Indholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2019 i Mother Jones

THERE’S AN INFAMOUS SAYING often attributed to Josef Stalin: One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. In the Trump administration, you might say: One scandal is an outrage, a million scandals is the new normal. That’s something we’re thinking about as we work on how Mother Jones can most effectively cover the critical 16 months ahead. What do you, our readers, need us to do to get beyond the day-to-day crazy and show the full picture? Where can our work have the most impact? There’s an idea we keep coming back to, and to illustrate it, we wanted to open the box a bit about the way MoJo journalists work. Rewind for a minute to early March. Amid the buzz and speculation about the impending Mueller…

ON ELECTION NIGHT 2016, Kim Cobb, a professor at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, was on Christmas Island, the world’s largest ring-shaped coral reef atoll, about 1,300 miles south of Hawaii. A climate scientist, she was collecting coral skeletons to produce estimates of past ocean temperatures. She had been taking these sorts of research trips for two decades, and over recent years she had witnessed about 85 percent of the island’s reef system perish due to rising ocean temperatures. “I was diving with tears in my eyes,” she recalls. In a row house made of cinder blocks on the tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, she monitored the American election results, using a satellite uplink that took several minutes to load a…

IN THE SUMMER OF 2014, officials in Toledo, Ohio, announced that the city’s tap water was no longer safe to drink. A toxic algae bloom caused by fertilizer runoff had poisoned Lake Erie, the primary water source for the area’s half-million residents, sickening more than 100 people. Stores emptied of bottled water within hours. For three days, “it was just total panic,” recalls Markie Miller. “People were fighting over it.” Miller joined Toledoans for Safe Water, a group of residents who had been trying to convince officials to clean up the lake, to no avail. Then, in late 2015, members of the group attended a presentation put on by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund about advancing the “rights of nature”—the idea that ecosystems, like humans, have legal rights. After…

Mother Jones Washington, DC, Bureau Chief DAVID CORN is the co-author of Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump. After covering Russiagate for years, he thought he needed a breather and turned his attention to…climate change (“Weight of the World,” page 18). He quickly realized he was covering another story where reality and fundamental facts are denied by people in power. Brooklyn-based photographer DEVIN YALKIN grappled with his fear of falling to climb a slippery cliff along Bodega Bay, in Northern California, and capture an image of the waves crashing against the rocks beneath him (page 18). His black-and-white photographs have been published in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone. He is currently at work on…

BRIAN AND ED KRASSENSTEIN Credentials: Twins, cryptocurrency speculators, and Florida men once raided by the feds as part of a possible fraud investigation Known for: Inserting themselves into Trump’s Twitter replies Profit center: A $19 donation to their Patreon account to fund their podcast, The KrassenCast, gets you a copy of their satirical children’s book, How the People Trumped Ronald Plump. SETH ABRAMSON Credentials: Creative writing professor, poet Known for: Extremely long Twitter threads about collusion. Wrote a 451-tweet thread in response to Mueller report. Profit center: His New York Times bestseller Proof of Collusion. (A sequel, Proof of Conspiracy, is out this summer.) LOUISE MENSCH Credentials: Former Tory MP and author of the novel Sparkles Known for: First reporting that Trump aides had been snared in a FISA wiretap.…

ON A FRIGID MARCH morning, Eric Holder strode into a brick union hall on the west side of Milwaukee, across from a credit union and an auto body shop. The Merrill Park neighborhood was once the center of the city’s Irish political machine, filled with stately Victorian houses—including the childhood home of Spencer Tracy—but it was now mostly African American and economically depressed. Holder had dressed down from his usual suit and tie: He wore a black fleece jacket, white button-down, and dark blue jeans. He was warmly greeted by Angela Lang, the 29-year-old executive director of Black Leaders Organizing for Communities (BLOC), a local group that works to increase voter turnout in Milwaukee’s black neighborhoods from an office in the union hall’s basement, which was filled with campaign flyers…

SUHAIL HAMOUD remembers when his Free Syrian Army (FSA) brigade got its first arms shipment from the CIA. The delivery, made along the Turkey-Syria border in January 2014, included 24 pickups and six large trucks full of weapons and ammunition. Most of it was Russian-made mortars, artillery shells, and heavy machine guns. But what caught his eye were the TOW (tube-launched, optically tracked, wireless-guided) anti-tank missiles, the only American-made weapons in the load. Hamoud had been an anti-tank specialist in President Bashar al-Assad’s special forces before he defected in 2012, and he had never seen these weapons in Syria before. The opposition occasionally captured Russian-made anti-tank missiles from regime troops or bought them on the black market for $110,000 each. If the CIA’s shipments kept coming, it would be the…

MORE THAN 120 years ago, a scientist named Wilbur Atwater launched what would become an enduring dieting trend: He started meticulously counting calories. In a series of experiments, Atwater set fire to hundreds of foods and measured the released energy. In another experiment, he and his team planted a grad student in an airtight “room calorimeter” and passed him portions of bread and beans and determined how much heat, carbon dioxide, and waste he generated. To this day, when the food industry lists calories on labels, as required by federal law, it often relies on Atwater’s calculations. Atwater’s work helped give rise to the nutritional dogma that your body weight is governed by whether you burn off all the calories you eat. Just ask chips-and-soda giant PepsiCo. When “the amount…

IN EARLY MARCH, just a week before the Midwest was inundated by catastrophic flooding, a dozen farmers gathered at the First Presbyterian Church in Grinnell, Iowa, for an event billed as a conversation about “Faith, Farmers, and Climate Action.” “How is God calling you to use your farm to improve the world?” asked the evening’s facilitator, Matt Russell. “We’ve got this narrowing window of time in which we can act,” he said. “When we think about climate action—are you feeling any call to that?” Russell directs the Iowa branch of Interfaith Power and Light, a nonprofit that promotes a religious response to global warming. A fifth-generation farmer who runs a livestock operation with his husband in nearby Lacona, Iowa, the 48-year-old nearly became a Catholic priest in his twenties but…

BEHIND THE FENCE of a refugee camp in the green plains of northeastern Syria, a white woman approaches from the sea of tents. Her long brown hair spills out of a beanie, and there is a black tattoo of a kiss on her neck. She tells me she’d like to talk, and we sit down in a prefabricated office on the edge of the camp. An intelligence officer from the Kurdish women’s militia listens in to our conversation. Samantha Elhassani tells me she’s an American and a Christian and that she’d come from Indiana to Syria with her young son and daughter after her husband decided to join ISIS without telling her. “I was not aware we were coming to Syria,” she says. She lived under control of the Islamic…

"WHAT'S UP WITH THE CAMERA?" asks the wild-looking American special forces operative standing outside my car window. He had a sculpted beard, angry eyes, huge tattooed arms, and an M16 slung across his chest. I've just entered Raqqa, and his large white SUV has pulled me and my driver over.  “I’m a journalist,” I tell him. “Oh are you, now? You took a picture of my motorcade?” “No, I didn’t,” I reply. When I saw the SUVs full of special forces zoom past, I had pulled out my camera, but I was too late to get anything. “Are you sure?” “Yeah, but I’m a journalist.” “Okay, I don’t care if you are a journalist. You don’t take pictures of my motorcade. Period.” “I’m an American,” I say. “I am free…

IN 2016, I INTERVIEWED the showrunner of Jane the Virgin, Jennie Snyder Urman. She was smart and candid, and we had a good conversation about Jane, one of the most inventive, emotionally layered shows on television. But in my write-up, I said that Jane, which is about a 23-year-old Catholic virgin who is accidentally inseminated at a gynecological appointment, has a “silly premise.” I wrote that I’d called Snyder Urman up for a “little chat.” Even in the course of making the case for Jane’s seriousness of purpose, my language was trivializing, infantilizing. Would I have said that Mad Men has a silly premise? Would I have had a “little chat” with David Chase or Vince Gilligan? Jane the Virgin is the sort of television that often gets called a…