Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2020 i Mother Jones

THE TWO OF US CAME of age in newsrooms at the cusp of the digital age—late enough that you could tell everything was about to change, but early enough that old habits still held unquestioned sway. Some of these (like smoking at your desk) were soon to vanish, but others have been stubbornly hanging around. One impulse that has become particularly dangerous in this age of attacks on journalism (and facts themselves) is the reflex against asking what readers (or viewers, or listeners) want. Like many dated ideas, this one started as a perfectly reasonable impulse: During the media corporatization wave of the ’80s and ’90s, profit-obsessed owners pushed for sensationalism in the name of “what readers want.” Audiences, the message went, demand fluff and flimflam; journalists concluded, understandably so,…

WHEN GORDON SONDLAND took his turn in the impeachment spotlight, the hotelier turned US ambassador to the European Union became the poster boy for President Donald Trump’s corps of deep-pocketed, politically connected diplomats. But he’s hardly the only envoy with a fat wallet and a skimpy resume. Jeffrey Ross Gunter (Iceland): This California dermatologist and longtime GOP donor gave $100,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee. At his confirmation hearing, he reassured senators, “While I have never been to Iceland, I have spent a considerable amount of time in Western Europe, as my late wife was from the Netherlands.” Callista Gingrich (Holy See): “As a lifelong Catholic,” Gingrich (who had an affair with future husband Newt Gingrich before he divorced his second wife) told senators she would be “profoundly humbled” to represent…

AT FIRST, PAMELA LOPEZ did not intend to name names. After more than a decade as a lobbyist in Sacramento, California, representing school districts, Native American tribes, and cannabis companies, Lopez had learned how to put up with a lot of crap from men—the dudes who took credit for her ideas, the official who insisted she wear open-toed shoes to lunch, and the boss who laughed off her complaints. “I had to make my peace with recognizing that if I wanted to be a significant actor in politics, and work in the political world, that putting up with abusive behavior, putting up with sexism and sexual harassment by some men, was just part of the cost of doing business,” she says. Then, at a party in January 2016, a state…

ON A CRISP fall morning in 2017, veteran science teacher Mary Bozenmayer and her colleagues filed into the cafeteria of their New Jersey middle school for an all-day professional development session. The speaker took the podium, smiled brightly, and explained that he was there to tell them how boys and girls think differently. Bozenmayer was skeptical. Given her scientific training, she knew that most theories about sex-related brain differences had been debunked long ago. Still, she tried to keep an open mind as the trainer, who worked for an organization called the Gurian Institute, told the teachers that girls learn best by sitting quietly and following directions while boys require competition and physical activity to master difficult concepts. “Males can store trivia (like sports statistics) better than females, and for…

Regina Brave remembers the moment the first viral picture of her was taken. It was 1973, and 32-year-old Brave had taken up arms in a standoff between federal marshals and militant Indigenous activists in Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Brave had been assigned to guard a bunker on the front lines and was holding a rifle when a reporter leaped from a car to snap her photo. She remembers thinking that an image of an armed woman would never make the papers—“It was a man’s world,” she says—but the bespectacled Brave, in a peacoat with hair pulled back, was on front pages across the country the following Sunday. Brave had grown up on Pine Ridge, where the standoff emerged from a challenge to the tribal…

1. The 12-gauge shotgun is the weapon of choice for many hunters. But this advertisement for KelTec’s recently released KS7 is not aimed at them. While 30 percent of Americans say they own a gun, only 4 percent actually hunt. Reflecting this fact, the KS7 doesn’t look like your traditional Remington shotgun; instead, with its bullpup design and long pistol grip, it adopts the look and feel of an assault weapon. Bullpup formats—in which the action and magazine are located behind the trigger, resulting in a shorter weapon without sacrificing barrel length—are a relative novelty in the 12-gauge market, first finding commercial success with KelTec’s ksg, released in 2011. In transforming a weapon typically associated with shooting game into a tricked-out tool of self-defense (or offense, as these things sometimes…

IF YOU’VE EVER bought organic meat, you’ve noticed the hefty price tag: An organic chicken can cost more than twice a conventional one. For some shoppers, that upcharge is worth it—the circular green and white “USDA Organic” label guarantees that the meat comes from an animal raised on feed that’s grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers. Or does it? Organic meat producers operate on impossibly tight margins, so many buy less expensive imported grain to feed their animals—and that’s where things get murky. Lax federal control means that exporters can hire organic certifiers that will help them boost profits by looking the other way. The result is an influx of cheap, fraudulent products that are driving down prices and hurting American organic farmers who play by the rules. In an…

ON A SUNDAY evening in mid-November, J.D. Scholten stood in the Swaledale, Iowa, City Hall and spoke, as he often does, about sandwiches. Scholten, a Democratic candidate for Congress in the state’s once reliably red 4th Congressional District, was in the midst of a series of town halls he called the “Don’t Forget About Us” tour, often making several stops a day in communities with fewer than 1,000 residents. About three dozen people were packed into the building’s only room, a wood-paneled space with paintings along the wall and a sagging ceiling that the 6-foot-6 Scholten could almost scrape with his perfectly bald head. Swaledale (population 158) was the smallest town he went through that day, and like most places he’d visited, it no longer had a grocery store. “If…

WITH A CHEERY DRAWL and an expression somewhere between exhausted and dead-eyed, Lindsey Graham spent a Sunday morning in November rattling off the greatest hits of GOP impeachment conspiracy theories before most Americans had finished their second cups of coffee. “When you find out who the whistleblower is, I’m confident you’re going to find out it’s somebody from the Deep State,” the South Carolina senator insisted during Fox News’ 10 a.m. block. Graham, a former Trump foe who has become the president’s chief defender in the Senate, then shifted into attacking Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence chair and now lead impeachment manager. “If you think Schiff is looking for the truth,” Graham snarled, “you shouldn’t be allowed to drive anywhere in America, because that’s a ridiculous concept.” The…

“It begins with the subject, a deep interest in wanting to describe the Black subject in a way that’s as complex as the experiences of anyone else,” Dawoud Bey has said of his photography. “It’s meant to kind of reshape the world one person at a time.” It is an audacious mission, but Bey’s work—now the subject of a career retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—is unique in its ambition. The diptychs to the left, for instance, are part of The Birmingham Project, which wasn’t so much a commemoration of the victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963 as a kind of seance. Each pairing in the series features two Birminghamians, photographed in 2013: One is a child the same age as the boys…

THE LABS OF Evolve BioSystems are full of baby poop. Tucked into a shopping mall in Davis, California, alongside a Jazzercise and a marijuana dispensary, this biotech company has gathered infants’ feces from all over the country. “Millions of people every day are throwing away poopy diapers, and they don’t realize how much information is actually contained in each poop,” says Robin Flannery, Evolve’s director of clinical development and operations. “It tells us a lot about what’s going on inside the baby.” Specifically, Evolve is interested in one potentially very powerful type of bacteria found in babies’ intestines: B. infantis. Its researchers, including several scientists at University of California, Davis, think the bacterium flourished in babies’ bellies for thousands of years. But today, the company’s research shows, in about 9…