Indholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2020 i Mother Jones

JESSICA CISNEROS needed to find a dentist. When she decided to challenge Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar in the upcoming Democratic primary, Cisneros quit her job and moved back in with her parents in Laredo to save money. She’d bought her own insurance plan after turning 26 last May, but it didn’t include dental, and she still had six figures in law school debt. So when Cisneros needed a root canal in July, she went with the cheapest option: Mexico. Affordable and accessible health care is hard to come by on the border. A third of the county she lives in is uninsured. Diabetics go to Nuevo Laredo for insulin. Women go there for birth control. Cisneros met a woman who saved up for a mammogram, only to be hit with…

I’ll take a wild guess that you don’t need any convincing about the need for action on climate change. You know that since the start of the Industrial Revolution we’ve dumped more than 500 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere and we’re adding about 10 billion more each year. You know that global temperatures have risen 1 degree Celsius over the past century and we’re on track for 2 degrees within another few decades. And you know what this means. It means more extreme weather. More hurricanes. More droughts. More flooding. More wildfires. More heat-related deaths. There will be more infectious disease as insects move ever farther north. The Northwest Passage will be open for much of the year. Sea levels will rise by several feet as the ice…

When almost no one she spoke to had heard of Momentum, the organizing framework behind the Sunrise Movement (“The Young and the Relentless”), Mother Jones climate reporter REBECCA LEBER knew she was on to something. A 2018 Vermont Law School fellow and winner of a 2017 SEAL Environmental Journalism Award, she interviewed sources as young as 8 and as old as (nearly) 80 in 2019. Mother Jones writing fellow JACOB ROSENBERG attended the Bay Area gathering Stoicon-X to learn about Stoicism as modern self-help (“The Grueling Class”). There, he spoke to one man who compared the Stoic tradition to Dr. Phil. Rosenberg encountered the Stoics through his mom, who skipped lunch in high school to learn Latin. He’s worked at the Arkansas Times and has written for the Oxford American.…

ON MAY 31, a disgruntled city employee entered a municipal building in Virginia Beach and opened fire, killing 12 people. Virginians were horrified, then outraged. Ever since the mass shooting that killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, there’d been a growing push to strengthen the state’s comparatively loose gun laws. But Virginia Beach was a tipping point: Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam convened a special legislative session in July with the sole purpose of passing gun control laws. Yet Virginia is also home to the National Rifle Association. On the day legislators gathered in Richmond, NRA officials turned the Republican House speaker’s conference room into a de facto war room, distributing hundreds of hats and T-shirts to the gun rights supporters who showed up at the Capitol. Some were…

RENEWABLE ENERGY Over the past 40 years, the price of delivering one watt of solar power has dropped from about $100 to $1. This makes solar one of the most promising success stories of carbon-free power, and a technology that needs relatively little government research help to keep improving. But although the cost is now close to that of the most efficient natural gas power plants, close isn’t always good enough for investors. The price of large-scale solar needs to keep dropping if it’s going to have a serious global impact, and money for both R&D and the massive infrastructure build-outs that the Green New Deal framework imagines can make that happen. The same is true of wind turbine technology, which has benefited from steady improvements in blade design, tower…

IT’S NOT HARD TO think of a historical precedent for President Donald Trump’s attempts to trade military assistance to the Ukrainian government for actionable dirt on his chief political rival. The pathetic desperation of the crime itself, the bungling attempt at a cover-up, the incriminating transcript—“it really is stupid Watergate,” one Democrat told the Washington Post in September. The similarities to the scandal that forced Richard Nixon from office in 1974 extend to the people talking about it. An attorney on Nixon’s House impeachment committee, Bill Weld, is running for president. John Dean, Nixon’s White House counsel, and Carl Bernstein, who helped break the scandal, are CNN contributors. A Nixon dirty trickster, Roger Stone, recently went on trial for doing more of the same for Trump. And of course there’s…

OF ALL THE INSULTS that greenhouse gases hurl at our food supply—a warming climate that triggers more severe droughts and floods in key agriculture regions like the Midwest and California, declining yields of staple crops—the most insidious may involve the deterioration of the nutritional quality of plants we eat. That’s the startling message of growing research led by Irakli Loladze, a mathematical biologist with joint appointments at the Bryan College of Health Sciences in Nebraska and Arizona State University. Ever since we started burning massive amounts of coal three centuries ago, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have nearly doubled. Plants are very flexible in their chemical composition, Loladze says. When the air that surrounds plants is richer in CO2, they use it to synthesize more carbohydrates, including starches and sugars, which…

BEHIND THE WALLS of California State Prison, Sacramento, six inmates gather in the library for their weekly short-story club. It almost feels like a classroom, except that the computers don’t connect to the internet, and there are no cozy chairs or natural light. A back room has metal cages where prisoners with behavioral problems can do legal research. About half of the books are donations, and the pickings are limited: Nonfiction is kept behind the counter, and most of the fiction is locked away in another small room. Michael Blanco, who is 19 years into an 87-to-life sentence, says this is a vast improvement over his last facility. “Right here is all right because you can fill out a form and ask for books and request them. It might take…

IN NOVEMBER 2018, I was enjoying a post-midterms vacation when I saw the news: Six days after Democrats had taken back the House, a scrappy group of 150 young people staged a sit-in at Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office because they weren’t convinced by her pledge to push forward on climate change legislation. The hourslong protest might have been a forgotten blip in the news cycle—if progressive star Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hadn’t stopped by. Her cameo set off a chain of events that meant, by the time I returned to DC, there were teenage and twentysomething activists everywhere in black T-shirts emblazoned with a symbol of a rising sun. They called themselves the Sunrise Movement, and they were calling for an ambitious bundle of climate legislation known as the Green…

WHEN I WALKED into the Obria clinic in Whittier, California, one evening in July, a woman in a modest floral-print dress organizing bundles of diapers in a back room greeted me hopefully. She thought I’d come for a class. Instead, I asked if I had come to the right place for birth control. Furrowing her brow, she walked around a couch and through a cozy waiting room full of baby toys to the front desk. “What sort of services were you looking for?” she inquired. I asked if they dispensed the morning-after pill, the emergency contraception often called “Plan B.” She told me curtly, “We don’t provide that or refer for any birth control here.” I wasn’t surprised. For most of its existence, this clinic has been known as the…

THERE’S A RUNNING JOKE IN Latinx circles about Puerto Ricans and their love for their flag. “How did you know I was Puerto Rican?” reads the caption on a popular meme accompanying a photo of a woman wearing Puerto Rican flags from head to toe. On the West Side of Chicago, the steel Puerto Rican flags that welcome visitors to the historic Paseo Boricua are a full 59 feet tall. All this goes beyond mere island pride. Puerto Rican political identity is woven into the fibers of the territory’s flag—or flags. “It’s not only a symbol of national affirmation,” says historian Jorell Meléndez-Badillo. “It’s used as a symbol of resistance to colonialism.” Flags are how the oldest colony in the world imagines itself into nationhood. The First Flag: Starting in…