parenting debates: In the West right now, breastfeeding is officially in. It’s the doctor-recommended way to be a good mother. And exclusive breastfeeding (that is, no source of nourishment but mother’s milk) until the sixth month is the gold standard. Experts agree it’s best for baby to drink the milk specifically manufactured for that baby, but it’s not so easy to achieve, at least not if you, as a mother, intend to do anything else during those six months. I can say this with some authority because my seven-month-old son was one of those lucky “EBF” (exclusively breastfed) babies for the first six months of his life. He still nurses a lot more than he eats solid food, and I’m here to tell you that keeping him nourished and happy is wonderful and rewarding and exhausting and hard. A generation or two ago, by contrast, breastfeeding was definitely not in. Babies drank from bottles, and the way you knew you were a good mother was by monitoring how many ounces they consumed. Nursing babies had become something only weirdos and hippies did. Enter La Leche League, a group formed in the mid-1950s by a group of women who wanted to nurse their babies and offer support to other like-minded moms. They’re the villains of Badinter’s essay. . . .