Indholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2023 i Mother Jones

THE FIRST TIME I spoke with Olga Shpak, I made the mistake of beginning by asking for some basic biographical information. “I used to be a scientist,” she said, not sounding bitter, only a bit nostalgic. Now, she clarified, she’s a war volunteer. Shpak built a storied career studying Arctic and sub-Arctic marine mammals as a researcher at Moscow’s prestigious A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution. Her work inspired some of Russia’s most significant whale conservation measures over the last decade, including protections for bowheads in the Sea of Okhotsk, an Alaska-sized body of water on the country’s Pacific coast. But in February last year, just as Vladimir Putin prepared to invade her home country of Ukraine, Shpak was forced to flee, leaving Russia—and its whales—behind. “There were relatively…

ANY WOMAN WHO WORKS in the maritime industry will remember where she was when she read about Midshipman X. This was the pseudonym used by a student at the US Merchant Marine Academy when she published a blog post in September 2021 alleging that, as a 19-year-old cadet on board a cargo ship, she was raped by a senior officer. Afterward, the officer intimidated and threatened her; she had to remain on the ship and work alongside him for another 50 days. The horrific specificity of Midshipman X’s account jolted the offshore world, as did the fact that she had written about it so publicly. In the Merchant Marine, the ubiquity of sexual violence against women is almost never acknowledged. But Midshipman X wrote that of the more than 50…

IF YOU’RE LIKE ME, you associate pork with the deliciousness of bacon. But lurking behind the pleasure lies something much less savory to think about: the risk of another pandemic. That’s because humans and pigs easily swap influenza viruses. Worse still, pigs can also pick up influenza strains that circulate among birds, whose viruses aren’t well adapted to infecting and spreading among people. Humans don’t have the receptors in our throats and noses that avian flus can easily attach to. Our isolation from avian flus is what makes them dangerous—since our immune systems rarely encounter them, we have little innate ability to fight them off. Enter pigs. They can catch flu strains from birds (often carrying them without symptoms), mash them up with genetic material from human-adapted flus, and create…

THERE’S BEEN A Groundhog Day vibe in media news lately. Every day, it seems, Punxsutawney Phil pokes his head aboveground to find more newsrooms laying journalists off or shutting down altogether. BuzzFeed News—the digital outlet that only a few years ago was winning all the prizes, hiring all the talent, and throwing all the parties—shuttered as its founder, Jonah Peretti, confessed he’d “overinvested” in the newsroom. Vice, another once-swashbuckling shop, has filed for bankruptcy, joining so many others that have fallen on hard times after the ad market soured and Facebook turned off its traffic firehose. In “legacy” media too, powerhouses like the Washington Post, NPR, and CNN announced layoffs, and corporate media owners squeezed what remained of local news, causing newspapers to disappear at the rate of more than two…

IN SEPTEMBER 2017, the Social Security Administration sent Gabriel Burgos’ family a letter warning that their income would be cut in half. Gabriel—a Brooklyn high schooler who lived with his mother, Marlena, and father, Jorge, in a public housing apartment—had recently turned 18. That meant the end of the monthly check he got because of his severe learning disabilities. The family—their names have been changed—was already living in poverty. Three years before, Marlena lost her job as a home health billing clerk; Jorge, due to complications from lifelong diabetes, was unable to work and also collected disability support. The family received food stamps and subsidized rent, but now were facing a future where two Social Security disability checks that once totaled some $1,600 a month would be reduced to $800.…

IN EARLY 2023, California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a “state of emergency” after multiple “atmospheric river systems” slammed the state. The storms flooded highways, caused mudslides, and toppled trees. Newsom’s declaration expedited the response. Police evacuated some senior citizens from parts of the East Bay. Counties and cities distributed sandbags. Crews erected walls to prevent flooding. While this disruption to everyday life certainly looked like an emergency, such catastrophes are now commonplace, especially in California. Annual wildfire season is peaking earlier and ending later. Winter storms packed the Sierra Nevada with three times the usual snow. Somehow, everything is a crisis but also the crises never stop; in fact, the consistency of calamity exacerbates each disaster. As we face a future warped by climate change, it’s worth asking: What does…

ONCE THE CORONAVIRUS made its human debut, it wasn’t long before scientists found the virus in our poop. Fecal samples from the earliest patients, including the first known case in America, revealed people were shedding the virus not only from their noses and mouths, but also through their excrement. This would turn out to be a pivotal discovery: If the virus was in our waste, it had to be in the sewers, too. And the sewers, scientists hoped, held information about how the virus was spreading, Guy H. Palmer, a professor of pathology and infectious diseases at Washington State University, told me. “They started saying, ‘We know this is in the wastewater. Can we measure it?’” The answer was a resounding yes. By sampling sewage, scientists discovered they could estimate…