Mother Jones
A once-in-a-lifetime comet has been dazzling astronomers recently, and tomorrow morning might be your last best chance to see it. Comet Nishimura, described by the New York Times as a green-glowing “cosmic snowball” full of dust and ice, was first spotted by Japanese photographer Hideo Nishimura about a month ago, but its brightness is now […]
Mother JonesThe Russian military killed two foreign aid workers in eastern Ukraine this weekend and injured two more, launching a missile strike that hit their van as they drove to assess the needs of civilians. A year and a half since Russia invaded Ukraine, attacks against aid workers, both Ukrainian and foreign, are on the rise. […]
Mother JonesIn Morocco, rescuers continued rushing to reach survivors in remote mountain villages on Sunday, after the worst earthquake to hit the region in a century killed thousands of people. The 6.8-magnitude quake that struck on Friday has killed at least 2,100 people and injured another 2,400, according to news reports, with the death toll expected […]
Mother JonesLate Friday night, a rare but powerful earthquake hit Morocco, damaging buildings all across the city and killing more than 1,000 people—a number that’s only expected to grow as rescuers struggle reach the remote areas hit hardest by the disaster. At a 6.8 magnitude, this is the largest earthquake to hit the country in 120 […]
Mother JonesOn Friday, a federal judge ordered the Louisiana State Penitentiary, the country’s largest maximum security adult prison, to relocate all incarcerated youths being held in the facility’s former death row building by September 15 after findings revealed that they were living in unsafe conditions and suffering inhumane punishments. US Chief Judge Shelly Dick, who reluctantly ruled in favor […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Hakai Magazine and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Peter Kyne sits down at his desk to write a eulogy for a fish he’s never met. It’s summer 2019. No scientist has seen signs of the critically endangered Rhynchobatus cooki, or clown wedgefish, since a dead one turned up at […]
Mother JonesIn their new book, A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism, historians Judith Stein and Nelson Lichtenstein chart how the 42nd president betrayed his progressive ideals—going from optimistic Democrat who triumphed over Reagan-era conservatism to the avatar of the failures of the Democratic party for a future generation of leftists. Thorough and readable (albeit academic and footnoted) the […]
Mother JonesThis piece is adapted from A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism by Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein. The book will be available from Princeton University Press on September 12. This excerpt is accompanied by an interview with one of the book’s authors. On December 14 and 15, 1992, the transition […]
Mother JonesAs an elder member of Gen Z, I grew up on the internet, my platform of choice being YouTube: Videos about Avatar: The Last Airbender as a kid, then questionable conspiracy content by the platform’s early viral creator Shane Dawson and quirky BuzzFeed shorts in high school. But at the age of seven, when YouTube […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Private equity firms are increasingly profiting from cleaning up climate disasters in the US, while failing to better protect workers and often also investing in the fossil fuels that are causing the climate emergency, new research has found. The demand for […]
Mother JonesDonald Trump and many of his acolytes take the position that the words “executive privilege” are more or less magic. Trump, a private citizen, last year tried to assert “executive privilege” to refuse to turn over documents the current executive branch demanded that he return. Trump adviser Steve Bannon argued last year that “executive privilege” […]
Mother JonesShe didn’t want to be married anymore, and he didn’t like that. In April, right-wing activist and influencer Steven Crowder told the audience of his podcast, Louder with Crowder, that he and his wife, Hilary, were getting divorced. He claimed he was blindsided. She just “didn’t want to be married anymore,” he complained, “and in […]
Mother JonesEarlier this summer, I showed up uninvited at a midtown Manhattan music venue, where a startup named the Praxis Society was holding an event as part of a weeklong series to promote its flagship product: a free-market Mediterranean city-state the company hopes to build under the leadership of a CEO who, former employees said, is […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Katie Muth knew it would be a long shot. This January, the Pennsylvania state senator reintroduced three pieces of legislation aimed at closing loopholes in the laws governing how the oil and gas industry disposes of its solid and […]
Mother JonesPeter Navarro’s trial for contempt of Congress started on Wednesday, and his lawyer quickly made a titular suggestion. In his opening statement, Stanley Woodward, an attorney who represents Navarro and a host of other clients involved with the January 6 insurrection and Donald Trump’s documents case, faulted the feds for failing to use Navarro’s preferred […]
Mother JonesA federal court has, for the second time this year, ruled that Donald Trump defamed E. Jean Carroll, who accused the former president of sexually assaulting her in a New York department store dressing room in 1996. On Wednesday, US District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan declared that Carroll had sufficiently proved in a previous civil case […]
Mother JonesSeaweed is having a moment. Once relegated to sushi rolls, kelp and other “sea greens” are now appearing in an array of American foods and beverages, including pasta, chips, burgers, butter, bread, beer, salsa, tea, muffins, and even ice cream. When I started looking into it, I too was eager to join the seaweed hype. […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Making homes more efficient and more electric is critical to combating climate change. But the undertaking can be expensive and beyond the financial reach of many families. Help, however, is on the way. Residential energy use accounts for one-fifth of climate-warming greenhouse […]
Mother JonesThis article was co-published with EdSurge. EdSurge is a nonprofit newsroom that covers education through original journalism and research. Sign up for their newsletters. Carrie Rodgers gestures toward the silver medallion sitting atop her fridge, then waves it off. It’s nothing really, she shrugs. Still, she reaches for the disc and sets it on the kitchen […]
Mother JonesThis article was co-published with EdSurge. EdSurge is a nonprofit newsroom that covers education through original journalism and research. Sign up for their newsletters. Carrie Rodgers gestures toward the silver medallion sitting atop her fridge, then waves it off. It’s nothing really, she shrugs. Still, she reaches for the disc and sets it on the kitchen […]
Mother JonesA federal judge sentenced Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the far-right Proud Boys, to 22 years behind bars, after ruling Tuesday that Tarrio’s actions qualified as terrorism. Tarrio was the “the ultimate leader, the ultimate person who organized, who was motivated by revolutionary zeal,” US District Judge Timothy Kelly said, describing Tarrio’s role in […]
Mother JonesA federal court struck down, for a second time, a racially gerrymandered congressional map in Alabama that denied fair representation to Black voters. In early 2022, a three-judge panel that included two appointees of Donald Trump found that Alabama violated the Voting Rights Act by failing to draw a second majority-Black congressional district in the […]
Mother JonesFor more than 100 days, Hollywood writers have been on strike; in July, actors joined them, causing a work stoppage in Los Angeles unseen for a generation. Together, the two groups—the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA)—have effectively stalled Hollywood’s endless engine as […]
Mother JonesEven in this age of police bodycams and bystander videos, there are certain categories of footage that most media organizations won’t share with the public. We rarely see corpses, for instance, and never executions or graphic images from school shootings. This sanitizing censorship may be intended to prevent such horrors from being normalized or gleefully […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In a way, when environmental researcher Ami Zota looks at data about patterns of cosmetics use by women of color in 2023, she’s gazing back in time. There were the fledgling days of the environmental justice movement in the 1980s, when […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Last fall, the specialty paper maker Dunn Paper closed its mill in Port Huron, Michigan, where, for about a century, it had been making paper used everywhere from the food industry to medical settings. In March, the packing paper firm Sonoco announced it would permanently […]
Mother JonesThe major labor union representing performers and broadcasters may branch out its historic strike for better working conditions to include the performers who bring video games to life. On Friday, more than a month after its current strike began, the SAG-AFTRA union’s national board announced that it was seeking a strike vote against major video […]
Mother Jones“Are you going to shoot me?” Those were some of 21-year-old Ta’Kiya Young’s last words before a police officer shot her in Blendon Township, Ohio, according to body camera footage made public on Friday. On August 24, the pregnant mother of two was killed after one officer shot through her windshield in a Kroger supermarket parking […]
Mother JonesElon Musk’s alleged penchant for not paying bills is catching up with him. In the wake of numerous lawsuits claiming the world’s richest man failed to pay severance owed to many of the 6,000 employees he fired after acquiring Twitter. On Monday, CNBC reported that the tech company now known as X is facing some 2,200 arbitration cases […]
Mother JonesHurricane Idalia, which made landfall Wednesday as a Category Three storm, left 450,000 Floridians without power and caused record-breaking storm surges and widespread flooding that locals documented on social media. Although early estimates of insured damages and economic losses are wildly preliminary, the costs in Florida alone will likely run into the billions. (AccuWeather initially estimated […]