Mother Jones
Manhattan’s new Amtrak hub occupies the ground floor of an old Post Office sorting facility across 8th Avenue from Penn Station, and compared to the claustrophobic, sewage-strewn warren next door, Moynihan Train Hall feels like a revelation. Natural light floods through the elegant glass ceiling; at night, you can look up and see the lights […]
Mother JonesThe last time I got in a fight was about four years ago in San Francisco. The incident involved me, my bike, and a car. And when I say fight, I mean a stranger shoved me to the ground and I ran away—the bike under me as I hurried like a child riding a stick that’s supposed […]
Mother JonesWhen I asked Rachel Sweet, a political operative from flyover country, what motivated her to pursue a career of fighting for reproductive rights, she couldn’t pinpoint a specific moment or life experience. She grew up in a politically engaged family that often talked about liberal values. She interned at Planned Parenthood in early adulthood and […]
Mother JonesIt is fitting that I interview illustrator and designer George McCalman on All Saints’ Day. When I flip through his new book, Illustrated Black History: Honoring the Iconic and Unseen, I cannot help but think of the children’s hagiographies of my youth. But rather than Joan of Arc in her armor or Sebastian’s arrow-pierced torso, […]
Mother JonesOn December 8, grainy footage showed WNBA star Brittney Griner landing in San Antonio after being released from 294 days in Russian detention. Griner wore a beanie over her hair that had been chopped off to avoid freezing conditions at the remote Russian penal colony in which she was, until recently, expected to ride out a nine-year […]
Mother JonesIn October 2016, less than a month before Donald Trump would be elected President of the United States, J.D Vance sat down for a conversation at the American Enterprise Institute. This was Vance in his most Atlantic-friendly era, when he was chiefly the author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. […]
Mother JonesThis piece was published originally by Capital & Main. You can read their full series on the struggle for farmworker health care in California, Ill Harvest, here. Carmen Hernandez lives in a small home on Chateau Fresno Avenue, one of the three streets that make up Lanare, a tiny unincorporated settlement in the San Joaquin Valley. The street’s name sounds […]
Mother JonesThe January 6 committee’s final report has 845 pages and not a word against Mike Pence. The committee lauds the former VP and other top Trump administration figures for refusing to go along with Donald Trump’s attempted self-coup. But it does not address those same officials’ decision to remain silent about Trump’s lies for weeks […]
Mother JonesAbout a month after President Joe Biden declared in his State of the Union address that the answer to crime is to “fund the police, fund them, fund them,” a mint green billboard appeared above a gas station one block from a northern Los Angeles Police Department precinct. Passerby who happened to look up learned that […]
Mother JonesConsider the billionaire. Yes, that is a David Foster Wallace reference. I spotted his book of essays, Consider the Lobster, yesterday morning in one of those little libraries people of a certain demographic put up in front of their houses. My morning walk takes me up into the Oakland-Berkeley Hills, and past the homes of two […]
Mother JonesThis year in New York City, traffic deaths were roughly on a par with shooting deaths. As of Christmas, 246 people were killed with guns in 2022, Gothamist reports, compared with 247 people killed in car crashes. This isn’t unique to New York. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has not yet released full data on 2022 traffic […]
Mother JonesBetween hotels and car rentals, 33-year-old Steven Murray spent more than $1,400 getting his family of seven home to Atlanta after a holiday trip to New York City. That was on top of the $800 they initially spent on Southwest flights, which were canceled. They have yet to see any reimbursement. The $500 rental van […]
Mother JonesThere have been a lot of telling moments in Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter—but the one that stood out to me was not one of the fireballs that tanked revenue or sent employees scrambling for the exits. It was when Musk tweeted simply, “More and more over time, as we hew closer to the truth, […]
Mother JonesGeorge Santos, the Republican congressman-elect who has come under fire for a growing list of inconsistent and false claims about his financial, employment, and familial history, is facing multiple investigations, including an inquiry announced on Wednesday by Long Island prosecutors. “The numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with Congressman-Elect Santos are nothing short of stunning,” said […]
Mother JonesThere’s a party going on on Sesame Street. A diverse group of young children is dancing. One muppet is juggling bowling pins. Another announces that there is about to be some live music. Enter three police officers in uniform singing the lyrics, “If you find yourself out in the cold and you don’t have a hand to […]
Mother JonesMerely being responsible for an absolutely terrible movie is no reason to be consigned to the monster category. Were that the case, some ridiculous but weirdly innocent creators would have earned a spot. A quick scan of the ever-reliable Wikipedia includes in its “List of Films Considered the Worst”—a collection, they caution, that can change—such classics as […]
Mother JonesI imagine (hope?) I’m not the only person who momentarily forgets my sister’s phone number when the doctor’s office requests my emergency contact information. Hell, sometimes I even forget my own number when the grocery store clerk asks me to plug it in to claim rewards and fuel points. So thank goodness we don’t have […]
Mother JonesGeorge Santos, the New York Republican who was elected to the House in November, has drawn much attention for his audacious lying. As a candidate, he said he had attended Baruch College. He said he worked for Goldman Sachs. He said he worked for Citigroup. Those were all lies. He claimed Jewish heritage and maintained that his ancestors had […]
Mother JonesThe images have become iconic. A woman sitting on top of a utility box pulls her hair above her head and begins to cut it as a crowd cheers her on. Another spinning around a bonfire, her long hair loose moving with her, throws her hijab into the flames. Teenage girls without their mandatory head […]
Mother JonesThere is a kind of genius in writing the savage review. Sometimes they become assessments of an artist that endure long after the works critiqued have faded from popular memory. The former New York Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani (once called “the Queen of Mean”) described The Discomfort Zone, a memoir by Jonathan Franzen, as […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. They are gray, rectangular and if you lumped their population of up to 2 billion together they would cover roughly the same area as Connecticut, about 5,500 square miles. Car parking spaces have a monotonous ubiquity in US life, […]
Mother JonesGOP Congressman-Elect George Santos flipped control of New York’s 3rd district in November by touting a long resume of impressive Wall Street and academic accomplishments. He said that he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance from New York’s Baruch College in 2010 and that he later spent time at New York University. […]
Mother JonesThe only thing I remember eating during the first months of new parenthood is seaweed. A metric ton of the stuff by way of miyeok guk, a traditional Korean soup whose perks include supposed benefits for breastfeeding. Also commonly referred to as “Korean birthday soup,” it’s normally pretty tasty! But mainlining globs of seaweed, day […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. As the Arctic warms, concern for the plight of Santa’s favorite sleigh pullers is mounting. But in one small corner of the far flung north—Svalbard—Rudolph and his friends are thriving. Warmer temperatures are boosting plant growth and giving Svalbard reindeer more time to […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 2007 an Idaho couple, Mike and Chantell Sackett, bought a building lot across the road from a wetlands complex that drains into a creek and then into Priest Lake, with plans to build a new […]
Mother JonesThink of Earth as a Kinder Egg, a ball of surprises (plastics) and danger (chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer) that is reduced to shit by human consumption. Of the many universes, PBS tells me, life can only form in a few—and most of those tolerate but don’t encourage it, the way […]
Mother JonesThe day after the Brazilian national team beat Switzerland in the group stage of this year’s World Cup, a handful of players went out for dinner. The group included Arsenal’s Gabriel de Jesus and Real Madrid’s Vinícius Júnior. Ronaldo, Brazil’s former striker and a talismanic figure in football, attended. They chose to eat at Nusr-Et. That […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. I thought it was a blood moon at first. The dark orange glow appeared at dusk on the far side of the shimmering silver band that is the Xingu River. It was just before 8pm, after the parrots had […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by the High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On May 6, 2022, Adam Baz, a resident who lives near El Sereno, a Northeast Los Angeles neighborhood, noticed a freshly cut pile of black walnut wood on the hillside next to his house. The trees are protected […]
Mother JonesLet’s hear it for the girls who are just like other girls. I still don’t entirely “get” Taylor Swift (although Anti-Hero still made my top five in Spotify Wrapped), but I have absolutely, undeniably fallen in love with Swifties. Swifties are punk rock. They couldn’t get tickets to the Eras tour? Looks like Ticketmaster/ LiveNation […]