Innehållsförteckning för September/October 2019 från Mother Jones

To tell the story of a small Oakland public school’s closure, EDWIN RIOS spent this spring roaming its locker-lined halls, watching YouTube with its sixth graders, and getting deep with the school principal (“Class Warfare”). Rios, who has spent three years reporting on education and inequality for Mother Jones, has covered segregation, teachers’ strikes, and a school district devastated by wildfire. ANNIE FLANAGAN’S favorite moments in photography happen when their subjects forget the camera. For the portrait of Mississippi activist Laurie Bertram Roberts (“Where Roe Doesn’t Reach”), Flanagan sat on a bedroom floor for two hours, talking with Roberts until the right moment arrived. Their work has been published in the New York Times, ESPN, and Smithsonian magazine. At first, MICHAELA HAAS believed it was rare for rape survivors to…

RICHARD BURR WAS contrite. It was late February 2017, and the Washington Post had just exposed the North Carolina Republican and chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee for running damage control for the Trump administration over its mounting Russia scandal. Along with Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), his counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee, Burr had spoken to reporters at the behest of the White House to rebut reports that the Trump campaign had repeated contact with Russian intelligence operatives. The combative Nunes made no apologies for his efforts to shield the new president from scrutiny. But Burr was different. He immediately moved to address the criticism. At a closed-door meeting with intelligence committee members days after the story broke, Burr acknowledged he had made a mistake. He pledged to avoid…

“I would drink bleach right now.” Kate shakes her head, and her long, sun-streaked brown hair, piled high in a messy bun, shivers. “That’s so bad, and I don’t mean it,” she quickly adds. She’s exhausted; shadowy crescents frame her bright eyes. Just a few weeks ago, she graduated from the University of Mississippi. “My one goal, as pathetic as it sounds, was do not walk across that stage pregnant,” she says. “Everything I worked for…I’m going to remember graduating and being pregnant.” Kate has been trying to get an abortion since March. It’s a Friday evening at the end of May, and she was just turned away from an Arkansas clinic, about 200 miles from home. In the morning, she’ll have to go back home to Oxford, Mississippi, where…

“Yesterday I saw a lady at Publix use her ‘Access’ welfare card. Her back was covered in tattoos. RT if u support entitlement reform.” In 2013, taking to Twitter to mock a participant in Florida’s public assistance program “This lawsuit reads like it was researched and drafted by Sen Joyner…and spell checked by Sen Bullard.” Responding to a 2015 bill he didn’t like by appearing to question the literacy of two black Florida state senators “The conditions in Haiti are deplorable, they are disgusting. I mean, everywhere you look in Haiti, it’s sheet metal and garbage.” Defending Trump’s description of Haiti as a “shithole” country in January 2018 “Since taking office, President Trump has worked tirelessly to apply maximum pressure on North Korea to end its illicit weapons programs and…

BEHIND THE cheerful faces in these photos is a bitter reality. The life and death of Roots International Academy are in many ways the story of how Oakland, California, reached what education historian Diane Ravitch calls its “inflection point,” a moment when its school system hovers between a vision of education as a public good and one of education as a commodity. “It’s either going to be destroyed by charters,” Ravitch told me, “or the parents and teachers there are going to recover a public school system.” Education reformers have “been successful at disrupting Oakland without improving it.” Born in 2006 during a nationwide “small schools” boom, this public middle school in the East Oakland flatlands shut its doors for good at the end of this past school year, the…

ONE MORNING in February, Brittney, a baby-faced 17-year-old with short black braids, stands in front of a juvenile court judge in Compton, California, talking about kittens. Brittney had been in and out of the justice system since she was 14, after the state removed her from her physically abusive mother. Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, Brittney bounced from group homes to foster care to the streets. She got involved with sex work. She’d been convicted of burglary and attempted robbery; in one incident, Brittney tried to steal a cellphone from a woman sitting at a bus stop with her 3-year-old. But today, Brittney is telling the judge about cats and her work with the veterinary program at the juvenile detention center in the Santa Clarita Valley, where she has spent…

  STANDING ON Shingletown Ridge and gazing west toward the setting sun, Bruce Miller eyes a rainbow of colors. He sees pink: the dusky sky blanketing a postcard-perfect valley 3,000 feet below. He sees gray: distant snow-capped mountains. He sees brown: century-old pine and oak trunks towering more than 100 feet above him. And he sees green: the profit he hopes to make by turning this 274-acre patch of forest into a subdivision for buyers looking for jaw-dropping views. “This would be your high-dollar lot here,” the hearty 68-year-old tells me, halting our hike through a tangle of manzanita and poison oak to unfurl a map and point out the boundaries of a future home site. A sheer drop at the property’s rear reveals a stunning panorama. It also invites…

INSIDE A SERENE natural grocery store in Mill Valley, California, Dr. Jen Gunter is scowling at the women’s health aisle. “What’s wrong with the way the vagina smells?” she scoffs, looking over the topical wipes, creams, and washes promising to resolve undesired aromas. “There are no products here to make balls smell better.” Gunter whips out a pair of tortoiseshell glasses to read the fine print on a tube labeled Good Clean Love pH Balancing & Moisturizing Vaginal Gel ($18.19), which promises to “naturally eliminate feminine odors.” “You don’t need any special wash,” she says. And don’t waste your money on cleansing wipes—“totally scammy.” Gunter is sounding the alarm about how confusion surrounding women’s bodies fuels larger efforts to control them. “All these things are designed to tell you that…

BACK IN 2010, then–first lady Michelle Obama launched a nefarious scheme to turn school cafeterias into liberal indoctrination zones. Or at least that’s how Obama’s right-wing opponents portrayed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, a law she spearheaded that gave the National School Lunch Program its first nutritional update in more than 15 years. Her treachery included requirements for more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and limits on calories in meals. “Here’s Michelle Obama trying to take over the school lunch program,” Rush Limbaugh warned his radio audience. Media outlets passed around photos of kids dumping their lunches into the trash, supposedly taken after the reforms went into effect. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) sponsored a bill to nullify the nutrition rules in 2012, decrying what he called a “misguided nanny state”…

ON ELECTION NIGHT in 2016, Carlos Spector turned off the TV as soon as the networks called it. He shifted on the couch toward his wife, Sandra, and said, “We’re fucked, honey.” The next morning he awoke at 4:30 like always and drove across El Paso to the two-story law office with his name out front. The mahogany desk upstairs was littered with case files. As he sat in front of the large windows that overlooked the border, he asked himself, What are we going to do? Soon attorneys all along the US-Mexico line called him asking that same question, because he was Carlos Spector, and surely he had a plan. His plan, he said, was to wait. Spector specializes in arguing asylum cases with the worst odds, and after…

CAN THE VERY online ever unplug? The question has spawned a cottage industry: everything from offline vacations and “digital detox” apps to books about how we might uncouple ourselves from an economic order in which our very attention is a commodity. Two thoughtful offerings in the latter category come from Oakland, California, artist Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (whose press materials describe her as “what Susan Sontag would have been like if she had brain damage from the internet”). Along with Ashley Feinberg, a reporter for Slate and a twitchily funny Twitter presence, Odell and Tolentino joined Mother Jones in an online chat, condensed here, about how to reclaim and…

IN JUNE, New York’s Museum of Modern Art closed its doors for four months to renovate its permanent collection. This was an expansion in every sense, not just of the collection but of the modern art canon it embodies. MoMA was carving out more space in its galleries—once dubbed “Modern White Guys” by a critic—for female artists and artists of color. “Today we’re saying: Of course there are many histories; the collection represents those many histories,” Ann Temkin, MoMA’s chief curator of paintings and sculpture, told the New York Times about the renovation. “Don’t repeat the dogmatism of the past.” In the same spirit, we asked curators from around the country to tell us which pieces, in their view, belong in the new, reimagined canon.  FROM ANTHOLOGY BY PERFORMANCE ARTIST…