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The federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour has lost 30% of its purchasing power since 2009. By Kevin Hardy for Stateline Workers in more than 20 cities and states will see the minimum wage increase next month as local governments continue to raise the wage floor amid federal inaction. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour has not increased since 2009, losing more than 30%

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On Thursday, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) will introduce a resolution that calls for the Department of Justice to rescind a memo issued last week that contests the longstanding interpretation of the Supreme Court’s 1999 Olmstead v. L.C. decision, a landmark case that limits states’ power to compel people to live in psychiatric and other institutions, such as nursing homes.

“I am not going to let this administration move us back to a time when people were ripped out of their communities, ripped out of their homes against their wills, and forced into institutions,” Duckworth told me in an interview.

The DOJ memo itself does not change the law, but it may influence how the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services approach agreements and programs that help disabled people live in their communities, outside institutions. Following the release of the memo, HHS took down its webpage on Olmstead and community living.

The slip opinion, which Bloomberg Law reported was allegedly driven by the demands of ultra-right Trump advisor Stephen Miller, was met with immediate backlash from disability advocates and legal experts. As George Washington University law professor Alison Barkoff told me when I covered the opinion last week, the Trump administration’s “interpretation is completely inconsistent with virtually all courts” with respect not only to the interpretation of Olmstead but also that of the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which the Olmstead decision builds on. That also greatly concerns Duckworth.

“This is taking us back to a time when there were forced lobotomies in this country,” Duckworth said. “We just cannot let that happen.”

The resolution is also co-sponsored by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). The DOJ opinion, the resolution says, “rejects the integration mandate and threatens the hard-won progress towards full integration of individuals with disabilities into society in the United States,” compounded by GOP cuts to Medicaid-funded home and community-based services, which will also force more disabled people into institutions. The resolution also calls for the US government to recognize the importance of fulfilling Olmstead and a reversal of Medicaid cuts.

“This is clearly the ableism that exists in this administration that starts with Donald Trump, the president,” Duckworth told me. “He’s the guy who looked at wounded veterans, amputees, and said those guys are suckers and losers.”

Olmstead‘s integration mandate, Duckworth emphasized to me, is “critically important to our society.”

“We cannot be a leader of the free world if we continue to segregate groups of people in our own country, whether it is through racism or through ableism,” Duckworth said. “They underestimate the willpower of the disability community.”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 25 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump privately raged at Republican senators during a lunch on Wednesday. He declared he won’t sign a bill reducing housing costs for the American people until Republicans end the filibuster and pass a vile piece of voter suppression legislation first. This shocked Trump’s own advisors and angered Republicans who see it as undermining their hopes in the midterms.

What’s striking about all this is that ordinarily a president would let members of his own party get distance from him in order to survive the elections. But he can’t do that. And he’s likely going to be the one who gets screwed by this. We’re talking about all of it with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, who has a good piece digging deep into Trump’s narcissism as the through line to all his current foibles. Amanda, good to have you back on as always.

Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So Trump was expected to sign this housing bill bringing down costs, and instead he tweeted the following: “Today’s housing news conference and signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE America Act, which I consider to be a national emergency. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Amanda, the SAVE Act would probably disenfranchise millions and millions of people. The real national emergency here is that Trump’s deep unpopularity will cost his party one or both chambers of Congress. This isn’t subtle, is it?

Marcotte: No, not even slightly. I’m beginning to think he actually genuinely believes that the SAVE Act is what’s going to save the Republican Party in the midterm elections. And I don’t see that that’s necessarily true, because it’s got these voter ID restrictions that are so severe that it seems to me the only way you may even be able to successfully vote is if you have a passport, which I feel benefits college-educated urban voters the most of all—who tend to be Democrats.

Sargent: Right. I mean, Republicans don’t want this thing to pass for a reason, and it’s not because they altruistically really want people to vote.

Marcotte: We know for a fact that Republicans in the past have been all over the map when it comes to Trump’s fantasies about stealing elections. And he really—I think he doesn’t just want to steal elections because he thinks it’s the only way he’s going to win. I think he just really likes the idea of stealing elections. I think Donald Trump would rather cheat to win than just win outright. It just gets him off somehow.

And so he’s gotten really fixated on the SAVE America Act, and he just cannot understand that it is not at all the slam dunk for Republicans that he thinks it is.

Sargent: I agree. I think that Donald Trump sees cheating as another form of winning, as another form of getting over. But let’s put off that for a second. Again and again we’ve learned that Republicans simply did not have the votes to end the filibuster and pass this voter suppression bill. And yet, I want to highlight something from Punchbowl News reporter Andrew Desiderio. He reports that in this private meeting, Trump was in a sour mood throughout, and he again demanded that Republicans pass the so-called SAVE Act. And get this—according to this reporter, nobody pushed back.

Amanda, just to reiterate, it’s typical for presidents who are this unpopular to let members of his party get some distance from him, but Trump won’t allow that because it would constitute an admission that he’s unpopular, and that can’t be allowed. And on top of that, these Republicans won’t challenge him on this. What do you make of that?

Marcotte: It’s so ironic, isn’t it? He can’t admit he’s unpopular, but he’s still pushing legislation that’s premised on the idea that he’s so unpopular that he can’t win an election without it. But yes, I think it’s sad at this point in time that Republicans are afraid of at least being singled out as being anti-Trump.

They voted in the Senate to stop his powers, to continue to fight the war in Iran—even though I think that’s kind of toothless at this point. But they do resist him sometimes, but always with this sort of eyeball towards never catching his evil eye, never being seen by him, or by the average Fox News viewer, as resisting Donald Trump. Because he still has this intense hold over the party even as he’s losing all of his power everywhere else in the American public.

Sargent: It’s a really interesting dichotomy. And to go to your point—literally minutes before he tweeted this announcement that he won’t sign the bill until Republicans suppress millions of votes, he tweeted this: “My real poll numbers are the highest they have ever been. Thank you.”

So one minute his poll numbers are showing that he’s astronomically popular, and then the next minute he’s saying, goddamn it, please prevent lots and lots of people from voting, otherwise we’re going to get killed. There you have it right there, right? That’s all of it right there.

Marcotte: One of the wildest things about watching Donald Trump in the second term is seeing how much worse his narcissism has gotten. I didn’t think it was possible, honestly, in the first term, but the spiral that he’s in—he’s talked himself into incoherence. I don’t know if it’s that he’s 80 years old and he’s just falling apart, or if it’s just that the stress of the situation is getting to him, or if it’s a combination of those two things.

But he ping-pongs wildly between the two problems that narcissists have, which is this overblown sense of self and this constant insecurity. And so it is just that. Like, I can’t win this election without cheating—I’m also the most popular president of all time. And it’s like, you’ve got to choose, man.

Sargent: Yeah, well—you’d think, although maybe MAGA doesn’t have to choose. Let’s listen to MAGA Senator Tommy Tuberville talk about Trump’s demand that Republicans pass this voter suppression legislation.

Tommy Tuberville (voiceover): If we don’t do something with the filibuster and we don’t get things passed, it’ll be the last time we’ll have a Republican president or Republican Senate or a House. That’s how fast this country’s going down to communism. And we need to stop it. We can stop it. It’s—the ball’s in our court. President Trump said it, ball’s in our court.

Sargent: I mean, there you have it, Amanda. Things are so bad that Republicans will never win an election again if they can’t figure out how to prevent millions and millions of Americans from voting. Could that be clearer?

Marcotte: This was a wild interview for a couple of reasons. One, the word “communist” is just a blunt dog whistle to mean, you know, non-white conservatives—not conservatives, rather. He’s using demographic change as a scare point. So there’s genuinely white supremacy right there. It’s right under the surface. And he would probably argue with me, but I think it’s communists, really communists. They keep putting Zohran Mamdani’s face up when they say the word communist. So we all know what’s going on there.

And two—if you are in a democratic system, and I know that Tommy Tuberville is not the brightest of guys, but if you’re in a democratic system and you can’t win an election, too bad, so sad. Your job is to change your party so that you can win elections. And it’s also delusional.

I mean, unfortunately, Republicans are the ones who have an unfair advantage in our electoral system. They’re the ones who punch way above their weight, who often lose the popular vote and yet somehow still win elections because of our Electoral College and Senate disproportionality and other problems like that. So this entire thing was just bonkers.

But it goes to show that they’re trying to whip the base into a state of hysteria over this. And you do have to wonder why, because it feels like it only is to please Trump—because the voters that Tommy Tuberville is speaking to are some of the people that would probably be disenfranchised.

Working-class white, suburban white, rural white voters are not likely to have the level of ID that is required to vote under this system. Who has their birth certificate in their house? I do. But I’m a college-educated urban voter. I’m the kind of person who has that ID.

Sargent: I want to highlight a couple of other tidbits. The Post reports that this announcement surprised even Trump’s own advisors, who had spent the morning touting this legislation. And the Times reports that Republicans were shocked by this announcement, and even that they regard it as an effort to undermine their chances in the midterms. Senate Majority Leader John Thune “appeared almost dazed,” The Times says.

I just want to reiterate—Republicans know that this is absolutely terrible for them, yet they still can’t say it that way. They have to dance around the fact that this absolute madman is fucking them in every possible way he can.

Marcotte: It really gets to the heart of a conflict he’s having with the GOP during the midterms, which is they understand they can’t steal this election. They understand that they have to win seats by appealing to voters and trying to get votes. And so the whole point of this housing bill was to try to address the affordability concerns that are motivating voters to turn against Republicans in this election. It’s very standard politics, right?

And Donald Trump’s attitude is like, why bother with all that stuff? I don’t care about any of that. And he’s almost mad at voters for making him have to care about their stupid poor people concerns about affording housing and gasoline. And so he’s just like, why don’t we just steal it? Can we just please steal it?

But they can’t steal it. This bill is not a way to steal it. There’s not a mechanism to steal it. And he just can’t get past the idea that there’s got to be a way to steal it.

And we know that he thinks like this because this is what caused him to behave the way he did in the run-up to the riot on January 6. He just can’t get it out of his head that there’s got to be a cheat code, there is an “I win” button hidden somewhere.

Sargent: Right. I really like that idea that he just wants to cheat his way through rather than change the policies and change the approach. Because again, I think that gets at the deep narcissism here, because doing that would be an admission that he’s failed. And that isn’t allowed.

And yet at the same time, the need to cheat to win is also an admission that he’s failed, but he’s too narcissistic to admit that to himself. It’s like there are so many layers of narcissism here, you can’t even penetrate it. And that’s sort of the nature of narcissism, right? It’s like the turtles going on top of the turtles. It’s just a bottomless pit, in essence, isn’t it?

Marcotte: Yeah, they get caught in these cycles of shame and bombast. And unfortunately for Republicans, he’s caught them all up in it. But I think that it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving group of people. Here’s the thing—if they held hands and jumped together, they’d be fine. And in fact, in a sense, they’re going to have to do that on the SAVE America Act. It’d be wild if they try to pass it just to placate him.

But anybody who’s ever dealt with a narcissist in real life knows that you can’t just constantly placate them. You eventually have to give them the boot, or at least set a strong boundary with them, because they will continue to do this stuff. And I don’t know, these Republicans just can’t do it because they know he’ll single out anyone who turns against him. But again, the answer to that is solidarity—not to sound like a leftist.

Sargent: Right. Yeah, exactly.

Marcotte: Always to sound like a leftist, actually.

Sargent: Well, I just want to highlight how this is backfiring for Trump in every conceivable way. It shows the voters that Trump doesn’t care about people’s economic struggles, and that will drive down his approval, which is the coin of the realm in midterms. It prevents Republicans from getting distanced from the unpopular president.

And all of this makes it more likely, rather than less, that Trump and the GOP lose control of one or both chambers of Congress, which means investigations of Trump. His own narcissism is fucking him, basically.

Marcotte: Every single time. I mean, it’s just like the Reflecting Pool, right? He got it in his head that the way to prove his greatness was to fix this pool. And instead he made it much, much worse. And now he’s panicking and denying what everyone can see, which is that he failed miserably. And we’re getting a preview from that of what’s going to happen after they lose the midterms, I suspect.

Sargent: Yes, that’s going to be really interesting. So Amanda, how do you see this playing out? I mean, I really hate to dismiss the possibility that they could pass the SAVE Act. Do you think it’s possible? And if not, how do you see it unfolding?

Marcotte: I agree. I don’t want to dismiss the possibility, because the lengths that the GOP will go to to placate Trump and his ridiculous ideas have been fairly bottomless. That said, they usually tend to be more passive than active when they disagree with him.

There’s a reason that he just goes around Congress to do things like start the Iran war—which is, he does still, I think, on some level understand that they might actually get in the way if they’re required to take action to do what he says. They’ll passively go along with it.

But I imagine whipping the votes on this is going to be really hard when you’re talking to congressional members who are like, look, dude, none of my voters have the level of ID that you expect. You’re going to ban all the married women from voting because their married name doesn’t match their birth certificate. The SAVE America Act is truly ridiculous. And I think that’s one of the obstacles here.

But they’re going to try to—I feel like we’re going to continue to see what’s happening, which is they’re not going to pass it, but they’re going to try to publicly placate him, because he’s also very shallow. And as long as you’re praising him and telling him he’s the greatest president of all time, he can be distracted, like a cat with a toy.

Sargent: Yes, and that’s the ultimate irony—that if Trump gets his way, it backfires even more dramatically for him and the GOP than if he doesn’t.

Marcotte: Yeah. But I mean, we should genuinely oppose this, because we really don’t want a system where only a small percentage of people can vote because they’re the kind of people who have all their paperwork in big files in their cabinet.

Sargent: No, a hundred percent. Well, we really got to hope it doesn’t pass—and it does look like it won’t pass. What do you think’s going to happen? How are you feeling about the midterms these days?

Marcotte: I feel like a lot of the people that are flirting with voting for the Democrat in red states will panic and at the last minute find their—”James Talarico said God is non-binary” excuse to vote for the Republican. So I’m always worried about that.

But the very fact that there are people in places like Texas and Iowa considering switching their vote from Trump to a Democrat for this midterm election is pretty significant. And I think that it’s possible that we win the Senate. I think we’re definitely going to win the House.

Sargent: It sure looks that way right now. And I got to say, Trump is doing everything possible to drive his own approval down as much as he possibly can, which I guess—thanks, Donald. Amanda Marcotte, thanks so much for coming on. Always great to talk to you.

Marcotte: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Republican senators proved yet again that their spines are made of pudding on Wednesday, rejecting a resolution to limit President Donald Trump’s war powers, the AP reported.

The flip-flop came after Trump blew up at GOP senators for voting “yes” on a similar bill just one day earlier. He got into a shouting match with Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, calling him a “lunatic” for voting with Democrats to pass the legislation.

Cassidy told reporters after the meeting that he had lost his temper. According to Cassidy, he berated Trump for not being clear with Congress, and with Americans, about what’s going on in Iran.

But it turns out Cassidy, who lost his primary election last month to a Trump-backed opponent, just needed a little hand holding. After the heated exchange, Cassidy was invited to a personal briefing at the White House from JD Vance and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, according to the AP. He then went back to Capitol Hill and promptly voted the other way on a nearly identical war powers bill.

“I want to thank Vice President Vance and Special Envoy Witkoff for the thorough briefing this afternoon on Iran. I appreciate the quick invitation to the White House to address many of my concerns,” Cassidy posted on X.

Republican Senator Rand Paul also switched his vote. Paul, who has voted multiple times with Democrats to block the war in Iran, voted “present” as “a way to give the President more space and leverage to negotiate a lasting peace,” he posted on X.

Trump celebrated the news on Truth Social, thanking Senators John Thune, Lindsey Graham, and Bernie Moreno, and noting that Cassidy and Paul had changed their votes.

“This vote puts Iran on notice!” he wrote.

Ultimately, the back-and-forth on the bill doesn’t change much: Both votes were largely symbolic, and neither resolution would have had the power to actually force Trump to change his actions in Iran.

But this vote symbolizes something we already knew: that even the Republicans who claim to have principles will gladly sacrifice them at the altar of Trump.

Please join the team that makes it possible for your friendly neighborhood comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug to exist in this hostile Trumpverse! JOIN US IN THE INNER HIVE, and be the first kid on your block to get each week’s Tom the Dancing Bug comic – before it’s published anywhere. * Sign up for the free weekly newsletter, The Tom the Dancing Bug Review! Not nearly as good as joining the…

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This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Steve Goodale isn’t used to attention like this. It’s not that he’s unfamiliar with being on camera: His YouTube Channel, Swimming Pool Steve, has amassed nearly 91,000 subscribers covering topics like how to bond concrete and clean a used hot tub.

But the saga of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which an algal bloom turned green following a renovation that President Donald Trump’s administration claimed would make the pool “American flag blue” in time for the US’s 250th birthday celebrations, has left people searching for answers about what the heck is going on.

“You don’t need Swimming Pool Steve to tell you that when you see what appears to be the interior surface peeling up and floating in chunks, that’s an ‘oh, crap’ moment.”

The mystery has only deepened as chunks of the newly installed lining have appeared to break off and Trump has said the pool will be drained while, without evidence, blaming vandals for the problems. Add in US Park Police arresting people for touching the water like it’s some kind of biohazard, and that’s made Goodale, an award-winning pool expert, one of the most in-demand sources for anyone trying to figure out what’s happening to the iconic monument.

Pools are in Goodale’s blood: He learned the tricks of the trade from his Uncle Joe and refers to pools as “a family business.” I called him up to go over some of our most burning pool questions. This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Are you sick of talking about all this yet?

This is like the Simpsons episode where the devil force-feeds doughnuts to Homer. “So, you like talking about pools, do you?”

We heard you like talking about pools, so we’re going to give you pools 24/7. All the time.

I’ve been talking about them forever. It’s just now everybody is listening.

You’ve gotten a lot of reporters calling you and asking, What exactly is wrong with the Lincoln Memorial pool? But from watching your videos, it sounds like it’s hard to say there’s one definitive thing wrong with it.

There’s not enough information in terms of pictures, videos, water chemistry values. A natural pond, an open-air, clear-water environment—that’s what this thing is. There are so many moving parts here. It’s the structure, it’s the water chemistry, it’s filtration. There’s so much stuff that has to work in conjunction with each other.

I’ve been saying for decades now, I think swimming pools are the origin of the term “doesn’t hold water.” If you don’t do every part of your job properly, it’s very easy to see that there’s something going wrong.

Experts like you can see 101 ways a project like this could fail, even with a very talented, experienced team doing the renovation.

Pools are mercilessly complicated—and I’m talking about little ones. This is literally monumental in size. It would take a master class in technical execution to be able to work on this thing in a competent capacity. But you don’t need Swimming Pool Steve to tell you that when you see what appears to be the interior surface peeling up and floating in chunks. That’s an “oh, crap” moment.

A duckling swims in algae in the Reflecting Pool in Washington, June 16, 2026.Chip Somodevilla via Getty

I’ve seen some speculation that the hydrogen peroxide might be the cause of the bottom of the pool peeling. But you made a video about the lining, saying that it might be more complex than just that.

There is merit to this line of thought. These interior surfaces, they’re very chemically resistant, but they’re not infinitely chemically resistant. It would come down to what’s being used and what concentrations of it are being used—all these unanswered questions.

But with a membrane system like this, there’s a lot of technical points you have to nail during installation. You have to account for ambient conditions like rain, sun, humidity, moisture control in your substrate, thickness, evenness, and chemical compatibility. There are so many things that can go wrong with that process. If the material hasn’t bonded to the substrate for any number of reasons, then ultimately the entire system will fail.

Now the president is claiming that it’s vandalism.

I can’t really get my head around the mechanism of vandalism that could cause this kind of damage. In terms of pictures and videos, it doesn’t look good, but it was fairly localized stuff. I haven’t seen anything that shows the 250-foot gash. At this point, I’m sure you can understand, I, more than anybody, have questions too.

The Department of Interior keeps saying, “We’ve got the nanobubblers on, that should fix it.”

Nanobubbler technology is an ozone injection system—it essentially adds oxygen to the water. In theory, it’s used as a suppression system to kill algae directly, but it also has a secondary function of making an oxygen-rich environment in the water, which controls the release of phosphorus from the sediment layer at the bottom of the pool, the primary nutrient source for algae.

Will sediment at the bottom of the pool affect the blue color? Or is it scattered too thinly to affect it?

It certainly starts thin, but it has the potential to be a heavier layer. It really comes down to the quality of the source water being used and the design of the filtration system itself.

Water from the Tidal Basin is usually pumped directly into the pool, but when there’s a lot of algae in the basin, they switch to municipal drinking water. The administration hasn’t answered our questions about what the source of the water in the pool is right now.

I’ve also been trying to find answers to that. But the water that’s in the pool is really what matters here. Now that it’s in the pool, what’s the phosphate level? What’s the nitrate level? Those would be good things to know.

So just grab a little bottle of water to test?

Well, I’ve seen on the news that maybe you can’t even get near it anymore. But in theory, yes, if this were my swimming pool, I would walk right up to it, dunk my little bottle into it and take a sample. I would test for phosphates, and it would tell me an awful lot about the nutrients available for algae to grow.

In the big picture, how much of a mess is this to clean up? How much could it cost taxpayers?

I can’t speak to cost or budget issues. But I can tell you that draining a 6.5-million-gallon body of water is certainly a considerable thing to do. In terms of what it’s going to take to fix it, what really matters at this point is, how much damage are we talking about here? Is it a localized area that can be exposed and repaired? Or is this an indication that there’s some sort of systemic issue?

You have to look at it as a system as a whole.

After spending more than four decades studying abortion in American social, medical, and political culture, Carole Joffe was fully prepared for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022. “Dobbs itself wasn’t that scary to me,” she says. “It was upsetting and politically outrageous, but because of our work, we knew abortion wasn’t going to go away.”

What she did find frightening was a Louisiana lawsuit last month challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s rules allowing the abortion pill mifepristone to be prescribed via telemedicine and sent through the mail. In the end, the justices kicked the case back to the lower courts, but abortion advocates were reminded of how much patients around the country still have to lose. “Things since Dobbs have gone better than many of us thought, but so much of that access has been dependent on telehealth,” says Joffe, a sociologist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco. “So yes, the case felt scary, but then I got back to business as usual. ‘Abortion is still happening. Who do I want to interview?’”

Joffe’s mission is to try to understand the American abortion ecosystem through the people who populate it, including patients, providers, and fellow advocates. Her most recent book, After Dobbs: How the Supreme Court Ended Roe But Not Abortion, co-written with Drexel University legal scholar David S. Cohen, tracked how that ecosystem adapted in the aftermath of the landmark ruling: the surge in abortion protections in blue states, the mobilization of activists to help patients in red states, the rage donations—and just rage—fueling it all.

Four years post-Dobbs, the right-wing legal and legislative attacks have been relentless, and the risks from the courts and the Trump administration are dire, but the abortion-access movement has proven to be more resilient than even Joffe foresaw. She points to new data from the #WeCount project showing that clinician-managed abortions approached 1.13 million in 2025, with the monthly average up 14 percent from April 2022. By the end of last year, almost 9,000 women a month were accessing care in states where abortion is banned. “David and I knew that there would still be abortions happening in the blue states, but we did not anticipate the [nationwide] numbers going up to the degree they have,” she says. “That has been astonishing.”

“Things since Dobbs have gone better than many of us thought, but so much of that access has been dependent on telehealth.”

Much of the movement’s strength is due to legal and medical innovations that have made abortion pills more accessible than ever before, including telemedicine and blue-state shield laws that protect providers in those states who care for patients from places where abortion is illegal. Cohen is one of the masterminds behind shield laws, which have been embraced by Democratic-run states. But when he and Joffe were working on their book, the laws had barely taken hold. Now, she says, “their impact can’t be emphasized enough.” 

Still, those innovations have largely benefited women seeking what one recent law review article calls “everyday abortions”—those occurring for non-medical reasons, usually in the first trimester. For other segments of the population—women suffering from life-threatening pregnancy emergencies, those seeking abortions later in pregnancy, immigrants—the Dobbs era has been precarious indeed, and sometimes deadly. Nor is it clear why more abortions are happening, with some advocates worrying that women are choosing to end their pregnancies because their economic and social circumstances are so bleak. Another major fear: Self-managed abortions without sufficient medical or legal support is increasing women’s risk of being criminalized.

I reached out to Joffe by phone for an update on how Dobbs has remade the US abortion landscape—and how it hasn’t. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with the numbers. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the last time the number of US abortions surpassed 1 million was back in 2012. 

And those are just the clinician-managed abortions counted by the #WeCount project in the formal healthcare system. There are also a lot of self-managed abortions not being counted that are happening with the help of underground community networks and overseas pill-providers. If someone goes to their computer and orders from a website in India, that’s not counted. If someone gets their pills from one of those grannie expats living in Mexico who are bringing in [medication] over the border, that’s not counted.

A lot of the increase in the WeCount numbers seems to be because of shield laws. 

Even though my co-author was one of the legal theorists behind them, I didn’t expect shield laws to happen so quickly and so effectively. It’s not just that shield laws and telemedicine mean women don’t have to travel, so abortion doesn’t cost as much money, and they can have privacy. There’s a provider in Massachusetts—The MAP—that offers pills for $150 but accepts as little as $5. So shield laws have also brought down the price of pills, which makes them even more accessible. I didn’t see that coming.

I was really worried that the criminal justice system in red states would go after providers, but so far, there has been remarkably little of that. I’m aware of only three criminal cases: two against shield law doctors in California and New York, and one against a midwife in Texas. There have also been some civil cases. I really hope things work out for the people being targeted. But that is not the massive wave of cases I was afraid of. 

From what I hear from other advocates, the patients who have benefited most from these post-Dobbs improvements in access are women in their first trimester.  Many telemedicine providers will only prescribe abortion pills through the 11th or 12th week of pregnancy, so patients who are further along may lie to get their pills or find another source, like an underground network. Who else is being left behind?

The people I most worry about are those with pregnancy emergencies—serious complications. These are not people who could get on a plane and travel from Texas to Illinois or Colorado for emergency abortion care. These are really sick women. 

“Can you imagine living in Louisiana, going to your boss and saying, ‘I’m going to be gone for several days because I need to get an abortion?’ No.”

There are also patients whose social circumstances make it impossible to access telemedicine or travel out of state. Maybe you’re a single mother with several kids, and you can’t take time off work. Can you imagine living in Louisiana, going to your boss and saying, “I’m going to be gone for several days because I need to get an abortion?” No. I remember when Dobbs first happened, reading about a doctor in Texas who told his patient, “Well, you could go to New Mexico,” and the patient said something like, “If you sent a limo for me, I couldn’t leave.” Think of a woman living in her car, or someplace in the Mississippi Delta—if she doesn’t have a computer, how does she even know? 

Back in 2024, you and your UCSF colleagues published a report about how doctors in Texas and other abortion-ban states were being forced to delay abortion care for pregnancy emergencies that could endanger the life of the mother. How common are those kinds of situations today?

This is something that a colleague and I are studying now. I had thought that, four years after Dobbs, these kinds of questions would be resolved. Doctors who don’t know whether they’ll be arrested if they perform an abortion while there’s still fetal cardiac activity, and wondering: How sick does a patient have to be? Some state legislatures have taken some action to clarify medical exceptions for abortion care—when women die, it’s not good publicity. So in aggregate, the situation has seemingly improved somewhat for women suffering from ectopic pregnancies and PPROM [when the amniotic sac ruptures before the fetus is viable]. But there are still too many unforgivable instances of care withheld and delayed. We won’t know the full impact of Dobbs for some time, but we do know that rates of maternal and infant mortality in Texas have significantly risen since Dobbs. 

Telemedicine only accounts for 30 percent of all abortions in the US, which means that more than two-thirds of patients are still getting their care in person. But abortion pills from a clinic can cost hundreds of dollars. How can clinics compete with a shield-law provider who charges much less? And that doesn’t even take into account the cuts in federal funding for Title X and Planned Parenthood.

I am worried about the viability of the brick-and-mortar clinic. Many clinics in red states have had to close after Dobbs. Some have been able to relocate to blue states, but not all. Many clinics operate on a tight budget. While the great majority of abortions in the US occur in the first trimester, one of the most important functions that some clinics provide is abortions in the second trimester or later. As more and more patients order pills and avoid clinics, the clinics may eventually have to close, leaving the minority of patients who require later abortions in a very dire spot.

While I applaud the creation of these new models that make abortion more accessible, I mourn the possible loss of the clinic-based model of abortion care, because what I have learned from my 45 years of studying this issue is that abortion is not one-size-fits-all. Many women are fine doing it themselves. They order the pills online, they take the pills at home, and they go on with their lives. Other women need more. For example, a very religious woman who believes, “God will punish me for getting an abortion—I am a murderer,” can really benefit from talking to someone who will reassure her that she’s not going to hell. Dr. George Tiller [the Kansas abortion provider who was murdered in 2009] had a chaplain on his staff. The best clinics deliver the kind of care that some women, often very young ones, really need. 

And not everybody is a suitable candidate for pills. Some people have bleeding disorders, some may have ectopic pregnancies, and some will be past the gestational age at which the pill is offered. Many of the most serious fetal anomalies are only discovered around 18 weeks. I worry that these people will get lost. Some women need to be in a clinic for the abortion experience to feel real. Some women are afraid— “I’m talking to a disembodied voice on the phone, she sounds nice, but I don’t know. My friend had a really bad reaction when she took a pill that somebody sent her.” Even though the shield laws and telemedicine have been an enormous success, there are still people going to be left out.

There’s a narrative out there that people don’t care about abortion as much as they did four years ago, or during the 2024 elections. One measure of this supposed lack of engagement is the big drop in donations to abortion-related organizations over the past couple of years. What do you make of that?

I always expected the so-called rage spending would drop off. After Roe was overturned, people were furious, and the money came pouring in. So much of that immediate mobilization we describe in After Dobbs was dependent on millions and millions of dollars in donations—for airplanes, hotels, abortion procedures or pills. I knew it couldn’t be sustained. I knew other very important issues would arise, like immigration, although I didn’t predict the savagery we’ve seen under the Trump administration. I knew that decent people giving their money to abortion would feel it was important to give it to other things as well.

That said, I think about what happened to make sure that women in red states could access abortions—the volunteer networks, the people who are willing to drive strangers to get care. The participation of everyday people. I read a touching account that almost sounded like the Underground Railroad: “Someone has to get the patient from Texas to Illinois—this person will drive her to here, and then somebody else will drive her to there.” I think of this as part of the larger resistance we’ve been seeing in the Trump era. 

When you think about the future of abortion in the US, what keeps you up at night?

We don’t know what’s going to happen politically. The midterms will be really important, but even if the Democrats win the House and Senate, the courts will be the ones calling the shots. What keeps me up at night is: Will they try to enforce the Comstock Act [the 19th-century obscenity law that would amount to a national abortion ban]? Will the FDA withdraw its approval of mifepristone or get rid of the rule allowing abortion pills via telemedicine? I am terrified of shield laws going before the Supreme Court. That’s really my biggest worry.

What if there’s a crackdown on providers to the extent we haven’t yet seen? I always worry about clinic violence, but I worry more now because the anti-abortion movement is furious: “We got Dobbs, so how in the hell have abortions gone up?” I worry that Republicans and the Department of Justice will figure out how to do surveillance on people who get abortion pills: “Why does this little town in Mississippi have somebody getting a package from India?” I am a Class A worrier, so I am worried about everything that one can possibly worry about.

Since its founding in 1976, Mother Jones has operated on a foundational premise: Visual storytelling goes hand-in-hand with investigative reporting to expose injustice, demand accountability, and build empathy needed to evoke change.

“For decades Mother Jones has seen photography as an essential component of its reporting,” says long-time contributing photographer Ken Light. “Photographers and their work have had and been an important voice within the magazine to reveal the truth.” The magazine’s photography has served as an uncompromising mirror to the world, evolving from the gritty black-and-white traditions of humanist documentary into an expansive, multiplatform chronicle of our time.

Across five distinct eras, this retrospective highlights a small fraction of great work from that 50-year journey. While the magazine’s editors could never have know at the time what a decade would bring, trends about each time period emerged when recently going through back issues.

Beginning with the magazine’s Origins (1976–1985), Mother Jones photography brought readers face-to-face with foreign wars and raw realities of American life. During the second era, Social Documentary (1986–1995) took center stage. The photography became a bit quieter and more intimate, capturing personal, subjective experiences of people living within systemic problems at home and abroad.

By the late 1990s, our photography followed the friction of Globalization and War (1996–2007), emphasizing human aftermath of political and economic choices over spectacle on the battlefield. The devastating fallout of the 2008 financial crisis brought us a Crisis at Home (2008–2015), with many projects tracking economic collapse, gun violence, and environmental degradation.

Most recently, a decade of Protest, Immigration, COVID, and Climate (2016–2025) highlights a new generation of photographers working directly alongside communities, documenting our fractured, fast-moving world.

Through every shift in art direction, technology, and geography, one constant remains: a commitment to immersive and engaged photography as a vehicle for storytelling. This work represents the visual arm of a Mother Jones core focus: powerful, longterm, independent journalism.

 
1976-1985: OriginsEarly Mother Jones drew heavily from the traditions of humanist documentary photography, which focused on the everyday experiences of ordinary people. The magazine championed visual storytelling that brought readers into Central American wars, political campaigns, and the struggles of American life. Much of the work took a direct and unsentimental approach, grounded in the idea that visceral photo­graphy could expose injustice and build empathy to spark change. The visual identity of Mother Jones under the leadership of founding art director Louise Kollenbaum took shape: serious, immersive, and engaged with the world.
 

Eugene Richards, “This Strange Knowledge,” May 1981

Richards’ photo essay centered on his first wife, writer Dorothea Lynch, and her battle with breast cancer, which ultimately led to her death in 1983. Some of the images became part of the book Exploding Into Life, which combined Lynch’s journals and Richards’ photos in a meditation on mortality.

Susan Meiselas, “White Hand of Terror: How the Peace Was Lost in El Salvador,” June 1981

The mano blanca, or “white hand,” was a sign left by Salvadoran paramilitary death squads on the homes of rebels they killed during the country’s civil war. (Magnum Photos)

Jim Goldberg, “Living at the Hotel California,” August 1978

This photo, the first Goldberg published in a magazine, became the basis of his first book, Rich and Poor (1985). It established his signature style of displaying handwritten messages by the photos’ subjects on the images. (Magnum Photos)

 
1986-1995: Social DocumentaryIn 1988, Kerry Tremain took the reins as art director and, with photographers Michelle Vignes and Ken Light, launched the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography, which supported, and often published, long-term photojournalism projects from the likes of Joseph Rodriguez and Nan Goldin. The magazine considered photography “an essential component of its reporting,” Light says. The stories of this decade were closer, quieter, and more intimate, reflecting a broader shift in documentary photography toward extended relationships and subjective experience. Often unsettling, many of the images explored the emotional terrain of people confronting the country’s biggest problems.
 

Ken Light, “I Will Send for You or I Will Come Home Rich,” November 1988

This piece, which shows three migrants being apprehended while hiding in the trunk of a car 50 yards from the Mexican border in Southern California, was taken from the 1988 book To the Promised Land. (Contact Press)

Joseph Rodriguez, “Gangstas,” January 1994

“Coming out of the streets of New York myself, I felt connected in some sense,” Rodriguez says of his subject. “I was tired of seeing the news covering gangs as animals.” (Gallery Stock)

Nan Goldin, “Among Friends,” January 1992

Goldin’s work here feels ahead of its time in its focus on people who “are going in and out of drag,” as Carole Naggar wrote in an essay accompanying the photos: “They embody the fantasy that gender is malleable.” (© Nan Goldin, courtesy the artist and Gagosian)

 
1996-2007: Globalization and WarWith troops on the ground in the former Yugoslavia, Liberia, and of course Iraq and Afghanistan, the magazine’s reporting increasingly focused on global dynamics such as war, migration, and the environment. Our photography followed suit, documenting the human consequences of political and economic decisions. Images of this period often emphasized aftermath and impact over spectacle: wounded soldiers, displaced families, polluted landscapes, and communities caught in cycles of conflict.
 

Lana Šlezić, “Hidden Half: Women in Afghanistan,” July 2007

Šlezić spent two years traveling Afghanistan, documenting the impact of the war on women’s lives. This photo features Malalai Kakar, who worked as a police officer before the rise of the Taliban and who later went unveiled to educate women about their rights.

Tim Hetherington, “Soldiers in a Forgotten War,” January 2004

In Which Way Is the Front Line From Here?, the posthumous documentary about Hetherington, he talks about working in Liberia, looking for photos that tell a side of war less seen. This quiet shot of a young Liberian man saying goodbye to his sweetheart before heading to battle exemplifies Hetherington’s work: unexpectedly tender, reflective images of young men caught up in tumultuous times. (Imperial War Museums)

Donna DeCesare, “Deporting America’s Gang Culture,” July 1999

DeCesare returned to a country featured prominently in Mother Jones’ early years: El Salvador. This time, though, the focus turned to the United States sending Salvadoran immigrant gang members back to their home country—returning the children of those who fled the violence of the 1980s and in turn creating new problems for the beleaguered Central American country.

Nina Berman, “Returning From Iraq, the Damage Done,” March 2004

As the first waves of soldiers returned from Afghanistan and Iraq, frequent contributor Berman turned her camera on the complicated ways in which these veterans processed being back home. One of her subjects, 22-year-old Luis Calderon, was a former Army tank operator who was destroying a mural of Saddam Hussein when part of the wall crashed down, breaking his neck and paralyzing him. (Redux)

  2008-2015: Crisis at HomeThe financial collapse of 2008 and its long tail turned the magazine’s gaze toward more domestic stories. When I came on as photo director in late 2007, I added more visual work to the rapidly growing website. Throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s, photo essays explored economic collapse, environmental damage, gun violence, and the erosion of working-class life in America. There was room for fun, too—photographers like Bryce Duffy, Gregg Segal, and Chris Buck contributed oddball and often humorous portraiture.  

Bryce Duffy, “Of Mormons and (Gay) Marriage,” March 2010

Longtime Republican operative Fred Karger dressed as the Lone Ranger for his portrait in a story about his fight against Proposition 8, the California initiative aimed at preventing same-sex marriage.

Danny Wilcox Frazier, “What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?” November 2010

Pairing Wilcox Frazier with reporter Charlie LeDuff gave readers an unparalleled insight into the decimation of Detroit. A lot of photographers documented the blight, but this piece told a unique story of how cops shot and killed a 7-year-old girl when they burst into her home with a television crew in tow. And it led to an all-too-rare outcome: accountability for the police. (VII/Redux)

Stacy Kranitz, “Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Business,” July 2013

Kranitz remembers this story—which looked at how police in rural Kentucky were playing whack-a-mole as they tried to stop the theft of Sudafed for use in meth—as one of the craziest projects she’s ever been part of.

 
2016-2025: Protest and PandemicOver the past decade, Mother Jones’ photography has often trained its sights on resistance movements and unfolding political crises: Black Lives Matter protests, climate organizing, immigration and the US–Mexico border, labor struggles, and the Covid pandemic. Many of the photographers represent a new generation working within or alongside the communities they photograph.
 

Ada Trillo,“‘Our Country Is Full,’” November 2020

Raised on the southern border, Trillo gave readers an inside perspective on a migrant caravan headed to the United States—and the ginned-up panic about it. In this photo, a young Honduran boy scrambles under a heavy gate at the Mexico–Guatemala border, where the caravan was stopped.

Zen Lefort, “‘I Didn’t Come Here to Lose’: How a Movement Was Born at Standing Rock,” January 2017

Lefort embedded with groups protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in the Dakotas in 2016. “I shared their daily lives—the freezing nights, the meals, the silences, the stories,” Lefort remembers. “I was 23; we were almost all the same age, and that shared youth bound us together with a kind of quiet certainty.”

Julie Dermansky, “A Portrait of a ‘Last Responder’: The Funeral Director Serving Louisiana’s Virus-Stricken Communities,” August 2020

Published in a special issue focused entirely on the Covid pandemic, Dermansky’s photo essay looked at the work of funeral home operator Courtney Baloney. His business, located in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” catered largely to the African American community, which was hit particularly hard by the pandemic.

Rian Dundon, “Blood on the Sidewalk: A Look at the Political Clashes of the Trump Era,” October 2019

Beginning in 2017, Dundon has been photographing the political confrontations that have rocked the country, including this faceoff at a Milo Yiannopoulos rally at the University of California, Berkeley.

For more on our 50th anniversary, check out Exploding Cars, Office Monkeys, Watergate: The Origins of Mother Jones; The Cover Stories That Put Mother Jones on the Map; and Women’s Work: My Barrier-Breaking Early Years at Mother Jones. And don’t miss the More to the Story episode “Exploding Pintos, Imploding Politics: Celebrating 50 Years of Fearless Journalism” and MoJo Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery and co-founder Adam Hochschild’s conversation on KQED’s Forum.

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As I page through colorful old copies of the magazines from my eight years at Mother Jones, memories start firing. I came on board as an editor in 1979, just as we were moving into the loft space Rolling Stone vacated when it fled to New York, supposedly because founder Jann Wenner’s then-spouse had a mortal fear of the Big One. Those were the days of being in an office all together, a small band of brothers and sisters, working long hours for slim pay, walking the copy from desk to desk as the magazine-making process played out in physical space. No texting or email, so we popped into offices for quick conversations and used the phone a lot, calling writers and sources all over the country.

We edited with mechanical pencils and colored pens, using precise copy editor’s marks that might cover a page edge to edge—spidery corrections, up carets, side arrows, and phrases in balloons. “Cut and paste” meant actual scissors and glue, and then those pages went off to the fact-checking department, then and now a severe taskmaster (the best libel defense being accuracy), and next to our visionary art director, Louise Kollenbaum. She wanted to give readers “access to the thinking,” she recalls, so she paired our long and so-serious articles with myriad color illustrations, photos, pull quotes, sidebars, and cartoons.

I sometimes hear people say that they remember Mother Jones from the ’60s, but chronologically and culturally, the magazine (founded in 1976) was a decidedly post-’60s phenomenon. As one of our founders, Adam Hochschild, would write a couple of years later, during the wildest days of the ’60s, many had believed the system was “so weak that a few shouts, kicks and a good hard shove would bring it all crashing down.” Instead, among the “silent majority,” resentment grew against the college-­based youth movement, hippies, and antiwar protests and against Black, Latino, and other uprisings. Revolutionary ideals and people were violently suppressed in crackdowns led by the FBI, CIA, and local police departments, while bomb-throwing militants also just burned out because of their own extremism and unpopularity. By 1969, Richard Nixon was swept into office by conservative resentment, a pattern we would see repeated: Nixon, Reagan, Trump.

RelatedExploding Cars, Office Monkeys, Watergate: The Origins of Mother Jones

When Nixon was unseated in 1974, it was not Democrats or the left that turned the tide, but journalism. The Watergate revelations made national heroes of investigative reporters and proved that even the president could be ousted thanks to malfeasance exposed. But then, after four years of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan rode another swell of conservatism, just as I was named editor-in-chief in 1980, and so my tenure coincided with a decade of backlash—but also continuing social change, what some have called “the long ’60s,” or the persistence of resistance. The backlash never fully succeeded.

As we baby boomers emerged from our freewheeling 20s, many became progressive professionals: social entrepreneurs, nonprofit leaders, affordable housing developers, alternative energy pioneers. Scholars were reforming schools and universities with more inclusive curricula. Many of us anticipated the emergence of a new voting majority, a left-populist “rainbow coalition” in Jesse Jackson’s 1984 phrase (a forebear to the “purple America” that Barack Obama would proclaim in his 2008 campaign), incorporating all those too long excluded from the American Dream—women, racial and ethnic communities, the working class and the poor. It seemed so logical, so possible, so…likely. And I believe it is still within reach.

I asked some of my colleagues from those days which stories they remembered best after 50 years. Mark Dowie, our chief of investigative reporting, answered unequivocally: a special issue from 1979, with a cover that read “The Corporate Crime of the Century,” about the practice of exporting products banned in the United States to other countries. In partnership with the Center for Investigative Reporting, we revealed what this meant on the ground: Hundreds of Iraqis had died from grain coated with a fungicide banned in the US. Pajamas treated with Tris, a carcinogenic fire retardant that had set off a panic among US parents, were shipped overseas; so were pacifiers and teething rings linked to choking deaths. Both Depo-Provera and the Dalkon Shield, dangerous contraceptives that could not be sold here, were being sent abroad in US-sponsored population programs.

The project won a National Magazine Award and led to a book called Circle of Poison by CIR reporters Mark Schapiro and David Weir. Carter signed an executive order banning the practice. Reagan would later rescind that order, but eventually, legislation was put in place to at least inform other countries whether products for export had been banned in the US.

For Hochschild, a landmark memory was an evening in Moscow in 1979, in the smoke- and vodka-infused apartment of Andrei Sakharov, perhaps the Soviet Union’s most distinguished scientist, whom he was interviewing for Mother Jones: “I felt immensely humbled to see this man…put his immense prestige in support of dissidents under threat from the Kremlin,” he told me. “I felt in the presence of people willing to sacrifice everything for their ideals.” Less than two years later, Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, would be sentenced to internal exile for opposing the USSR’s war in Afghanistan.

At the time, there was no other woman editing a national “thought leader” magazine—the term of art in our trade—and bylines for women were scarce. Men and women mostly read different magazines, and feminist writing was generally directed at women, as in Ms., founded just a few years before Mother Jones. This was a profound cleavage among progressives: Feminists were growing by leaps and bounds in their understanding of patriarchy and gender discrimination, but men were often barely aware. Bringing women’s voices into what had been male-dominated political conversations—and showing that feminism was good for men, too—was a big step.

I am proud of assigning stories by the late and much-missed Barbara Ehrenreich, along with Katha Pollitt, Doris Lessing, Vivian Gornick, and so many more. Kollenbaum brought in countless women as artists, cartoonists, and photographers, such as Sue Coe, Roz Chast, and Susan Meiselas, often spotlighting their work at the beginning of what would be significant careers.

Fiction was another way to bring fresh voices into our pages, as art is often a step ahead of politics. Alice Walker gave us a complex meditation on marriage and abortion, and an excerpt from The Color Purple—which, shockingly to some, centered Black feminist issues with the type of writing that would come to be called intersectional. Maxine Hong Kingston wrote “The Brother in Vietnam,” a story about Chinese American men who had been drafted into an anti-Asian war. Bharati Mukherjee’s “Angela” traced the journey of a girl adopted from Bangladesh; Grace Paley wrote on marriage and her neighborhood association; Rudolfo Anaya, a founder of Chicano literature, shared an excerpt from Bless Me, Ultima, which later won the Premio Quinto Sol award.

RelatedThe Stunning Photojournalism That Made Mother Jones

Kollenbaum, herself of Native American ancestry, put Russell Means, a leader in the American Indian Movement, on the cover of the issue featuring his essay on the ravages of “European mentality” on the Earth. Reggie Major and Cecil Brown and Manning Marable wrote on racial discrimination, Thulani Davis on Black mayors, Roger Wilkins on Jesse Jackson. Margaret Atwood wrote about anti-American feeling in Canada, Alan Bérubé explored the origins of gay liberation in WWII, and Arlie Russell Hochschild, in a piece about flight attendants, introduced the term “emotional labor” and drew attention to the habit of men telling women to smile more.

We editors all wrote for the magazine, too. Amanda Spake delved into a brutal attack on a young female hitchhiker and the “mythic rage” particular to men that led to the crime. Doug Foster, who would later become ­editor-in-chief, investigated the dumping of radioactive waste at sea. Jeffrey Klein, another future editor-in-chief, provided a ferocious interrogation of 60 Minutes legend Mike Wallace, who for months had turned down Klein’s requests for an interview. Finally, after learning that Wallace was to fly to New York from Los Angeles on a particular day, Klein booked the seat next to him and grilled him midair.

Art director Louise Kollenbaum (from left), Deirdre English, Philip Glass, Godfrey Reggio, and Tom Luddy in 1982

One time, our great copy editor, Rick Clogher, disappeared for a spell and came back with a fabulous story about having infiltrated the Bohemian Grove, a retreat for rich and powerful men that has been the subject of countless conspiracy theories since. Another editor, David Talbot, had a knack for the kind of headline we didn’t yet call viral (“My Mother’s Name is Afton Blake. My Father’s Number 28. Sperm-Banking in America”) and went on to found the first major digital magazine, Salon. We often looked beyond our borders: Orville Schell traveled to China, where he encountered a nascent underground punk culture. Bill Finnegan wrote about “unlearning apartheid” as a teacher in South Africa. We especially focused on Central America during those blood-soaked years when the US sponsored the region’s repressive armies. In a 1981 special package, “The White Hand of Terror in El Salvador,” we showed grisly photos, including of children murdered by US-trained forces, images the rest of the press shied away from. In 1985, I went to Nicaragua, interviewed President Daniel Ortega, and raised doubts about the sustainability of Sandinista ideals.

When I mentioned to a wise colleague that I was writing about my years at Mother Jones, she challenged me: What did we miss? Did the magazine overlook one of the biggest trends of the era, the shafting of the working class? When it comes to the content, the answer is decidedly no. We ran pieces by writers like Ron Chernow (who would go on to write the Alexander Hamilton biography on which Lin-­Manuel Miranda’s musical is based), extolling progressive unionism and investigating the “New Pinkertons.” Studs Terkel brought us the lament of a logger over his life and the life of the forest. Barbara Garson wrote about the fresh hell of data-entry jobs in “The Electronic Sweatshop” in 1981.

RelatedThe Cover Stories That Put Mother Jones on the Map

Our readers, though, were largely college educated and middle class, as they generally are for long-form magazines, even as right-wing radio and TV made inroads with working-class audiences. This is why I am so hopeful about today’s Mother Jones, which is reaching audiences not just in print, but on YouTube, social media, and podcast platforms, featuring personalities who can connect with a wide range of communities.

When I look back at the early years, I still mainly see my co-workers, so many more than I could mention. In hindsight, they are all good-looking, caring, witty, and whip smart. To them, my message is: Those were the days, my friends.

For today’s MoJo audience, my message is that our experience offers a hope now. In the Reagan era, the movements we championed, the accountability we demanded, were hit with a brutal backlash. But our journalism persevered in exposing and opposing, as it does so forcefully today. The audience for that work has only grown in size and in diversity. Now, MoJo stands on a firmer foundation than ever, and we know in our hearts that it’s exactly when accountability and justice are most under attack that independent, reader-supported journalism will rise to the challenge.

For more on our 50th anniversary, check out The Stunning Photojournalism That Made Mother Jones, The Cover Stories That Put Mother Jones on the Map, and Exploding Cars, Office Monkeys, Watergate: The Origins of Mother Jones. And don’t miss the More to the Story episode “Exploding Pintos, Imploding Politics: Celebrating 50 Years of Fearless Journalism” and MoJo Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery and co-founder Adam Hochschild’s conversation on KQED’s Forum.

War. Oil shocks. A corrupt president and a scandal-ridden administration. Civil rights abuses and government violence. An immense gap between how young and old, men and women, left and right, rural and urban people view the world. A technological revolution that no one quite understands. And, underneath all that, a sense that an era is ending, and the future looks pretty confusing.

That was the mid-1970s, and it was at that moment that a rambunctious, ­fearless, generous crew of journalists decided that the way to engage with a world in upheaval was to start a magazine unlike any other. One that would tell the truth without hesitation; that would be beholden to its readers, not to a bazillionaire owner; whose defiant tagline would be “A magazine for the rest of us.”

Mother Jones began publishing in 1976, but the prologue begins nine years earlier, when another magazine published an iconic cover: four hands, in men’s dress shirts peeking out of jacket sleeves, holding burning scraps of paper. It wasn’t all just a staged photo illustration: Those were the actual draft cards belonging to Ramparts’ editors and its art director—at a time when destroying your draft card was a felony.

Ramparts had begun as a magazine for “the mature American Catholic” but evolved to land at the journalistic ­frontier of the movement against the Vietnam War. It published investigative reporting and documentary photography, including a groundbreaking photo essay about what napalm was doing to children. (The ­foreword was by America’s most famous parenting expert, Dr. Benjamin Spock.) Martin Luther King Jr., who had not yet taken a position on the war, read that issue while grabbing a meal in an airport. As his associate ­Bernard Lee would later recall, King pushed his plate away when he came to the photos. “Doesn’t it taste any good?” Lee asked. “Nothing will ever taste any good for me until I do everything I can to end that war,” King responded. Soon after, he came out publicly against the war for the first time, and Ramparts published his speech.

Like most startups then and now, ­Ramparts was staffed by people who hated convention, systems, and process. Staffers (including Jann Wenner, who would go on to found Rolling Stone, and Brit Hume, now a senior analyst for Fox News) got used to seeing Henry Luce, the pet monkey belonging to Editor-in-Chief Warren Hinckle, leaping from cubicle wall to cubicle wall in their San Francisco office. The chaos was creative, but it was also just chaos, and Hinckle’s champagne tastes (he insisted on first-class tickets and fine hotels for himself and the team) kept pushing the magazine toward the brink. Ramparts’ next editors, David Horowitz and Peter Collier, declared that the system “must be overthrown. As humanely as possible, but by any means necessary,” amplified the Black Panthers, and put a picture of a Bank of America branch set on fire by protesters on the cover. (Horowitz and Collier would later become leading conservative activists, a long story stemming from the murder of a colleague they had hooked up with a job for the Panthers.)

These were the actual draft cards belonging to Ramparts’ editors and its art director—at a time when destroying your draft card was a felony.

Into this mess stepped a trio of journalists from very different corners of a changing America. Paul Jacobs, in his 50s, was a child of the Depression and the New Deal, an organizer turned investigative journalist who’d labored as a farmworker for a story and documented the aftermath of nuclear tests in the Southwest.

Adam Hochschild, barely 30, had worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, at an anti-­apartheid paper in South Africa, and at Ramparts off and on; he would later write a gripping memoir about his relationship with his father, who ran an international mining company. Richard Parker, the youngest of the lot at 27, had grown up in Southern California amid the aerospace boom and had run an alternative paper in Santa Barbara.

The trio were brought in to revive ­Ramparts, but the politics—inside and outside the magazine—made that impossible as the revolutionary passions of the 1960s splintered into factional fights. “Presenting a coherent progressive or left view seemed impossible,” Parker says. “And so there was some sense that Adam and Paul and I and others have that, well, we’ve just got to fucking start over.”

From left: Mother Jones co-founders Adam Hochschild, Richard Parker, and Paul JacobsGary Sinick; William Rosenthal; Mother Jones archives

What Substack and TikTok are to our moment, new magazines were to the ’70s, and there was a big opening to speak to a new constituency. “Those of us who were political progressives, who cared about social justice, about ecology, the environment, about stopping US military interventions overseas, we didn’t see many places where our voices could reach a large audience,” Hochschild recalls. “There were long-established magazines like The Nation and The Progressive that did a good job, but reached quite small audiences, often in a fairly drab way—just black-and-white type on newsprint-like paper.”

Their new magazine would be something else entirely: iconoclastic, colorful, unapologetically West Coast. It would print on high-quality paper so that color photography would reproduce vividly. It would be well designed and compellingly written. It would have kickass marketing and a solid, monkey-free business operation.

The trio had no idea how to do much of this, but they had a knack for attracting people who did. Louise Kollenbaum, the inaugural art director, concocted powerful visuals on a tiny budget. Photographers offered their work for little or no money, famous illustrators took assignments to be part of something cool, staffers posed for photo illustrations. Jeffrey Klein, a boyish editor with a shock of red hair and a pit bull’s persistence, brought in big pieces, including an essay by Li-li Ch’en that won a National Magazine Award for the magazine’s very first issue. John Klingel, a publishing executive who later became president of Reader’s Digest, helped them figure out how to hire a printer, buy paper, and navigate the Sopranos-esque world of magazine distribution. And Bill Jayme, a ­direct-mail marketing whiz, signed on to help them launch a crowdfunding campaign: They would mail out tens of thousands of letters asking strangers to subscribe to a magazine—they were calling it New Dimensions—that told the unvarnished truth.

“Investigative reporting on corporate malpractice was something very few other people were doing in a systematic way. It was open territory.”

The reply envelopes came back with a decent response, but something else came in the mail: a cease-and-desist letter from a newsletter named…New Dimensions.

“It scared the shit out of us,” Parker ­recalls. There were printer deadlines to meet for the next mailing; they needed a new name, stat. Parker sat down with Jayme “and our friend Jack Daniel’s” to brainstorm. Sometime after midnight, they landed on the name of a fiery labor organizer from the early 20th century.

The editors were skeptical. Who had ever heard of Mary Harris “Mother” Jones? People wouldn’t know what it meant. “That’s the point!” Jayme insisted.

Not long after, the mail carrier trudged into the cramped office the crew had ­secured in downtown San Francisco, a space enveloped in the smell of fries from the McDonald’s downstairs. “He said, ‘Oh, such a pisser carrying all these up the stairs’—the elevator didn’t work or something,” Hochschild recalls. The pile of envelopes was enormous. Using the name Mother Jones had doubled response over previous mailings. “When we saw that,” Hochschild says, “we knew it was a go.”

The premier issue was set to publish in February 1976. But soon, the small team had a different problem: They had assigned, edited, and fact-checked a bunch of great stories, but what, asked Kollenbaum, was going to be on the cover? Eventually, ­Dugald Stermer, Ramparts’ former art director, created an illustration riffing on the revolutionary flavor with a take on the iconic Spirit of ’76 painting. Like the magazine’s name, it wasn’t what anyone had planned on. But somehow, it worked.

RelatedThe Cover Stories That Put Mother Jones on the Map

Reading through those early issues is equal parts nostalgic treasure hunt and shock of recognition. There are exposés on Nazi war criminals; personal essays of a generation in its adulting phase (“We are…in the midst of a great new social laboratory—the egalitarian marriage”); pieces on communes, the Austin music scene, vegetarian food (“Despite its looks, tofu can be fun”), and “Chinese eye exercises.” But there’s also a “Letter to an Israeli Friend” warning that denying rights to the Palestinian people will harm a nation still emerging from the Holocaust (“Watching Israel is like watching someone in a wheelchair racing down a path toward a precipice”). There’s poetry, short fiction, and a letters page with missives from “Dr. Hunter S. Thompson” of Colorado (confirming an $8 subscription) and Sen. Frank Church (of the eponymous committee investigating CIA abuses, saying thanks for a complimentary copy).

It’s an eclectic mix, and one that reveals a bit of an identity crisis at the young magazine. “We fought a lot,” recalls Mark Dowie, who was part of that early team. “It was all about: Were we making a service magazine for the left, or were we trying to keep the center from sliding too far to the right?”

The answer, it turned out, was something else, and it landed with a bang in the eighth issue, in November 1976. On the cover was an object that looked like a plastic beetle with a string attached but that many women would have recognized as a Dalkon Shield—a birth control device that had been implanted in millions of patients and had caused serious health issues for some. There had been lawsuits, but the story hadn’t really broken through. Dowie thought Mother Jones could change that.

As the business manager, Dowie wasn’t technically a journalist, but he’d had a stint as a reporter at a local paper. “I went to an editorial meeting and said, ‘We’ve been promising hard-hitting investigative reports, particularly corporate stuff, and we’re not delivering.’” What did he have in mind, the editors asked. “I said, ‘Look, you can walk into the lobby of any corporation in America and you have a story.’ And they said, ‘Okay, why don’t you do it?’”

Dowie, who knew a woman harmed by the shield, started digging into the story on his bus commute to work. He read piles of legal documents and research papers; he got on the phone and pestered executives, regulators, lawyers. The result was a piece, co-bylined by Dowie and freelance journalist Tracy Johnston, that read nothing like the bullet point–laden investigative dossiers you’d find in a newspaper. It had facts, names, and dates, but also characters and a plot. It married dogged reporting with New Journalism panache.

Infections linked to the shield had killed at least 17 women just in the US and left many more infertile. Dowie and Johnston showed that the research behind the device was questionable, that the doctors who invented it had made a fortune by pushing it to market, and that its maker, A.H. Robins, knew the product had issues but had continued to heavily promote it.

The story made a splash, and the little magazine suddenly walked a little taller. This­ (what Hochschild would later refer to as taking on “the great unelected power wielders of our time—multinational corporations”) was a mission.

RelatedWomen’s Work: My Barrier-Breaking Early Years at Mother Jones

“Stumbling upon the vacuum of reporting about corporate misdeeds was the big discovery of those early years,” Hochschild says. “Muckraking, in the years before we started publishing, had been mainly conceived of with government and politicians as the target…We began realizing that investigative reporting on corporate malpractice was something very few other people were doing in a systematic way. It was open territory.”

Browsing the issues after the Dalkon Shield reveals the vibe shift. There are more stories on corporate power (a deep dive on labor conditions at a textile mill, a first-person dispatch from “the world of secretaries,” a piece on American oil company corruption in Venezuela). And there’s a media critique emerging, too: Even with investigative reporting gaining traction post-Watergate, it turns out there were still plenty of stories that mainstream media wouldn’t touch. The cover story of the June 1977 issue is about the murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles, whose car was blown up while he was investigating the mob. A team of journalists from around the country came together to finish the story, but the Republic wouldn’t print the resulting investigation (claiming it didn’t have sufficient documentation), and the big national outlets mostly shrugged it off. Meanwhile, MoJo reported, the Hearst Corporation, which owned the San Francisco Examiner and other major papers, was refusing to defend freelance journalist Lowell Bergman in a libel case connected to a murder in San Francisco’s Chinatown. (Bergman and two other journalists, David Weir and Dan Noyes, would go on to found another Bay Area powerhouse: the Center for Investigative Reporting.)

The combination of corporate muckraking and media critique solidified the ­magazine’s sense of its identity—and its readers’, too. Mother Jones frequently printed reader surveys, Hochschild recalls, lists of questions that readers would answer and send back. When asked what kinds of stories they would like to see, “people would always say, ‘I want more stories of activism, of positive news.’ But then when you ask people to actually rate the stories that they read, it would be exposés of corporate malfeasance at the top.”

RelatedThe Stunning Photojournalism That Made Mother Jones

Corporate malfeasance could not have been more in evidence in the story that truly put Mother Jones on the map. In the wake of the oil crisis, the small-car market had been booming, and the Ford Motor Company had a bestseller in its subcompact, the Pinto. The company’s brash new president, Lee Iacocca, had brass-knuckled it into production, decreeing that it must not cost a penny more than $2,000 or weigh an ounce over 2,000 pounds. Most production lines took 43 months to ramp up; the Pinto started rolling off the line in about half that time.

One design flaw brushed off in the rush to market was the placement of the Pinto’s fuel tank. It was nestled right next to the rear bumper, where four pointy bolts would perforate the tank in even low-speed collisions. Any spark could lead to an explosion—and it did. Between 500 and 900 people, Dowie reported in Mother Jones’ September 1977 cover story, had died in Pinto fires and many more had suffered terrible burns.

Those numbers were shocking, but even more so was an internal memo that Dowie obtained: It showed that Ford had carefully calculated the cost of such tragedies versus the cost of fixing the car. An annual toll of 180 deaths and 180 serious injuries would cost about $50 million. Retooling the assembly line to add an $11 part would come out to $137 million. Ford had chosen the cheaper path.

If the Dalkon Shield story had made a splash, this one was a cannonball. Ralph Nader held a press conference announcing Mother Jones’ findings. The New York Times ran a story. Mike Wallace did a long segment on 60 Minutes. (The MoJo team felt a little salty, Dowie recalls, about CBS ripping off their earlier stories, “so when they called this time, we said, ‘Yes, we’ll help you, but you have to credit us on the air.’”) The ­National Highway Traffic Safety ­Administration launched an investigation. Eventually, Ford recalled 1.5 million cars—roughly half of all the Pintos it had ever sold—and ended up facing more than 100 lawsuits, including the first-ever criminal prosecution of a company for a product defect. (A jury later found Ford not guilty of reckless homicide.)

“When a little pipsqueak magazine out on the West Coast all of a sudden is getting a lot of national attention,” Dowie recalls, “that’s exhilarating and fun.”

The Pinto story cemented the young magazine’s sense of its “journalism of purpose,” as Parker called it, and left the fretting about carving out this or that position on the left in the rearview mirror.

“I’ve often been asked, ‘Where does Mother Jones stand on this?’” Harriet ­Barlow, a longtime activist who served on the board for nearly 40 years, told me. “The answer is: wherever the best story is.”

Going after Big Pharma or carmakers “is not, per se, a left point of view,” Parker notes. “You don’t have to use the word ‘proletariat.’ You don’t have to talk about class struggle. The idea here is we’re defending and building a community of common values, not that we’re advancing a particular party or even a particular ideology. So that gave Mother Jones a broader reach in terms of reputation and avoided allowing critics to pigeonhole it quite as easily as they might have.”

It also proved fortuitous, Parker says, that the magazine was based in San ­Francisco and never—despite entreaties from some of its supporters—moved to the East Coast to become part of the political media bubble. “One of the strengths is you don’t get caught up in the conventional wisdom that exercises such a powerful hold on what passes for journalism in the area between Boston and Washington.”

Indeed, many of MoJo’s biggest investigations in those early years were stories few in the Amtrak corridor had thought of as newsworthy—abuses that were perfectly legal, but outrageous nonetheless. “Smoking: The Truth No One Else Will Print,” in the January 1979 issue, started out this way:

“Every morning my husband coughs and gags for about ten minutes. Some days he wakes up choking. On others he is fine until he stands up, then doubles over retching. After 15 or 20 minutes, he can finish a sentence without gasping, walk across the room without bending over in pain, even pick up our two-year-old son without dropping him. Then he gets dressed, has a cup of coffee and lights his first cigarette of the day.”

In painstaking detail, the story laid out the science on how cigarettes hooked you more effectively than heroin. It would be 20 more years before tobacco executives admitted that they knew.

One by one, Mother Jones was biting the hands that fed America’s publishing industry: Cars. Tobacco. Booze. Big Pharma. Beauty products. Most magazines (and not a small portion of the underground press) were bankrolled by marketing budgets; no chance of that here.

But unlike other progressive organizations launched in the ’70s, MoJo didn’t have much access to big foundations—journalism was not yet seen as a worthy charitable cause. So where the magazine turned for survival, over and over again, was its readers. MoJo had begun with a determination to find and keep an audience—to compete not just in the marketplace of ideas, but in the actual marketplace, too. It had to convince hundreds of thousands of people each year to subscribe, then deliver them a quality product, and then—because the cost of subscriptions was kept ridiculously low so that more people could afford them—compel those who could afford a little extra to pitch in with a donation, and keep track of all the little transactions and expenses along the way. In a word, it needed to function as a business, but one that made change instead of a profit.

Art director Louise Kollenbaum (left) and a 1981 staff meeting (right) with editors Dave Talbot, Deirdre English, Ruth Henrich, Kollenbaum, Mark Dowie, and Amanda Spake.Mother Jones archives

It also needed to respond to the bigger forces roiling around it—including one that the founders hadn’t quite reckoned with. Within a year of Mother Jones’ launch, a group of feminist writers announced a boycott of the magazine, demanding that it do better at including their concerns.

The women’s movement had put gender and sexuality at the center of its politics, but many in the old left viewed those as distractions, too personal and niche. At Mother Jones, however, a women’s caucus quickly formed to negotiate with the writers and resolved the strike with a commitment to solicit more articles by women, especially “Third World women,” and to feature at least one explicitly feminist article in every other issue. (In a similar vein, a demand by staff to join the United Auto Workers in 1983 soon led to the magazine recognizing the union.)

“Magazines were incredibly segregated in those days,” recalls Deirdre English, who came on board in 1978 and became editor-in-chief in 1980. “Women were not taken seriously as readers by the left magazines in general. The idea that Mother Jones would be a magazine that was read pretty much equally by men and women was a big accomplishment.”

In 1981, the magazine published an essay by writer Dorothea Lynch, who had asked her husband, storied photographer Eugene Richards, to document her breast cancer treatment. “This was back in the day where people were, unbelievably, still not talking about breast cancer,” Kollenbaum says. “Nobody had seen pictures like that in the media. It was kind of still a secret.”

The following year, Mother Jones published an essay by Nora Gallagher about another secret in plain sight—“a group of diseases that…are causing a trembling among doctors and gay men. They are known by the acronym AID, which stands for acquired immune deficiency.” At a time when newspapers were still struggling to acknowledge the existence of gay people, Gallagher described the harrowing questions men were asking themselves and each other. There was “talk of fearing a quarantine, a ‘reason to round us up.’” One man, who described his life before the illness as “Peter Pan, the magical boy who didn’t grow up,” wondered “whether I brought all this on myself.”

MoJo staff march in a Pride parade.Louise Kollenbaum

By the late 1970s, Mother Jones was among the fastest-growing magazines in the country. It was one of just 37 publications used to prepare the daily newsbrief for President Jimmy Carter—the circulation team even used a photo of Carter reading MoJo in its promotions, ignoring a cease-and-desist letter from the White House.

But change was on the wind. Carter was in a tight race against the ex–governor of California Ronald Reagan, who promised to roll back the social changes of the past decade. A new religious right movement was gearing up to help make it happen. And in MoJo’s Bay Area home, tech companies were building something called the “personal computer” that would change the way everyone lived.

At Mother Jones, the founders had all moved on. Jacobs died at just 59, his lung cancer widely attributed to the radiation he’d absorbed while investigating nuclear tests. Hochschild was eager to get back to writing (he has published 11 books to date, including the award-winning King Leopold’s Ghost). Parker (who went on to an acclaimed career as a Harvard economist) started a consulting firm.

This is where a story like this would normally end. The groundbreaking startup would struggle after its founders’ departure. It would have trouble finding an identity in a new political environment and its audience would drift away. Maybe it would hang around for a few zombie-­esque years, coasting off the innovation and experimentation of its past.

Hochschild with current CEO Monika Bauerlein and Editor-in-Chief Clara JefferyMatt Lisack

But that didn’t happen. Mother Jones is still here, and not only that, its reach and impact have grown dramatically. Back in 1976, the magazine’s founders went after audiences and stories not well served by traditional media. Every one of the 50 years since has been defined by that mission. In 1993, MoJo became the first general interest magazine on the web. In the 2000s, when our current editor-in-chief, Clara Jeffery, and I came into the fold, we launched a Washington bureau as counter to the ­insider journalism that had amplified the Bush administration’s lies about Iraq.

In the 2010s, as more and more people were getting their news from social platforms, MoJo built a big footprint there; then, as audiences turned to TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, we doubled down there as well. And two years ago, we merged with our crosstown frenemy and longtime partner, the Center for Investigative Reporting, creators of the acclaimed radio show and podcast Reveal. With unprecedented challenges for independent news and democracy, having a bigger impact together seemed much more important than whatever was keeping us separate.

While our newsroom of 75 people is less than 5 percent the size of, say, the behemoth New York Times, it punches way above its weight, reaching some 10 million people a month regularly and sometimes double that. There are days, astonishingly, when more people watch Mother Jones videos than watch either Sean Hannity or the CBS Evening News.

DC Bureau Chief David Corn (right) discusses the 47 percent story on Face the Nation.Face the Nation

This team has also won virtually every major prize in journalism—shelves full of National Magazine Awards, Polks, duPonts, Emmys, Webbys, etc. But the biggest reward has always been going after stories nobody else would and seeing them change the world. In the 1980s, under ­Editor-in-Chief Doug Foster and the tagline “People, Politics, and Other Passions,” the magazine investigated Big Tobacco and weapons makers and profiled the likes of Jesse Jackson, Spike Lee, and Bono. In the 1990s, long before ­Citizens United, came a string of investigations into the corrosive effects of money in politics and how Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh were laying the groundwork for what would become Trumpism.

In the 2000s, we charted the caravan of lies that led America into the Iraq War and exposed how the fossil fuel industry was undermining climate science. We’ve published manifestos that turned into movements; Bill McKibben laid out the mission for 350.org with an essay, “The Most Important Number on Earth,” in these pages. We investigated the Oath Keepers a decade before January 6. In 2012, DC Bureau Chief David Corn broke the 47 percent story that changed the course of that presidential election, revealing that GOP nominee Mitt Romney had insulted half the electorate as slackers looking for government handouts.

We sent reporters undercover into private prisons, border militias, and the Amazon shipping universe. At a time when other news outlets were treating Donald Trump’s presidential campaign as entertainment, we probed his business deals and the extremist movements he was bringing into the mainstream, and revealed the FBI investigation into his dealings with Vladimir Putin. We created the first database of mass shootings and calculated the price we all pay for gun manufacturer profits. While big publishers were making deals with Facebook, we exposed how its algorithms manipulated millions. And in a sweeping historical investigation from the Reveal team and our friends at the Center for Public Integrity, we showed how the US government took away land it had given to formerly enslaved people after the Civil War.

Reporter Shane Bauer (left) in his private prison guard uniform; Reveal host Al Letson (right)James West; Reveal

There were lots of bumps, and more than a few near-death experiences, along the way. Michael Moore was dramatically booted from the editor’s chair after four months in 1986 (his out-of-court settlement helped fund his breakthrough documentary, Roger & Me). The Reagan-era IRS came after ­MoJo’s nonprofit status (we won, but not without major legal bills and headaches). In the ’90s, we were sued by a famed Republican operative for revealing that two ex-wives had accused him of domestic abuse. In 2013 came a massive lawsuit from a dark-money billionaire and Romney campaign finance chair. (More legal bills and headaches before we won, in both cases.)

And then there’s just the struggle ­underneath it all: It’s incredibly hard to find the money to keep it all going. ­Careful ­budgeting (okay, often penny-pinching) has helped, and so have the hardest-working business-side professionals in the field. But what has primarily kept Mother Jones alive for these 50 years is support from hundreds of thousands of readers (and now viewers and listeners, too) who believe, as we do, that journalistic independence is one of the strongest counterforces to autocracy.

Never in recent history has that danger been as clear and present as it is right now. Enough said about that.

But also, never in recent history has it been more evident what we can do about it. Back in 1976, when MoJo was one of just a handful of nonprofit newsrooms, many sneered at the idea that public interest journalism cannot be left to profit-­seeking owners. The last 50 years have put that argument to rest. Now, as much of what’s left of the media industry crumbles and caves around us, it’s time to commit to something better—journalism by and for “the rest of us.”

Additional research was provided by Dru Sefton and by Ariel Kaplan, whose oral history of global investigative journalism is in development at Columbia University.

For more on our 50th anniversary, check out The Stunning Photojournalism That Made Mother Jones, The Cover Stories That Put Mother Jones on the Map, and Women’s Work: My Barrier-Breaking Early Years at Mother Jones. And don’t miss the More to the Story episode “Exploding Pintos, Imploding Politics: Celebrating 50 Years of Fearless Journalism” and MoJo Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery and co-founder Adam Hochschild’s conversation on KQED’s Forum.

For our 50th anniversary issue, we did something that we try every once in a while: We produced two covers, one for subscribers and one for the newsstand.

The idea behind a split cover is to give different types of readers different experiences. In this case, subscribers got a rich, celebratory collage from artist Max-o-matic, stitching together some of the most iconic and aberrant figures of our half-century in print. For the newsstand, our art team took inspiration from Nirvana’s legendary second album to tease Casey Michel’s investigation of Jared Kushner’s (self-)dealings. With the help of ace illustrator Justin Metz, we had an insta-classic: Nevermind the Corruption.

Both covers blend stunning visuals and sharp design with the bold (and occasionally irreverent) writing inside the magazine—something we’ve been shooting for ever since our first issue way back in 1976. 

March 1976

For our premier issue, illustrator Dugald Stermer recasts The Spirit of ’76 with a movement vibe.

October 1977

Art director Louise Kollenbaum borrows her uncle Al’s Ford Pinto for the cover shot of the exposé that put Mother Jones on the map.

November 1977

“When Mother Jones asked me to write about women and success, I thought: How optimistic, so few of us are in danger of it.” —Rita Mae Brown

June 1978

Remember barcode moral panic?

December 1978

With the Center for Investigative Reporting, we dig into the quasi-religious self-help group EST.

January 1979

Tobacco companies pull years’ worth of ads as a result of this story.

July 1981

“The sailor pissing over the side is a more important source of pollution” than nuclear waste dumping, says a former Atomic Energy Commission official.

November 1982

A deep dive into STDs zeroes in on a mysterious illness “causing a trembling among doctors and gay men.”

January 1983

Christopher Hitchens memorably skewers Tom Wolfe’s chummy relationships with conservative elites.

June 1983

Co-founder Adam Hochschild and photographer Susan Meiselas expose the truth about a US-funded dirty war.

December 1983

Arlie Russell Hochschild, writing about men telling women to smile more, coins the phrase “emotional labor.”

October 1984

William Styron! Kurt Vonnegut! Al Franken! Carolyn Forché!

May 1985

Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau illustrates a still-familiar tension.

September 1986

Michael Moore’s first issue as MoJo’s editor, in what would be a fiery four-month stint. He famously took his settlement pay to help make Roger & Me.

October 1987

As Editor Douglas Foster later notes, the answer to this question is: “To win.”

June 1988

Or, as we call it, “the sex tornado issue.”

May 1989

A smoldering Bono in our “People, Politics, and Other Passions” era.

September 1989

Resting Spike face.

August 1990

The first of Ralph’s short-lived “Nader’s Nineties” columns.

June 1991

Bart Simpson’s second cover appearance, along with his sister Lisa—a MoJo reader if ever there was one.

February 1992

When the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons calls small breasts “deformities,” you have to put a boob on the cover.

February 1997

Artist Philip Burke captures the controlled chaos of political celebrity for several covers in the ’90s.

February 1998

Bill Gates, writes Editor Jeffrey Klein, was “instrumental in making a mindless world attractive.”

October 2000

We skewer the overhyped threat of a foreign terrorist attack—a year before 9/11. Whoops.

June 2005

The “scientists disagree” narrative has held up climate action for decades. We expose how ExxonMobil created it.

October 2006

An exhaustive timeline of how the George W. Bush administration—with the help of mainstream media—sold the Iraq War.

February 2007

Jack Hitt’s provocative essay could’ve run anytime in the previous—or following—decade.

April 2007

Here’s hoping we don’t end up making an Iran Handbook for Dummies cover.

February 2009

We didn’t know just how much of a balancing act the Obama years would be.

October 2010

Julia Whitty unmasks BP’s lies about its “cleanup” of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

December 2010

Nailed it.

August 2011

Co-Editors Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery unpack the “do more with less” trend.

April 2012

Gabriel Mac goes undercover in the e-commerce supply chain.

February 2013

Kevin Drum probes reams of research to deliver a compelling thesis: Lead exposure caused the spike in violent crime in the late ’70s and ’80s.

August 2014

Dan Schulman gives the dark-money Koch brothers the tabloid treatment.

June 2015

Our deep data dive finds that gun violence costs America $229 billion a year—more than $700 per person.

October 2015

Tim Murphy profiles Bernie Sanders, whose wild presidential run is still on the Mount Rushmore of populist insurgencies.

August 2016

Shane Bauer’s epic undercover investigation causes private prison company stock to tank.

October 2016

The first of our 18(!) Donald Trump covers. (Bill Clinton and George W. Bush tie for second, with five covers each.)

August 2017

The definitive guide to the hack-and-leak operation that threatened American democracy.

December 2018

Okay, so maybe we were a bit optimistic…

April 2019

As many publishers cut deals with Facebook, we expose how it is poisoning the information ecosystem.

October 2020

While police protests grip the country, Samantha Michaels spotlights alternative visions of community safety.

June 2023

Frequent contributor Bill McKibben pushes progressives to build, baby, build.

February 2024

A year before Big Tech overlords join Trump on the inauguration stage, our oligarchy issue calls it what it is.

April 2026

This callback to our first cover features Pete Hegseth bringing up the rear, bottle in hand.

For more on our 50th anniversary, check out Exploding Cars, Office Monkeys, Watergate: The Origins of Mother Jones; The Stunning Photojournalism That Made Mother Jones; and Women’s Work: My Barrier-Breaking Early Years at Mother Jones. And don’t miss the More to the Story episode “Exploding Pintos, Imploding Politics: Celebrating 50 Years of Fearless Journalism” and MoJo Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery and co-founder Adam Hochschild’s conversation on KQED’s Forum.

Madeleine Rotzler’s new film, O Horizon, offers an odd vision of dystopia, even as it’s billed as a “sci-fi comedy drama.” The film itself is not always much to look at, but sometimes a film in its very strangeness can reveal a great deal, precisely because of all that it obscures. After all, so much of what matters these days is happening out of sight, suppressed by algorithms, hostile media, and even more hostile governments, and increasingly one must learn to look under the surface of simple things. Rotzler’s film gets its title from the layer of decomposed plant matter on the forest floor, the “O horizon,” but it’s what’s lying beneath O Horizon that truly matters.

In a near-future New York, Abby (Maria Bakalova) works in a neuroscience lab tracking the brain waves of monkeys, struggling to deal with the recent death of her father, played by David Strathairn. An intrusive, Siri-like AI assistant encourages her to visit a shabby-looking tech start-up called Seeking a Friend Store; there, a lone employee played by Adam Palley offers to recreate someone you’ve lost or are missing. After uploading a parcel of photos, documents, and other archival material to its servers, the company creates a digital avatar that you can call on your phone whenever you like. After some initial reluctance, Abby creates a digital version of her dead dad, and soon begins talking to it as a means of managing her grief as she tries to go forward in her life.

As an AI chatbot, her dead father acts like all AI chatbots: supportive, deferential, complimentary. The AI is always there with a new prompt to fill up dead air (“Tell me something fun that happened today,” “What’re you up to tonight? Having fun?”) or a little ego boost (“Dr. Williams is so lucky to have you. You’re excellent.… Somehow you’ve managed to develop excellence in all that you do. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise”). It’s always working to keep her engaged and affirmed, and anytime there’s any friction between the two of them, it backs off, eager to keep her on the line. If Strathairn’s dialogue wasn’t actually written by ChatGPT, the script does an excellent job of imitating it, and the bot’s lines have all the hallmarks of an LLM: cloying and irritatingly sentimental.

These are strange scenes. For narcissists, incels, and sociopaths, the appeal of a chatbot is that it will always tells them exactly what they want to hear, so you can imagine how uncomfortable it is to listen to such a thing telling someone else what they want to hear. As the platitudes and clichés dribble out of Abby’s phone, not even an actor with Strathairn’s delivery can save them.

We never learn how much Abby pays for her subscription, but in real life these businesses have a financial incentive to get their users hooked, so to speak, on their product. As Mary-Frances O’Connor, professor of clinical psychology at University of Arizona, told Scientific American’s David Berreby in 2025, the danger here is that people struggling with grief can be uniquely vulnerable to Big Tech’s long-honed engagement and gamification strategies. Researcher Nore Lindemann has further noted that “users are likely to become dependent on their bots, which may make them susceptible to surreptitious advertising by deathbot providing companies and may limit their autonomy.”

That vulnerability offers real possibilities. For emerging companies like You, Only Virtual, HereAfter AI, Super Brain, and Silicon Intelligence, grief represents an exciting new market. Researchers are already beginning to identify the obvious financial incentives for such companies to alter the “informational bodies” of the dead to increase engagement and revenue. Rather than moving people through the process of grieving, AI companies would seem to benefit more from keeping them in the phase of acute bereavement, distorting their memories to give them what they want, all the while promising the false allure of being perpetually free of loss. Indeed, one wonders if Abby’s dad was really this asinine in life, or if Seeking a Friend Store has already tweaked his personality to keep her paying subscription fees.

While Rotzler’s movie doesn’t much explore the ethical implications of what it might mean to get addicted to a product that promises to take the pain away, it does depict what a world without pain might look like. And it turns out to be a truly banal one. For it’s not just the dialogue. Strathairn’s chatbot doesn’t push back or try to challenge or trouble Abby in any way, and strangely, O Horizon’s plot does not try to challenge or trouble the viewer, either. Throughout its hundred-minute run time, hardly anything happens. There is no real conflict, no real rising tension, no climax, no real denouement.

O Horizon gives you what AI thinks you want: no struggle, no tension, nothing unpleasant, no pushback.

At one point, the AI develops the ability to call Abby of its own initiative—you think this may signal a turn in the narrative, some malevolent warning about technology getting out of control, but it doesn’t. At another point, Abby begins dating a man named Douglas (Avi Nash), and the viewer thinks maybe he will turn out to be a jerk, but he doesn’t. The viewer thinks perhaps her AI dead father will get jealous, or otherwise turn haywire. He doesn’t. You may think Abby will have to learn to let go of her father to be with her boyfriend, but she doesn’t! The few conflicts that do arise have such low stakes that they are resolved within minutes and forgotten almost immediately. No character conflict has any kind of lasting ramification or seems to matter for any serious length of time. Anytime it seems like there might be any kind of friction, the plot backs off.

It’s as if the story is as deferential and sycophantic as AI itself. O Horizon gives you what AI thinks you want: no struggle, no tension, nothing unpleasant, no pushback. It is a movie made by real humans, but it feels like it’s made by AI, made without an awareness of what makes film interesting or ultimately pleasurable. For one of the most basic reasons we experience narrative art, be it a film or a novel or a television show, is some kind of tension, some kind of drama. No one actually wants a smooth, flat surface. We do not want art to smile placidly back at us for one hundred minutes telling us we’re excellent, that the world is lucky to have us, that nothing matters.

We’ve known this for thousands of years; it’s one of the most basic lessons of Aristotle’s Poetics. Catharsis—the purging of negative emotions that happens through the experience of watching something difficult; of dealing with a character’s actual pain and suffering; of being engaged with issues of actual tension, drama, hardship, impossible decisions, insurmountable odds, tragedy, and resolve in the face of despair—matters not just because it allows us a safe venue to release these emotions, but because it gives us perspective on our own troubles and hardships. Grappling with pain through art is one of those very existential things that makes us human, that allows us to experience the world fresh and anew. That word itself—catharsis—has remained so elusive since Aristotle’s days, so hard to pin down, precisely because it’s hard to say exactly what it is we need from great art. There is no simple definition, no easy formula, no predictable algorithm that can deliver it to us. It seems cheesy to have to say this, but we live at a moment when AI-generated art that fails to deliver this is being passed off as legitimate, and sometimes just stating the obvious becomes an act of resistance against this dreck.

Dulled of sensation, the world of O Horizon is emptied. The same opiate that griefbots would offer the grieving, Rotzler’s narrative offers her viewers: soporific, painless.

In a strange way, the fantasy of painlessness is particularly fraught for Rotzler. Her previous films appeared under her maiden name, Sackler. Her grandfather, Raymond Sackler, was one of three brothers who founded Purdue Pharma, the pharmaceutical company behind OxyContin; her father, Jonathan, sat on its board and was its vice president for years.

While Rotzler herself has never worked for Purdue Pharma, in 2023 Artnet reported that a number of the production crew of O Horizon became uncomfortable during filming, viewing Abby’s relationship with her father as being an autobiographical depiction of Rotzler’s relationship with her own father, who died in 2020, and an attempt to whitewash his image.

In the decades when Jonathan Sackler was involved with Purdue Pharma, it generated billions of dollars by distributing Oxycontin throughout the United States and abroad. In 2007, the company pleaded guilty to misleading the public about the addictive properties of OxyContin, and the year Jonathan died the company reached a settlement in which it admitted that for years it had “knowingly and intentionally conspired and agreed with others to aid and abet” doctors in dispensing the drug “without a legitimate medical purpose.” (The consulting firm McKinsey & Company additionally agreed in 2024 to a $650 million settlement for its work in helping “turbocharge” Purdue’s sales of OxyContin during the epidemic.) The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that between 1999 and 2018 alone, 450,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses.

The father of O Horizon is a kindly, generous man—a sculptor, a fan of David Bowie, and a reader of scientific journals. It was this depiction that apparently caused friction among the crew during filming. “The script is extremely parallel to Madeleine’s experience of the loss of her dad, and clearly very related to what he did with drugs,” set dresser Caroline Pigou told Artnet. “Everyone on the crew would talk about how fucked up and weird it was that this movie was getting made in the first place.”

Rotzler has insisted that the film is not autobiographical. “This film is about artificial intelligence and there are no parallels between my father or his work and the characters in the film,” she told Artnet through a representative. Fine. That’s her take. Still, the film’s theme of painlessness is one that resonates with the family business of selling pain relief; and the film’s obliviousness to the shallowness of the AI bot’s consolations echoes with Purdue’s years of denying the dangers of its opioids.

Everywhere, it seems, we are faced with bullshit technology and bad art that offer false promises to take away all our pain.

It’s not the first time Rotzler has proven determined to ignore the ways in which her films might seem to audiences to be in conversation with her family’s scandals. In a New Yorker feature on her earlier work, the documentary It’s a Hard Truth Ain’t It and the feature O.G., both filmed inside an actual penitentiary in Indiana, Nick Paumgarten wrote that “one might suppose that Sackler’s concern and sympathy for the incarcerated is some kind of expiation,” given that so many incarcerated Americans are there for opioid-related offenses, but she “thinks this is baloney.… It pains her to think that the perception of her project, and of the hard work of everyone involved, would be tainted in some way by her pedigree.” In Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, Patrick Radden Keefe relates how Jeffrey Wright, the star of O.G., emailed her before the film opened, asking her to address the “elephant” in the room: why so many of the men were in the prison where they’d been filming. “You never spoke to me about any of that. I was aware and only once tried to broach the subject with you. You didn’t open up about it.” As the premiere approached, Wright wanted to know: “Do you think you should take into consideration that this will become part of the dialogue around these films?” According to Keefe, she never wrote Wright back.

If there’s an animating impulse in O Horizon beneath its facile resolution of grief, it’s denial: the steadfast inability to contemplate how this story of a daughter conjuring a smoother, simpler version of her late father might play to audiences who have followed years of news of the opioid epidemic and the Sacklers’ central role in it.

O Horizon is not much of a thing in and of itself. But it offers an almost perfect distillation of our relationship to pain in 2026. Everywhere, it seems, we are faced with bullshit technology and bad art that offer false promises to take away all our pain, all the while completely misunderstanding what that pain is, why we suffer it, and what it means to actually endure it.

Rotzler’s uncle Richard Sackler once wrote of those overdosing from his company’s drug, “These are criminals.… Why should they be entitled to our sympathies?” Why indeed. I think of Susan Crathern, whose son Kevin broke two teeth on the playground when he was 10 and was given OxyContin for the pain, his mother assured by the dentist that it was not addictive. Ten years later, he died from an accidental overdose after years of struggling from addiction. In her 2020 testimony to Congress on the damage wrought by the opioid crisis, Crathern wrote: “In my mind his death is a truth that can’t be true.”

This is how grief actually is for too many people, down in the wreckage, where it is a paradox that can’t easily be solved, one that can’t be glibly assuaged with pabulum and clichés, a thing not to be solved with subscription fees, engagement algorithms, and prefabricated compliments but faced with rage and guilt and sorrow and carried every day without reprieve. For too many people’s lived reality, grief is the unimaginable weight of memories, the ugly truth that can’t be true. There’s no money to be made from it, so it gets hidden away, pushed down out of sight, past the detritus, down here, below the horizon.

President Donald Trump surprised just about everyone in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike, when he announced on Wednesday that he was canceling an afternoon signing ceremony for the biggest housing bill to pass Congress in decades. He’s holding the bill hostage over his unreasonable demand that lawmakers first pass the Save America Act, the Republicans’ voter suppression bill, which doesn’t have the votes to pass the Senate. As Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, a key supporter of the bill, said, “He could be over here trying to claim a victory lap. And instead, he’s saying no, no he doesn’t want anything to do with it.”

The bill will automatically become law in ten days if Trump refuses to sign it. (He could also veto it, but it passed with veto-proof margins.) So one way or another, more than 60 measures will take effect with the goal of increasing housing by waiving some regulations, increasing grants to communities that encourage building, updating rules on manufactured homes, and preventing large investors from buying single-family homes. Much of the provisions were big asks from the abundance movement.

Proponents of these measures hope that they will increase housing supply and therefore lower prices, putting homeownership back within reach for middle-class families. But there’s a smaller provision that could be just as important. The bill includes pilot programs to address a gap in the housing market which keeps families from getting mortgages on already inexpensive homes because it’s often not profitable for lenders to issue smaller mortgages. Addressing this gap could bring the best idea of the abundance movement—that public policy should focus more on increasing housing supply—to distressed and rural communities where aging, inexpensive homes already exist.

The provisions deal with “small-dollar mortgages,” defined as those less than $100,000, for homes that are often called “naturally affordable”—which is to say, cheap. They’re often priced affordably because they’re small, old, in a less expensive neighborhood, or some combination of the three. Such homes are not a big part of the market, but they could be exactly what working-class families who want to move from renting to homeownership need, especially in certain areas of the country.

“These small-dollar, or low-cost, homes comprise only about 3 percent of active listings, that’s about 32,000 homes that are under $100,000 today,” said Aniket Mehrotra, a policy coordinator at the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center​. “However, in rural areas of the country the share of active listings is greater.”

Yuliya Panfil, director of the Future of Land and Housing program at the nonpartisan think tank New America, calls this “affordable housing hiding in plain sight.”  While many homes are simply too expensive for low- and moderate-income families to buy, these are well within their price range but difficult if not impossible to get mortgages approved for. “The result of these often-invisible challenges is that millions of starter homes sit in a financing no-man’s-land — too complicated for most buyers to access and too overlooked by policymakers to fix,” Panfil wrote at Bloomberg CityLab. “We are struggling to build new homes fast enough as millions of existing affordable homes quietly go to waste.”

Researchers at The Urban Institute in 2018 documented the problems families face when trying to buy these less expensive homes. “Lenders weren’t originating small-dollar loans even where affordable properties existed, locking out working-class families not because of creditworthiness, but because the loan economics didn’t work for lenders,” said Alanna McCargo, a Senior Fellow for Inclusive capitalism at the Clinton Foundation and non-resident Fellow at the Urban Institute who worked on the original report. This dynamic keeps families out of homeownership, pushes them into less secure loans, or encourages them to buy more expensive homes they struggle to afford.

It’s unclear what banks need in order to issue more of these loans, so the bill creates pilot programs to study and implement possible fixes, including requiring the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to study compensation rules and caps on fees to mortgage lenders to potentially encourage more small-dollar lending, and a Housing and Urban Development pilot program to increase access to these loans.

But encouraging more lending isn’t the only solution. Much of this housing stock is in smaller cities far from the booming coastal megalopolises where abundance proponents live, and the homes are also aging. Even if families find willing lenders to buy an older home, the houses may not appraise or pass inspection. Families already living in them are also often locked out of financing to make necessary repairs that would enable them to put their homes on the market again and move on, freeing them up for new families to buy.

The bipartisan housing bill only provides limited provisions on rehabilitating old homes, primarily for elderly and low-income homeowners, and doesn’t provide new funding for existing grant programs. “Focus on this bill is predominantly on building new housing,” Mehrotra said. “However, we have an aging housing stock in this country. The majority of our housing stock was built before 1980, which indicates that many homes are in need of repair, particularly in certain markets, like in rural areas, [and] in cities like Philadelphia or Baltimore, and so it is critical that we also prioritize home rehabilitation.” Developers are also often unwilling to renovate or rebuild older homes in neighborhoods where they can’t get their money back. Mehrotra said that proposed legislation to tackle that problem was not included in this bill but could be revisited in the future.

Still, Panfil’s colleague at New America, Sabiha Zainulbhai, called the measures “exciting progress on figuring out how to unlock this critical housing supply for first-time and low and moderate income buyers, especially at a time when homeownership is inaccessible for a growing segment of the population.”

There’s other work to be done on housing, of course, like more rental assistance for low-income families, which is a nonstarter in this GOP-controlled Congress. And while Trump sits on the housing bill, many American families have already given up on the homebuying dream because they simply can’t afford it. This bill won’t fix those problems overnight. “Implementation takes time, and families who need a small-dollar mortgage today and thousands of families already left behind by rising home prices over the past decade won’t benefit from this,” McCargo said. “But it’s a step in the right direction, and one we’ve been working toward for years.”

It’s rare for a judge to acknowledge that they are handing down a prison sentence for political reasons. But that is precisely what chief district judge Reed O’Connor stated from the bench in a North Texas federal courtroom this week, during the sentencing of eight defendants in one of the Prairieland cases, so named for the defendants’ participation in a July 4 demonstration at the Prairieland Detention Facility, a federal immigrant detention camp in Alvarado, Texas. In a hearing on Tuesday, as O’Connor handed down sentences of decades in prison, the judge said he was ordering the maximum allowed in each case because “the state wants to send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology,” according to a support committee for the defendants.

The bluntness of the sentiment struck some of the defendants’ supporters hard. “We’ve always known the U.S. government has punished dissent every chance possible, but for it to be so blatantly pointed out was such a hit,” said Kels Menchaca, a member of the DFW Support Committee, which provides practical support to the defendants and works to educate the public about these cases. The group is now preparing for the long-haul support the defendants will need over what may be decades in federal prison, pending appeals or possibly pardons. The Prairieland cases are an emergency in their own right, but they are also a warning. This is not the last case of dissent to be punished so severely by the Trump administration. Defending them could help us stop the next one.

The Prairieland cases should be understood as the government’s effort to heroize ICE in the face of community defense efforts to stop mass deportations, and to shift the blame for political violence from federal officers to the left. Last summer, in Los Angeles and other cities, people took to the streets in massive numbers to demand an end to the flood of federal officers assaulting and abducting people profiled as immigrants in chaotic operations that were often captured on video by teams working for the government. As people organized regular demonstrations at federal sites used for the mass detention of immigrants, Trump threatened to send in troops to stop them. No one knew how these events would escalate, but it was clear the administration was looking for scapegoats.

On July 4, 2025, community members held a demonstration outside the Prairieland Detention Facility. As the demonstrators made noise and set off fireworks outside that night, hoping the people locked up inside would hear them, a few split off. A security booth and some employees’ cars were graffitied, and a security camera was broken. The detention center guards told the demonstrators to leave; most did. A police officer arrived on the scene, his weapon drawn. One of the remaining demonstrators was open-carrying a rifle. An officer was shot in the shoulder. He was briefly hospitalized and survived. Within hours, what followed was garnering breathless coverage in right-wing media as an antifa assault on a federal facility.

There was no such assault. But the facts weren’t enough to stop the government from punishing eight people with effective life sentences, convicting them of “providing material support to terrorists” for acts such as printing and distributing leftist zines, joining an anarchist book club, communicating on the same messaging app, or having visited the same shooting range. These people are now facing 30-, 50-, 70-, and 100-year prison sentences. “These are friends,” Menchaca said. “These are people’s family, and they’re being given extraordinary sentences for things that are supposed to be protected actions. Fireworks on the 4th of July being called explosives and terrorism? Political literature is something worth taking 30 years of someone’s life?”

In all, 21 people were arrested for their alleged connection to the Prairieland demonstration, some that night, but many much later. In a press release on July 8, ICE claimed that “nearly a dozen violent assailants equipped with tactical gear and weapons attacked the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Prairieland Detention Facility.” Todd Lyons, then the acting director of ICE, used the arrests to hammer home the administration’s narrative. “This is precisely what we have been warning against, as disinformation and dangerous politically motivated rhetoric spreads,” Lyons said. The department promised terrorism charges, and “vowed” to charge “anyone obstructing ICE operations or assaulting federal law enforcement officers.”

The government’s story diminished before any of the defendants made it to court. Multiple shooters became one, and up to 30 rounds fired dropped to less than a dozen, as Steven Monacelli found in an investigation for The Barbed Wire. Months passed before the defendants, some of whom remained in custody, were arraigned. But in that interval, the president issued an executive order claiming to designate “antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization” (there is no such designation), and signed a national security memo authorizing sweeping investigations for alleged “political violence” from the left. Finally, when grand jury indictments were made public, the official story had settled: The Department of Justice had taken down a “North Texas antifa cell” that had “created and distributed insurrectionary material called zines,” “dressed in ‘black bloc’—dark clothing with head and face coverings,” and used “an encrypted messaging app to coordinate with each other that had auto-delete functions.”

Now, just shy of one year after the demonstration, we are witnessing the part of the government’s narrative in which the administration thinks it has won. Its position is clear, Menchaca said: “Not allowing the government to abuse people will cost you most of your natural life. Not allowing the police to murder an unarmed protester fleeing means your life is now forfeit to the state.”

But since the Prairieland defendants were indicted and as their trials wound on, we’ve seen many of the government’s attempts to charge people for disrupting ICE operations fall apart, some in now high-profile scandals such as that involving the former Broadview Six, a group of demonstrators at an ICE facility near Chicago, who were indicted on charges of conspiracy to impede a federal agent. (The charges were dropped after prosecutorial misconduct came to light.) Still, such failures have not slowed the government down. Last week, 15 people in Minnesota were indicted on federal conspiracy charges related to allegedly impeding federal officers.

The lesson here is not that the Prairieland defendants did something uniquely dangerous, but that they faced the same political repression any number of us could. The government, Menchaca said, is “trying to set the stage to criminalize every person who doesn’t agree to their atrocities. And our loved ones are suffering for their compassion.”

It was rumored to have been made from the tree

Of the first spinning place. Some said the side

Of a Spanish slaver spit from the sea.

Others church bench, chunk of stage, courthouse wall.

A widow swore her grandfather had helped

Drag it from his swamped fields after a storm.

One leg longer than the others, it leaned

Left. It belonged to no one and was ours.

Years pressed down on it with tobacco ash, peach

Pits, coffee rings, the impress of elbows,

A knife-mark widened by a thousand thumbs.

You can’t run your hand across the surface

Without passing through three or four fables

And a splinter that always finds the hand.

Such a common thing in an uncommon

World: this table, so worn down that it shines.

There’s room here. There’s never any room here.

It’s hard to keep clean. We all eat off it.

The Supreme Court decided two cases on Tuesday that, at least at first glance, have nothing to do with one another. One involves the People’s Republic of China, Silicon Valley, and the Judiciary Act of 1789. The other involves Louisiana prisons, Rastafarian spiritual beliefs, and contract law. In both cases, however, are two shared and recurring impulses from the court’s conservative majority: a nearly boundless contempt for Congress as an institution.

The first case, Cisco Systems v. Doe, involves a group of plaintiffs who claim that the Chinese government has persecuted them for their religious beliefs. They filed lawsuits against Cisco, a major U.S. tech company, alleging that the company sold surveillance software to the Chinese government that was later used to surveil, torture, and otherwise abuse them.

In theory, no federal law is any more “constitutional” than the other. But laws from the First Congress tend to be seen as indicative of how the Constitution’s Framers intended the government to function. Among the early laws they passed was the Alien Tort Statute, or ATS, which allows federal courts to hear “any civil action” against a foreign national for any “tort” that was “committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”

Congress enacted the ATS as part of the Judiciary Act of 1789—the first federal law it enacted to structure the federal courts. Though it was only occasionally invoked in those courts until the 1980s, one might think that its founding-era pedigree might entitle it to a little more respect. Apparently not. The modern-day aversion to this longstanding law was on display in the 2004 case Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, a complex case about whether a man arrested by federal agents on drug charges could sue a Mexican national for temporarily apprehending him.

In his majority opinion, Justice David Souter wrote that the ATS “was originally understood to be available to enforce a small number of international norms that a federal court could properly recognize as within the common law enforceable without further statutory authority.” Those norms included “offenses against ambassadors, violation of safe conducts, and piracy.” Accordingly, he rejected Sosa’s more novel claim against Alvarez-Machain.

Does this mean that only that “small number” of claims described by Souter could be pursued under the ATS? Souter said no. He left open the possibility that the high court might recognize future implied claims beyond the more traditional ones. Justice Antonin Scalia took the opposite approach. He wrote in a partially dissenting opinion that he disagreed with the majority’s “reservation of a discretionary power in the federal judiciary to create causes of action for the enforcement of international-law-based norms.”

Scalia argued that this approach would “amount to judicial lawmaking” that the federal courts are “neither authorized nor suited to perform.” Souter, on the other hand, took a more deferential approach to the framework that Congress had created in the ATS. He noted that Congress could correct the court’s work through its own legislative powers by amending the ATS itself or adding new constraints to it through separate legislation.

“While we agree with Justice Scalia to the point that we would welcome any congressional guidance in exercising jurisdiction with such obvious potential to affect foreign relations, nothing Congress has done is a reason for us to shut the door to the law of nations entirely,” Souter explained. “It is enough to say that Congress may do that at any time (explicitly, or implicitly by treaties or statutes that occupy the field) just as it may modify or cancel any judicial decision so far as it rests on recognizing an international norm as such.”

The court’s conservative majority was never satisfied with that ruling. In case after case over the past 20 years, the justices repeatedly narrowed the scope of ATS claims, including by ruling that it could not be used to sue foreign corporations and by holding that domestic corporations can’t be sued for “general corporate activity” linked to human-rights abuses. In Cisco, Justice Amy Coney Barrett finally transformed Scalia’s dissent in Sosa into the court’s new majority opinion.

“Since Sosa was decided, we have firmly committed to the view that judicially created causes of action offend the separation of powers in almost every circumstance,” Barrett wrote. “As a result, we have virtually eliminated the practice of fashioning them.” She finished the job by “clos[ing] the door that Sosa cracked to judicially created ATS liability.” The Supreme Court’s rulings on these matters are often described as “closing the courthouse door” on wronged plaintiffs, but rarely by the majority itself.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing in dissent, chastised the majority for its transparent about-face. “The Court nonetheless closes the courthouse doors not just to [the plaintiffs], but to virtually every future litigant seeking redress for a violation of international law under the ATS,” she wrote. “It thus overrules Sosa, without even acknowledging that it is doing so. Today’s decision marks yet another low point in this Court’s esteem for its precedents.”

Okay, you might think, maybe that’s a defensible reading of an archaic founding-era law. Perhaps there is good reason not to lean so heavily on a 18th-century statute in novel contexts. So then, what happens when Congress does provide unambiguous guidance on how to sue someone? Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections shows that even this is not enough to satisfy the justices.

Again, it is worth tracing the history of the underlying law in question. In 1990, the Supreme Court held in Employment Division v. Smith that litigants could not invoke the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause to challenge what the court described as “neutral laws of general applicability,” meaning general laws that applied to all people with few or no exceptions. Congress and President Bill Clinton responded to the perceived curtailment of religious freedom by enacting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA.

RFRA originally required laws and policies that infringed on free-exercise grounds to meet the highest threshold of judicial scrutiny. In 1997, however, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress could not apply RFRA to actions by state and local governments for federalism reasons. In response, Congress enacted the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, or RLUIPA, in 2000 that sought to apply RFRA protections to the states on narrower grounds.

One of those contexts was state prison systems. Under RLUIPA, states that accept funds from Congress for their prisons must also allow private plaintiffs to file Free Exercise Clause lawsuits against them and (more importantly, in this particular case) their employees. This framework sought to place Congress’s goals on firmer constitutional footing—namely, Congress’s Spending Clause power—even though its overall impact would be more limited than at the federal level.

It would be hard to find a more clear-cut violation of the Free Exercise Clause than Damon Landor’s treatment by Louisiana correctional officials in 2020. Landor, a Rastafarian, grew out his hair into lengthy dreadlocks in keeping with the practices of his faith. Long hair is generally disallowed in prison systems for safety and hygiene reasons, but Landor had previously obtained exemptions on religious grounds.

When he was transferred to a new facility, Landor told the prison personnel that his hair was kept long for religious reasons. He also provided them with a copy of a 2017 ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over Louisiana, that held that it would be a RLUIPA violation for state prison officials to cut a Rastafarian’s hair. Nonetheless, prison officials threw the ruling in the trash and shaved Landor’s head.

In response, Landor sued both the Louisiana Department of Corrections, or LDOC, as well as the guards themselves in their personal capacity under RLUIPA. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had previously held that RLUIPA could not be used to sue prison officials in their personal capacity. In 2020, however, the Supreme Court ruled in Tanzin v. Tanvir that plaintiffs could bring those claims against federal officials under RFRA. Landor now sought to apply that reasoning to RLUIPA.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the court, declined to do so. He framed the dispute not as a question of religious freedom, but of Congress’s power to impose conditions on federal funds. The decision is an unusually muddled one for Gorsuch. He insisted that Congress’s choice to provide federal funds to Louisiana so long as the state abides by certain conditions is a contract of sorts. While Congress can impose conditions on those funds for the states, Gorsuch argued, it cannot contractually bind people—in this case, the prison officials—who didn’t consent to the agreement in the first place.

This reasoning is too clever by half. The Louisiana Department of Corrections is not some sort of cosmic entity or demiurge. It does not independently exist in a metaphysical sense despite its legal personality. It is, at its root, a group of people in buildings who sit behind desks and walk down hallways and occasionally violate people’s constitutional rights. Gorsuch nonetheless hypothesized about ways that Congress could, in theory, rewrite the law to properly bind those employees in a private capacity.

“For example, Congress could have said that, as a condition of federal funding to LDOC, its officers had to agree to enter separate contracts with the federal government consenting to answer suits under RLUIPA,” he wrote. The officers arguably fulfilled that condition by agreeing to work at the Louisiana Department of Corrections in the first place, which is supposedly still bound by RLUIPA’s conditions.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who dissented with the court’s other two liberal members, also argued that the majority’s reading of the Spending Clause upended decades of precedent about congressional powers. “Today’s decision magically transforms a federal statute into an invitation to be accepted or declined, deemed binding only if each particular defendant has explicitly agreed to be penalized,” she explained. “No matter that laws, as opposed to contracts, don’t ordinarily work this way.”

At the root of Gorsuch’s opinion, she hinted, was a fundamental lack of respect for Congress as an institution. “In the end, the Court reduces some of Congress’s greatest legislative achievements—federal laws that secure civil rights, environmental stability, healthcare, and more—to nothing more than the wheelings-and-dealings of an especially wealthy private party,” she warned.

Gorsuch did not forthrightly address the Tanzin argument, apparently because his reductive Spending Clause interpretation made it unnecessary to grapple with. Nonetheless, Jackson argued that Tanzin’s reasoning applied with “even more force” to RLUIPA because damages would often be the “only form of relief available” to prisoners when their religious freedoms are violated.

“The Prison Litigation Reform Act’s exhaustion requirement and strict limitations on injunctive relief in prisons, coupled with States’ ability to transfer prisoners and thereby moot claims for injunctive relief, mean that withholding a damages remedy will often leave prisoners with no remedy at all,” she explained. A right with no remedy, it goes without saying, is not really a right at all.

For most of the 20th century, the Supreme Court confined itself to interpreting federal law instead of rewriting it. Thanks to the conservative legal movement, that posture has changed. The court’s Republican appointees have developed a wide array of tools to second-guess Congress, sometimes even under the cynical guise of defending its prerogatives.

Under the major-questions doctrine, for example, the Supreme Court has claimed the power to strike down federal rules and regulations if the statute they rely upon does not “speak clearly” on the issue in question. What is often framed by the conservatives justices as a check on executive-branch overreach is actually a curtailment of Congress’s legislative powers. By denying it the power to pass broadly worded legislation, the court is denying it the ability to legislate for unforeseen circumstances.

The justices are also either ignorant of, or hostile to, the basic nature of the legislative process. Congress typically enacts legislation after a long period of debate, consideration, and jockeying between various factions—from groups and movements that can be partisan, civic, business, special-interest, activist, and so on. Entire election cycles can hinge on a specific bill, as the 2010 and 2012 elections did for the Affordable Care Act.

This democratic process receives no deference or validation from the high court, either implicitly or explicitly. Thus, the work of years of activism, negotiation, and compromise can be undone with a few friend-of-the-court briefs and the right five justices on the court. When the Supreme Court struck down the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance formula in 2013, it invited Congress to simply draft a new one—knowing full well that congressional Republicans would never agree to it.

When the justices don’t want to overturn a law, they simply rewrite it. In VRA decisions in 2021 and earlier this year, the court’s conservatives added atextual limits on the law’s protections under the guise of interpreting it. Baseless fears of voter fraud can be used by states to evade challenges to voting restrictions; states’ rights to partisan gerrymander can be used to defeat racial-gerrymandering lawsuits. Thirteen years later after Shelby County v. Holder, with the rest of the VRA now in ruins, it is clear that the court wouldn’t have approved a new preclearance formula anyway—it wouldn’t have mattered how “clearly” Congress managed to speak on the matter.

“Heads I win, tails you lose,” has become this court’s judicial maxim. Tuesday’s rulings underscore how far these impulses will go. It does not matter if Congress broadly intends for courts to hear civil lawsuits over human-rights violations. Nor does it matter if Congress narrowly seeks to ensure that Americans whose federal constitutional rights are violated via federal funds can seek redress in federal court. Whatever Congress does, the Supreme Court will happily insert its own judgment in favor of that of the people’s elected representatives.

In the past, conventional wisdom would have us believe that any victory by the Democratic Socialists of America was due to their overwhelmingly white, young, transplant membership—bike lane users, co-op members, and Bernie 2020 voters. Meanwhile, DSA candidates struggled with working-class Black and brown voters due to a lack of trust, gentrification-fueled disdain, and communication failures. And more than anything, socialism just wasn’t something Black and brown people were “comfortable” with historically. 

But recent election victories have thrown out that entire narrative. Nowhere was that more evident than in Washington, D.C., last week, where the DSA-backed mayoral candidate won the Democratic primary thanks to support in majority-Black neighborhoods, while the candidate packaged as the preference for native Black voters actually lost them by a landslide.

In the weeks leading up to the primary, moderate Democratic Councilman Kenyan McDuffie framed himself as a measured, natural progression from current Mayor Muriel Bowser. He promised to be tough on crime and focused his rhetoric on the native residents of D.C.’s historically Black neighborhoods. Meanwhile, Councilwoman and Metro DSA member Janeese Lewis George represented a progressive vision for the city that focused on universal childcare, housing, and affordability—a vision that political commentators and media outlets said was more salient with the transplant-heavy neighborhoods. 

The New York Times wrote that Lewis George was “expected to be preferred by younger white residents who’ve lived in Washington less than 10 years.” CityCast DC featured a “Newbies Vs. Natives” analysis stating that “the Democratic Socialists of America member Lewis George does not seem to be cleaning up among D.C.’s poorer and less-educated voters,” and that “the younger, better educated, and newer you are to D.C., the more likely you are to support Lewis George.” 

Lewis George’s primary victory put that narrative to rest. She won seven of the eight wards in D.C. and had secured more than 50 percent of the vote even before the first round of ranked-choice tabulation. 

McDuffie only won Ward 3—which contains affluent, majority-white neighborhoods like Woodley Park, Chevy Chase, Foxhall Village, Friendship Heights, Palisades, and Tenleytown. Ward 3 is 69 percent white, with nearly 90 percent of residents holding a bachelor’s degree, an average age of 40 years old, and a median household income of around $144,877. And yet this younger, white, more educated, more affluent ward is the only one that went for McDuffie, and just barely. NBC reported that the specific neighborhoods that went for him were “among the most heavily white neighborhoods in D.C.”

Conventional wisdom would have had McDuffie cleaning up in DC’s Ward 8—81 percent Black with an average household income of $52,769 and less than a third of its residents holding a bachelor’s degree. Lewis George won it by 15 points. And in Ward 5, which is 55 percent Black and where McDuffie grew up, George won by 20 points. In the end, it was McDuffie who found the most support in the city’s whitest neighborhoods, while Lewis George overwhelmingly carried Black and Latino ones.  

There are plenty of theories as to why McDuffie lost so handily both across D.C. and specifically in poor neighborhoods of color. His focus on crime—calling Lewis George’s decision to vote against a teen curfew a “failure” after a chaotic teen brawl in Navy Yard—may have been overshadowed by a more imaginative platform from Lewis George, who was trying to address the constant struggles that the district’s most vulnerable residents face. Hyperfocusing on teen crime—an issue that Lewis George will eventually have to address—may not have landed well while hundreds of National Guardsmen roam the streets of D.C. at the behest of the president. His ties to Bowser (who has a dismal 49 percent disapproval rate) and the city’s centrist political establishment didn’t help either, as the outgoing mayor gave him her support without offering an official endorsement. 

It’s easy to make comparisons between Lewis George and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Two DSA members ended long reigns of neoliberalism in two major East Coast cities, and expanded their voting blocs well into the Black and brown working class even as pundits expected them to be successful only in “commie corridor” neighborhoods from Bushwick to Mt. Pleasant. But there are notable differences. Lewis George never got a Bernie Sanders or AOC endorsement. Lewis George stated that she has no relationship with Mamdani. And D.C. operates in a different landscape given its lack of statehood—another unique issue Lewis George will face as she likely squares off with President Donald Trump, who has had no qualms about strong-arming D.C. leaders.

Lewis George will certainly face a host of doubts and challenges in her tenure, as will DSA as a whole. Of course this movement would be nowhere without the college educated, mostly white transplants that move to cities like New York and D.C. But it’s equally true that they have made legitimate connections with older, more moderate natives that are skeptical of them. That tension will remain. But Lewis George’s victory—bucking stereotypes and punditry to deliver a resounding, mandate-securing election—shows that democratic socialism can no longer be viewed as a disqualifier for Black working-class voters. It’s mainstream now. 

Donald Trump dreamed of turning the Lincoln Reflecting Pool “American Flag Blue” in advance of celebrations for America’s 250th anniversary on July 4. Instead, he got a pungent, bright green embarrassment. National Parks employees have yet to fully remove the algal bloom that sprang up after Trump’s ill-fated paint job, despite applying vacuums, hydrogen peroxide, and nanobubbles to the problem; the next step will be to drain the now-swampy basin for the second time this month and restore the blue sealant that has been floating to the surface in unsightly chunks. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Washington D.C.’s Department of Energy and the Environment was conducting an investigation into what killed the multiple ducks that have been found dead in the pool’s waters.

It’s all a bit too on the nose. The tacky $16.4 million vanity project was carried out in part by giving a $1.7 million no-bid contract to a firm called (appropriately enough) Greenwater Services, which is owned by an already scandal-laden Trump loyalist, John J. Cafaro. On June 15, workers reported that one or two of the four algae-killing machines Greenwater used weren’t working at any given time. Trump has—without evidence—blamed the algae problem on “vandals,” alleging that anonymous hoodlums sabotaged the pool with knives and fertilizer; this does not seem to be true. Still, as of June 24, the Parks Police, National Guard, and U.S. Marshals have been patrolling the usually placid site. As of Tuesday, six arrests had been made. White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt claimed—also without evidence—that those detained included “longtime donors to the Democrat Party, to Barack Obama, to ActBlue.” Newly installed fencing around the pool is apparently meant to deter what Interior Department spokeswoman Katie Martin has called an “increase in vandalism by leftist activists.” Trump pledged to drain the metaphorical swamp. Instead, he’s created one.

Algae, however, are much more than either smelly sludge or a tidy narrative device. While algae play several critical roles in freshwater and saltwater ecosystems, algal blooms like the one now bedeviling the Reflecting Pool are “a growing problem,” said marine biologist Gregory Dick. He’s the director of the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research, or CIGLR, a partnership between the University of Michigan and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. “They’re becoming more frequent as water pollution becomes more of an issue, and they grow more in warming condition,” he explained. “The Reflecting Pool is not an exception.”

The government’s newfound war on algae contrasts starkly with its repeated attempts to defund the experts who protect the public against harmful algal blooms not appearing on Washington, D.C., landmarks. The Trump administration’s cuts to research funding and federal agencies like NOAA have already undermined the federal government’s essential role in monitoring, responding to, and understanding harmful algal blooms. Deeper cuts outlined in next year’s federal budget would lower the public’s defenses against those blooms just as climate change helps them proliferate.

Trump’s talk of vandals and knives notwithstanding, you don’t need conspiracy theories to explain how algal blooms happen. Experts suspect that the Reflecting Pool algal bloom began as a cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae. Those generally grow thanks to abundant nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen, warm temperatures, and calm waters. “The Reflecting Pool has those three ingredients,” Dick said. There’s no official definition for what constitutes a harmful algal bloom, and the one in the Reflecting Pool hasn’t received that designation. But they tend to give off a foul smell and are known to kill birds. Cyanobacteria produce a toxin called microcystin that can fatally poison animals and cause nausea, vomiting, and skin rashes in humans. A 2014 microcystin outbreak in Lake Erie left nearly half a million people in the greater Toledo area without running water for three days.

An enormous amount of local, state, and federal resources are needed to keep the country’s waterways safe. NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab—which houses CIGLR—monitors and responds to algal blooms throughout the Great Lakes watershed, including Lake Erie. Researchers there use a range of technologies to keep tabs on algae in real time. Remote sensors let them track the distribution of harmful algal blooms. Buoys and remotely operated vehicles measure nutrient levels in the water, and scientists analyze physical samples to understand which species of algae are present at any given time and what environmental conditions cause them to give off certain toxins. If the scientists spot a potential threat, NOAA alerts municipal water treatment plants so that they can proactively safeguard the water sources that some 40 million people use to hydrate, cook, and shower. Algal blooms pose dangers not only to public and environmental health but to local economies that rely on revenue from tourism and fishing operations, which depend on the Great Lakes Lab to help determine when beaches should be closed down and which fish are safe to catch and sell.

In spite of its crucial role in monitoring blooms, the lab lost roughly 40 percent of its staff last year. That was thanks to cuts imposed by the Department of Government Efficiency, which laid off newly hired and promoted staff and encourged federal employees to accept buyouts and retire early. The lab still hasn’t received all of the funds it was appropriated by Congress. The White House’s proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2027 also includes an 18 percent cut to NOAA’s overall budget; it would completely eliminate funds for “Ocean, Coastal and Great Lakes Research.” Funding for the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies—the technical backbone of the National Hurricane Center, which houses researchers that forecast harmful algal blooms—is also at risk.

Thankfully, these sorts of proposals tend to be aspirational. The budget Congress passed last year avoided the steepest cuts to NOAA outlined in the White House’s FY2026. So far, Project 2025’s authors in the Trump administration have not been able to follow through on their pledge to dismantle and privatize the agency. But those funds remain under constant threat. What was already a bare-bones team at the Great Lakes Environmental Lab, or GLERL, pre-DOGE has had to make do with a lot less.

The reduced funding has already had some very concrete effects. Some of the Lab’s autonomous sample processors—which collect samples and measure water quality—“did not go out last year because of funding delays and lack of personnel,” Dick said. “Reduction in support and capacity for places like GLERL would have big impacts on boots-on-the-ground operations” he added, endangering researchers’ ability to provide up-to-date measurements and forecasting to (among many others) beach managers, drinking-water treatment facilities, and charter boat fishing captains.

Dick worries too that continued cuts will hamper researchers’ ability to understand how algal blooms are responding to rising temperatures and climate-fueled extreme weather. Cyanobacteria thrive in warmer temperatures. Heavy storms can wash their favorite nutrients into the water, fueling algal growth. Lake Superior, for instance, was long thought to be “the coldest and cleanest of all the Great Lakes,” Dick said. In the 2010s, it suddenly started seeing substantial algal blooms, following a series of 500-year storms that washed off nutrients from the landscape. Lake Superior is also among the fastest-warming lakes on earth; over the past 30 years, summer surface water temperatures have increased by five degrees.

Unlike Lake Superior, the Reflecting Pool has long hosted algae. As Washington’s summers become increasingly swamplike, eliminating the algae altogether may well prove impossible. As it has stretched out over the last several weeks, the Reflecting Pool debacle has been something of a microcosm for Trumpist governance, combining handouts to inexperienced loyalists with gaudy kitsch and baseless accusations against the left. It is also about as good a summary as any for the right’s approach to a climate crisis that’s fueling harmful algal blooms the world over: When it becomes impossible to keep denying a problem you helped cause, blame it on your political enemies and try to throw them in jail.

In one corner above a field: a kid’s drawing of the sun. But with fat, round rays, like yellow petals, and a smiling lion’s face—cleft lip attached to a pink, upside-down triangle nose; black ovals for eyes. Something in me has awoken. A spark. A love. A sensation, by definition, must be felt. And then die off. No one still talks about the dentist who killed the lion named Cecil. I shut that in a box, along with learning that cats wounded in the wild don’t heal—that they die without the strength to hunt. I don’t understand much. Not suffering. Not the nature of risk. My fears—captive, domestic—yawn and flex their feet. Another version of me was sixteen and drove a yellow truck named Frisky. She drank with her friends beneath the shade of a tree. She could let her thoughts out. But she never put them down.