Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2021 i Mother Jones

This again? That’s the Groundhog Day feeling I had reading “Boring news cycle deals blow to partisan media” on Axios. The article noted that web traffic has declined for news organizations. To us at MoJo, it seems a good sign that people can finally back off the frantic doomscrolling of the Trump era. But Axios treated the story in the way that conventional political journalism treats most issues, by creating a partisan frame. They examined traffic data for 24 news sites, divided into “far right,” “right-leaning,” “mainstream,” “left-leaning,” and “far left.” The article didn’t specify how these were defined or which sites were placed in which group, but a few were called out by name: Mother Jones in the “far left” group, and on the “far right,” the disinformation hub…

For months, Republican lawmakers have publicly downplayed the threat and the mayhem of the January 6 Capitol assault that left five dead. But their colleagues’ growing fears of extremist violence are clearly, if quietly, reflected in recent campaign finance filings that capture a surge in security spending. In fact, in the days following the rebellion, the party committees that work to elect more GOP lawmakers formally asked the Federal Election Commission to clear the way for elected officials and candidates to spend campaign funds on security details. Even before the FEC gave a green light in March, our analysis shows that House and Senate members spent early 2021 shelling out a record amount for protective measures. From bodyguards to residential security firms that specialize in reinforced doors, bulletproof glass, and…

We Americans sure are angry these days. Everyone says so, so it must be true. But who or what are we angry at? Pandemic stresses aside, I’d bet you’re not especially angry at your family. Or your friends. Or your priest or your plumber or your postal carrier. Or even your boss. Unless, of course, the conversation turns to politics. That’s when we start shouting at each other. We are way, way angrier about politics than we used to be, something confirmed by both common experience and formal research. When did this all start? Here are a few data points to consider. From 1994 to 2000, according to the Pew Research Center, only 16 percent of Democrats held a “very unfavorable” view of Republicans, but then these feelings started to…

Just five minutes away from Debra Furr-Holden’s cluttered home office in Flint is the house she lived in as a teenager, on Pontiac Street, in a zip code that now has among the lowest life expectancies in the city: 73 years. I learned that last bit from Furr-Holden herself. She cited the figure the way you or I might describe a neighborhood by mentioning a famous building or some movie scene that was shot there. Furr-Holden is the associate dean for public health integration at Michigan State’s College of Human Medicine, and she sees the world through an epidemiologist’s eyes. Life and death are bound up in the particular conditions of place—in what Furr-Holden and her colleagues would call the social determinants of health. “Zip code,” as she put it,…

WEEK 124 Their story—the one I was writing, and the one I had no power to write—had to have a happy ending. There was no other way. Juan Carlos Perla, a man of faith and a man of rules, insisted Of course, it wasn’t that simple. His story, after all, is something of a parable about the crushing machinery of the Trump era’s immigration system. What’s more, we weren’t even at the ending. It was early March, two days before he and his wife, Aracely, and their three young boys would finally be allowed to enter the United States. From the small room in a Tijuana church where the Salvadoran family had been living for the past nine months, Juan Carlos, 38 years old, was asking me what it feels…

Recently, while volunteering as a union organizer for freelance journalists, I spoke with a skeptical member. “Really, what is my ROI?” he asked. I tried to explain that the union is not a business. There are no customers or investors. His dues would uplift the group, but that process may benefit some more than others. We tend to forget that the word “investment” has a specific technical usage—money spent in pursuit of profit—and that “return on investment” is more technical still, a ratio of profit to invested capital. This person was using “ROI” in the looser, colloquial sense, so disturbingly widespread in the American lexicon that we hardly notice it. Without batting an eye, a man in New Jersey can sing the praises of a local retiring pastor by noting…

Spring was a bad season for carnivores: Popular cooking website Epicurious committed publicly to leaving beef out of all of its recipes, and one of the world’s most famous fine dining restaurants, Eleven Madison Park, announced that it was nixing all meat from its menu. Both moves were made in the name of environmental sustainability—meat production is thought to be responsible for around 15 percent of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. While the news may have put ranchers on the defensive, entrepreneurs in another industry were jumping for joy. For the past few years, companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have been betting that their plant-based replicas of burgers and sausages will encourage people to ditch meat en masse. Fake meats currently make up less than half a percent…

While worker-owned cooperatives make up only a tiny sliver of US businesses, the chaos and privations of the pandemic have helped make them newly popular. “It’s typical of what people do when their government is unable to meet the moment,” says Mo Manklang, policy director at the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives. Given new extremes of income inequality, corporate consolidation, and union-busting—and with what work is available being increasingly unstable and episodic—it’s no wonder that people are drawn to a model that returns them power. That interest has helped drive a boom; a 2019 survey the USFWC helped produce found 465 such enterprises—a 36 percent jump in five years. Being a worker-owner can be part of what Emily Kawano, a co-director of the Wellspring Cooperative Corporation, describes as making a…

Early one May morning, I escaped Tucson’s unrelenting grid and drove south through Pima County on Arizona’s state Route 83, into the heart of the Madrean Sky Islands, an almost mythical landscape of shadowy, isolated peaks where several biological zones overlap. The blue-gray Whetstone Mountains marked the distant eastern horizon, the Patagonias loomed to the south, and to the immediate west rose the camelback ridgeline of the Santa Ritas. There, oaks and junipers stippled upper elevations, and rolling swells of grass blanketed low slopes. A haven for wildlife and a balm for those seeking respite in nature, this region contains some of the rarest intact ecosystems and the highest-quality streams among the deserts of the Southwest, providing habitat for ocelots, jaguars, and a dozen other endangered species. I parked just…

ACT I RAPE He has lured her into his apartment, smeared her with cocaine, drenched her in opinions about Consider the Lobster as he inches closer to her on the futon. She is bleary-eyed, listless, her consonants soft at the edges. “I feel such a connection to you,” Neil assures her, before prying her bare legs apart with his hand. “I needa go home,” she says. “Noo, don’t go, stay,” he whispers, marking her neck with kisses. “Oh my god, you are so, so pretty.” “I need to go home,” she repeats, but instead his hands disappear under her skirt. Then her eyes snap open. “Hey Neil,” she says, no longer drunk, her voice suddenly self-assured and lucid, her hand shooting out to grab his face: “I said I need…

In early January 2020, months before the World Health Organization officially uttered the word “pandemic,” a research hospital in Shanghai received a sample of a mysterious virus that had sparked a cluster of pneumonia cases more than 400 miles away, in Wuhan. Virologist Zhang Yongzhen, who had studied thousands of new viruses over the course of his career, quickly got to work. Zhang sequenced the virus’s genome in less than two days and submitted his results to a US-run database for review. But, knowing that there was no time to waste, Zhang and a colleague also decided to post the sequence on an open-access site. It was a turning point: Even as the virus, which we now know as SARS-CoV-2, began to spread globally, researchers everywhere had already started using…