Mother Jones

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IT’S BEEN A BRUTAL year for journalism so far. How many times have I written that sentence now? Enough that I wasn’t going to write it again, despite the headlines about how the current troubles in the news business represent an “extinction-level eve

WHEN HE RAN for president in 2004, Democrats were counting on John Kerry’s military service to define him as a strong leader in a time of war. The decorated Vietnam veteran headed into the party’s convention with a small lead over President George W.

WHEN ETHAN BLOCK heard that Andy Kim was running for Senate, he got to work. Over winter break, the Rutgers University senior launched a campus group to spread the word about the mild-mannered congressman taking on Bob Menendez, the longtime Democrat

DOSTIE FARM, an organic dairy in Fairfield, Maine, was thriving until one day in October 2020 when owner Egide Dostie Jr. got a call from Stonyfield, his exclusive buyer. Something was off with the farm’s milk: Tests had found that it contained three

A DAY AHEAD of the third anniversary of January 6, President Joe Biden traveled to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania—where George Washington encamped during the Revolutionary War—before delivering what he described as a “deadly serious” speech framing the s

IN THE SUMMER of 2000, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a scion of the Democratic Party dynasty, took time out of his schedule as an environmental attorney to write an op-ed for the New York Times. In the piece, Kennedy hailed consumer advocate Ralph Nader as

EVEN BEFORE THE last shots of the Revolutionary War were fired, John Adams wrote a friend to warn, “There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties.” Alas, political scientists will tell you the winner-takes-all

VOTERS LOVE TO complain about the two-party system, which can leave us feeling stuck: Trump and Biden again? Yet most of our elections rely on a process that guarantees frustration. Plurality voting—pick one candidate and the top vote-getter wins—usu

WHEN WE ASKED the Mother Jones community for their personal experience with turning away from the two parties, we got thousands of responses stretching as far back as Eldridge Cleaver. But many readers, like the sample collected here, focused on this

THE WAR FOR control of the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire began to escalate in the spring of 2021, when Jeremy Kauffman got the keys to the Twitter account. Kauffman, a tech entrepreneur, had arrived in the state a few years earlier as part of th

TOMMY ALBA COULD be a pain in the ass. It’s how he ran two bustling cafes in coastal Virginia. His linebacker physique and booming baritone, with more than a hint of a childhood New Jersey accent, could make him intimidating. Even Lorene Alba, who ad

ON THE AFTERNOON of January 6, 2021, as election deniers armed with Tasers and tomahawks overran the US Capitol, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) handed his colleague and close friend Eric Swalwell a pen. “Here,” he said to the California Democrat. “Stic

THEY MIGHT NOT know his name, but millions of video gamers have encountered narrative designer Evan Narcisse’s handiwork in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which showcases more Black and Brown characters in its first few minutes than most popular

NOT LONG AGO, I noticed a new term trending in social media wellness circles: “certified hormone specialist.” I could have investigated it the old-fashioned way: googling, calling up an expert or two, digging into the scientific literature. I’m accus

IN 2007, AFTER Paul Ross Evans pleaded guilty to leaving a bomb outside of a women’s health clinic in Austin, he assured the judge: He never meant for anyone to get hurt. “Except,” he clarified, “for the abortionists.” For almost two centuries, the m

THE FEAR OF pernicious substances getting into children’s bodies and causing lasting harm is understandably a nail-biter for parents. Maybe that’s why the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued new guidelines in December to help d