Indholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2023 i Mother Jones

  ON THE COVER Our coverage of November’s colorful, surreal midterms called for equally colorful and surreal art. The perfect artist was London-based ANDREW RAE, whose cover brings to life Washington’s weirdest weirdos and wingiest wingnuts.   CONTRIBUTORS MoJo is named after a hellraising labor leader. Who would you name your magazine for? Pantalones, to honor Luisa Capetillo: feminist labor organizer, anarchist, and the first Puerto Rican woman to publicly wear pants.—Emily Hofstaedter, “Hidden Figures” Albert Parsons, the former Confederate soldier-turned-antislavery-anarchist, for his inspired personal arcs of social change.—Gabbriel Schivone, “Black and Blue” Grace Paley, who wrote her genre-defying short stories on scraps of paper before attending antiwar rallies.—Emma Copley Eisenberg, “Friend Zoned”     BY THE NUMBERS Competitive water polo, financing a new stadium, nepotism—there are lots of ways to…

ON NOVEMBER 14, shortly before the networks called the Arizona governor’s race for Democrat Katie Hobbs, Charlie Kirk, the 29-year-old conservative activist, asked a guest on his YouTube livestream what Republicans had missed. Since moving to the state in 2018, Kirk and his organization, Turning Point USA, have become one of Arizona’s biggest political power brokers, using the state party apparatus to elevate candidates who showed fealty to former President Donald Trump and purge those who did not. Turning Point had been a launch pad for Hobbs’ opponent, the former local newscaster Kari Lake, and Kirk had for days been predicting an easy victory for the rising conservative star. “The vibe on the ground was totally different than this, wasn’t it?” he said, head on his hand, looking mystified. His…

FOR THREE AND a half years, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers’ veto pen was the only thing keeping his state’s Republican legislators from getting everything on their anti-abortion wish list. When they tried to ban abortion based on fetal anomalies, Evers was there to veto it. Block Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood? Evers vetoed that, too. And he shot down a bill that would have required doctors to tell patients they could reverse a medication abortion—a claim the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says is “not based on science.” Then the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Suddenly, the Wisconsin legislature didn’t have to lift a finger. State law appeared to automatically default to an 1849 statute that made performing abortions a felony, with no exceptions for rape or incest—only…

IN HIS NEW BOOK, Illustrated Black History: Honoring the Iconic and the Unseen, graphic designer (and MoJo alum) George McCalman pays homage to Black Americans beyond those normally remembered each February. The book pairs biographical essays with spirited portraits of famous and lesser-known luminaries brought to life with diverse materials, from acrylics to colored pencils, resulting in a collage “as complex and interesting as we are as people,” McCalman says. “If I had rendered them in all the same styles, it would have totally undercut what I thought was an essential part of making this.” To transcend the American urge to “demonize or deify people,” he says: “That is how we actually make peace with our history.”…

IN 2021, on San Francisco's wettest October day on record, an “atmospheric river” dumped a stunning 4.02 inches of rain downtown, causing highways and neighborhoods in the area to flood. Cars were stranded in standing water. And the city’s sewers, which carry both stormwater and sewage, overflowed in the low-lying Marina neighborhood. Officials estimated that 1.4 million gallons of untreated water could have escaped into the bay. For the approximately 700 municipalities in the United States with combined sewers, overflow can happen during periods of heavy rainfall and can lead to polluted waterways, closed beaches, and tainted drinking water. And with climate change, heavier storms are on the horizon. So about 10 years ago, San Francisco began to turn, in part, to a simple solution: planting dozens of public rain…

ON JANUARY 11, 2021, five days after Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol, CNN published an article titled “Experts Warn That Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ Will Outlast His Presidency.” It quoted Timothy Snyder, a historian who wrote the 2017 bestseller On Tyranny. “The idea that Mr. Biden didn’t win the election is a big lie,” Snyder said. “It’s a big lie because you have to disbelieve all kinds of evidence to believe in it. It’s a big lie because you have to believe in a huge conspiracy in order to believe it. And it’s a big lie because, if you believe it, it demands you take radical action.” In the two years since, the phrase “Big Lie” has become central to the story of how Trump incited violence at the Capitol.…

WHEN HE WAS 8 years old, Michael Wang decided he wanted to go to Harvard. “I don’t know if it’s the Asian stereotype,” he told me, “but I saw it as an avenue to social mobility.” Though he wouldn’t have thought of it in these terms when he was 8, Michael meant the sort of upper-echelon mobility familiar to graduates of elite colleges. Specifically, he wanted to be a neurosurgeon. Because he was that sort of kid, he read several peer-reviewed articles about cloning and checked the authors’ credentials. When he saw that many of the researchers had gone to Harvard, he knew that was the college for him. From that point forward, Michael’s parents made it their life’s work to help their only child achieve his goal. Michael’s dad—who goes…

AS I WAS watching the new Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney’s 2017 novel, Conversations With Friends, I kept waiting for something to happen that was never going to happen. The show follows two young women in Dublin, Frances and Bobbi, who become romantically entangled with an older married couple. As the series progressed, I was waiting for Bobbi—the lesbian secondary character to the bisexual main character, Frances—to have her own storyline, one that doesn’t revolve around Frances or Frances’ troubled relationship with a man. I knew this would not happen because I’d read the book. But that didn’t keep me from hoping. Bobbi is just the latest iteration of a burgeoning trope in film, TV, and contemporary literature: the Lesbian Best Friend. The LBF is always the sidekick of a…