Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2021 i Mother Jones

By the time you read this, the 20th anniversary of 9/11 will be far in the rearview mirror, and so will the “where were you” recollections that dominated the news in early September. So let’s talk instead about what happened after the tragic attacks: a failure of journalism that helped lay the groundwork for so many failures to come. That morning in September 2001, I headed to the Mother Jones newsroom—the only place I could imagine being. I watched cable news, typed queries into a still-newish search engine named Google, called up sources in DC (few picked up). Everything was confusing, but one theme soon emerged: America’s warmongers were not about to let a crisis go to waste. Pundits like ex–CIA Director R. James Woolsey went on CNN urging war…

One morning this spring, Cat Brooks got a call letting her know that Oakland police were swarming a crashed car on East 25th Street. The driver of the silver hatchback was unresponsive, and his stereo had been blasting R&B for an hour before a neighbor, worried the man might need an ambulance, called 911. The neighbor hadn’t seen the gun in his lap, but the cops who arrived did. At least 16 police officers soon took over the block and surrounded Lavel Jones, a father of four, who remained in the driver’s seat, appearing to pass in and out of consciousness. Brooks rushed to the scene. An anti-racist activist and former mayoral candidate, in 2012 Brooks co-founded the Anti Police-Terror Project, dedicated to fighting police brutality targeting Black, brown, and…

It would be hard to deny today that the male chauvinist pig is still alive and kicking, running amok in his own filth. The election of Donald Trump and his “grab ’em by the pussy” regime mixed misogyny, mockery, and race privilege with delight. Andrew Cuomo’s domineering behavior in politics echoed his sexually belittling actions in private. Both were proud of being jerks, personally and professionally, and both got called “male chauvinist pigs.” Calling someone a male chauvinist pig offers sweet revenge, a chance to dehumanize those who dehumanized you. But the insult contains more than a laugh. The three jabs in quick succession—male, chauvinist, pig—are part of feminist attempts to place men’s sexism within a broader American political milieu. The phrase is also a prime example of how men…

Before it was dissolved this fall, Purdue Pharma made billions selling the painkillers behind the overdose crisis while giving millions to patient advocacy groups, doctors’ organizations, and academia—spending that effectively served as an OxyContin marketing blitz. Yet the details of this largesse have long been murky. Congressional and media investigations have named only a handful of recipients, and a more comprehensive view of Purdue’s payouts didn’t exist—until now. Buried among thousands of opioid litigation documents is a 44-page spreadsheet from the company detailing more than $115 million in disbursements to nearly 800 organizations, including medical societies, police associations, anti-drug campaigns, and political networks. The data, which runs from 2002 to early 2015, reveals that groups like the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, PhRMA, and the Patient Advocate Foundation took even…

It was 5 A.M. and still dark as we rolled west out of Santo Domingo, on a cool morning in May 2019. We rode through the tourist zone, past whitewashed Spanish colonial buildings, pointing our truck toward the Haitian border. A sliver of waning moon hung in the eastern sky. After three decades, I’d returned to the Dominican Republic, pulled back by the haunting memory of a Haitian child. All stick legs and sunken eyes, he stood barefoot and shirtless under a fierce and pounding sun, surrounded by endless fields of Dominican sugarcane. His name was Lulu Pierre; he was 14 years old. I’d met him in March 1991, when I went to a Dominican state-run sugar work camp, known as a batey, to investigate widespread human trafficking and forced…

When David Boulware read that a cheap and plentiful drug called ivermectin had shown some promise in treating COVID-19, he was eager to study it. The University of Minnesota physician and infectious disease researcher had seen a few small but encouraging studies on the drug, which was most often used to treat parasites in both animals and people. Boulware set up the study early in 2021 with a methodology considered to be the gold standard: the randomized controlled trial, where one group of patients receives the drug, and the other gets a placebo. In May, Boulware’s team put the word out about the study, aiming to recruit 1,100 volunteers. But then something strange happened: He began to receive hostile emails from people who fervently believed that ivermectin was a miracle…

I drove to Oregon because I wanted to see the future. Our rapidly changing climate vexes me, keeps me up at night—perhaps you’ve felt this, too—and recently I’d become particularly preoccupied with trees. In California, where I live, climate change helped kill nearly 62 million trees in 2016 alone, and last year, 4.2 million acres of our state burned. I wanted to know what was in store for our forests and, because we humans rely on them for so much—for clean air, for carbon sequestration, for biodiversity, for habitat, for lumber and money, for joy—what was in store for us. I’d read about a group of scientists who were not only studying the calamities befalling our forests but also working to help the trees migrate in advance of coming doom. So…

Joyce Faye Nelson-Crockett was 13 years old in 1955, dancing to a jukebox in the Hughes Cafe on a Saturday night in East Texas with her sister and her 16-year-old cousin, John Earl Reese. The boy had come home to the nearby town of Mayflower earlier that day after a summer away picking cotton, and he held Nelson-Crockett’s hand as he spun her around the room. All of a sudden, a sharp crack interrupted the music. Nelson-Crockett thought it was fireworks at first, until she heard a thud on the floor and noticed Reese lying there. “I looked and saw his brain coming out of his head,” she later told a reporter. She felt warm liquid running down her arm and saw that she’d been struck, too, in her wrist.…

WE’RE DRIVING toward Porterville, California, when Matt Black explains his attempt to escape geography. Black is a photographer, and Central Valley towns like this have long been the setting of his work, the people in them his subjects. Farmers and migrant workers. Droughts and heat waves. It’s a corner of the country he felt needed attention, the breadbasket of America. It’s his home. Place may have been at the heart of his photography, gritty and black-and-white images rooted strongly in a social documentary tradition, but by 2014 Black had come to realize that place could be a prison, too. The iconic depictions of the Central Valley—from The Grapes of Wrath to the photos of Dorothea Lange to the more recent work focusing on the lives of Latinx migrants—seemed to lock…

America's Corn Belt—a broad swath of land stretching from Nebraska to Ohio—ranks as the globe’s most agriculturally productive region during the summer months. Its farms churn out the bulk of domestically grown corn and soybeans, most of which goes to feed the livestock that satisfies our meat habit, makes cheap fat and sweeteners for Big Food, and produces the ethanol that constitutes about 10 percent of our car fuel. It’s also an ecological basket case. Fertilizer-laden farm runoff pollutes rivers, lakes, and wells. Ultimately, these chemicals flow to the Gulf of Mexico, where they feed an algae bloom bigger than Connecticut that every year morphs into an aquatic dead zone. Worse, under assault from increasingly fierce storms, the Corn Belt’s fields are hemorrhaging its most precious resource, topsoil. In a…