Mother Jones
I no longer find the the overwrought drama over whether Elon Musk will acquire Twitter interesting. The showdown has simply overextended itself, featuring more inexplicable legal jargon with each new development. So, until some sort of resolution emerges, I’ll be ducking every headline dedicated to the billion-dollar saga. Still, I am all in for Musk gossip […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In the late 1970s, a physicist and textiles engineer in Texas named Robert Steadman published a paper called “The Assessment of Sultriness.” The title reflected an unpleasant sort of steaminess—how temperature and humidity combine to make life hard on the body. […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. This year’s midterm elections will decide the direction of a massive legislative package meant to tackle the nation’s agricultural problems. Republican Senate and House members are already vowing they won’t pack it with climate “buzzwords.” Roughly every five years, lawmakers pass The Farm […]
Mother JonesAt a rally for Nevada Republican candidates on Saturday, Republican nominee for secretary of state Jim Marchant promised that he and his fellow GOP nominees, if elected next month, would reinstall Donald Trump in the White House in 2024. “We’re gonna fix the whole country and President Trump is gonna be president again,” Marchant promised as Trump stood […]
Mother JonesOn Saturday, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) implied Black Americans were “the people that do the crime” in comments railing against reparations. Speaking at a Donald Trump rally for Republican candidates in Nevada, Tuberville described Democrats as engaged in a battle to take from white people and give to Black people whom he stereotyped as criminals. Democrats […]
Mother JonesOhio’s near-total abortion ban will remain on hold as a challenge to the law proceeds in state court, a judge ruled Friday, allowing abortions up to 20 weeks gestation to proceed. The case, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood last month, has already showcased the harmful effects of Ohio’s abortion ban […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Week by week, thanks in large part to climate change, it seems we hear new stories of natural disasters and their horrific effects across the United States: hurricanes slamming Puerto Rico and Florida, droughts in the American Southwest, wildfires scorching the Pacific Northwest as well as punishing heat […]
Mother JonesNew Hampshire Republican Senate candidate Don Bolduc told supporters last week that abortion decisions “belong” to “gentlemen” in the state legislature. At a Wednesday night town hall in Auburn, Bolduc said, “It belongs to the state. It belongs to these gentlemen right here, who are state legislators representing you. That is the best way I […]
Mother JonesRikers Island, New York City’s main prison complex, has long been scrutinized as a hotbed of chaos and violence. Now, new images published in a recent Gothamist exposé give a startling look at the squalid, dangerous conditions inside the jails. We obtained & published exclusive photos from inside Rikers Island jails, icymi. They were shown […]
Mother JonesTV Host Jon Stewart received a flurry of praise on Friday for his unyielding interview with Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, who fought for legislation denying anyone under 18 access to gender-affirming treatments. The law, passed last year, is the subject of a legal challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union. A trial on whether […]
Mother JonesPatrick Orlando is trying to get Donald Trump’s attention. With a critical shareholder vote fast approaching, the CEO of the beleaguered Digital World Acquisition Corp.—a so-called SPAC that is supposed to merge with the former president’s social media company—needs all the help he can get. In recent weeks, Orlando has repeatedly tagged Trump on TruthSocial […]
Mother Jones“Ralph who?” my teen asked the other day as I waited on hold to be connected with Ralph Nader. I wasn’t too surprised—it’s been a long time since Nader helped launch the modern consumer advocacy movement, starting with the revelation that the auto industry was cold-bloodedly prioritizing profits ahead of drivers’ lives. Nader was perhaps […]
Mother JonesThis story is a collaboration between The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Mother Jones, and Enlace Latino NC. When the tobacco giant Reynolds American cut a check for Brent Jackson’s political campaign in November 2019, it was well aware of the accusations against the Republican North Carolina state senator. Jackson—dubbed “the only mega-farmer” in the North […]
Mother JonesThe US military has spent decades cultivating a corrosive environmental legacy around the world. Just last December, about 6,000 people became sick when jet fuel from a World War II-era Navy storage facility reportedly leaked into the drinking water aquifers of Hawaiian residents. Famously, at North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune military base, up to 1 million […]
Mother JonesIf you’ve watched even a sliver of the campaign ads ahead of the midterms, you’d be forgiven for believing that American cities have turned into cesspools of crime. In a recent ad for New York’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, Rep. Lee Zeldin, a montage of grainy video footage shuffles between images of pedestrians and even children […]
Mother JonesOn Thursday, President Joe Biden said that he would pardon all prior federal marijuana possession offenses. President Biden announced the change—aimed at remedying the socioeconomic disadvantages that people, particularly Black and brown people, face for convictions of marijuana possession—to “relieve the collateral consequences arising from these convictions.” Since many marijuana possession charges are filed at […]
Mother JonesOn Monday, the Daily Beast reported that Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker—who supports forcing women to carry pregnancies to term with no exceptions, even if doing so could lead to death—once asked a woman he impregnated to get an abortion, and then paid for the procedure. Walker vowed that evening that he would sue […]
Mother JonesIn the immediate aftermath of such horror, it’s challenging to think beyond the profound suffering of all the people victimized by a mass murder and to focus on the constructive. Yet, initial reporting on Thursday’s massacre of at least 38 people in northern Thailand, a majority of them children, has already revealed behavioral patterns from the […]
Mother JonesI met my husband in 2008 and therefore skipped the whole online dating universe that dominates how we hook up and fall in love in 2022. So I was pretty excited to try out The Right Stuff—the Peter Thiel-backed dating app for conservatives—you know, for journalism, and end my personal streak of dating-app virginity. “Inae […]
Mother JonesIn August 1944, just two months after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (a.k.a. the GI Bill of Rights), Harry McAlpin, Washington correspondent for the National Negro Publishers Association, warned that the new law, though race-neutral on its face, would exclude Black veterans. The GI Bill included funding for housing, college, and […]
Mother JonesEditor’s note: This essay is anonymous in order to protect the writer from potential reprisals. Russia is not at war, despite what you may have heard. Despite the mobilization of reservists, the stories and images of destruction and death, despite the refugees fleeing. Russia is not at war, as Dmitry Peskov, press secretary of the […]
Mother JonesThis video was created by Pattrn and is shared here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. North Carolina’s Outer Banks are home to beautiful beaches, historic sites, and native wildlife. They are also a vacation destination for thousands of people each year. But rising seas and declining beaches have put it all in jeopardy. The islands, and people’s […]
Mother JonesAfter Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) clinched the Republican nomination for Congress in the state’s right-leaning third district, it seemed like she was a shoo-in for the general election. But recent polling suggests that Boebert’s re-election isn’t as sure as it appears. A new poll by Keating Research has shown Boebert to have the support of […]
Mother JonesAs the death toll continues to rise from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Ian, President Joe Biden on Wednesday visited several storm-ravaged communities in Florida to meet with survivors and thank first responders working tirelessly on the ground. “We’ve got a long road ahead of us,” said Biden. “I want the people of Florida to […]
Mother JonesTwo months before the 2020 election, Joe Kent, a 40-year-old former Green Beret, was being interviewed on a little-watched show called There Will Be Bourbon. With his wavy shoulder-length hair, beard, and T-shirt, Kent looked to be enjoying the privileges of civilian life. But he was disturbed by parallels he was seeing between Iraq and […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. If you want to cross the Rillito River in Tucson, Arizona, anytime between October and July, you probably won’t need a boat, a bridge, waders or even waterproof shoes. Most of the year the river […]
Mother JonesThe Central Intelligence Agency has a penchant for producing hagiographic narratives about itself. Its new podcast is no exception. The Langley Files, which debuted on September 19, bills itself as a show that provides the public with a “unique look behind the curtain,” sharing interviews with CIA officials and other “exciting” guests, educating the world […]
Mother JonesThe Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority often rely on “originalism,” professing to apply the Constitution as they believe the founders intended—and did so last term to issue rulings eroding Americans’ rights to abortion and gun control. On Tuesday, during her second day of arguments as a Supreme Court justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson applied this same originalist […]
Mother JonesEditor’s note: This column by David Corn first appeared in his newsletter, Our Land. But we wanted to make sure as many readers as possible have a chance to see it. Our Land is written by David twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories about politics and media; his unvarnished take on the events of the […]
Mother Jones“Violations of the [Voting Rights Act] should not be made too easy to prove,” a young John Roberts wrote when he worked in the Reagan administration in 1982, “since they provide a basis for the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes.” Forty years later, the court’s conservative majority seems […]