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President Trump on Friday unveiled the latest rendering of a special edition US passport to commemorate America’s 250th birthday that features a large image of himself hovering over the Resolute Desk, the latest in a series of plans to place Trump front and center of the anniversary.

But it’s the warning that will accompany the new passports that’s prompting a new kind of stress: “Welcome, but be good!”

The message instantly called into question Trump’s understanding of a passport, which is primarily obtained so that American citizens can leave the United States and travel abroad—no welcome needed. It seems likely that Trump was conflating a US passport with a visa. Either that or he feels a knee-jerk inclination to inject anti-immigrant, xenophobic themes into everything he does. Both feel too possible.

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Meanwhile, the State Department hasn’t confirmed the new design. But American citizens with plans to obtain or renew their passports this summer may want to steer clear of the Washington Passport Agency. As CNN reported when an earlier rendering was released in April, the limited edition passport will be the “default option” at the DC processing center. “Online options or other locations will maintain existing passport design,” an official told CNN.

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

With Western Europe in the grip of a punishing early-summer heat wave, maximum health alerts have been issued in Rome, Paris, and even London. Thursday was the UK’s and Switzerland’s hottest June day on record, with each just below 100 degrees F, while France endured its warmest day ever on Wednesday, with temperatures in some areas rising to approximately 111 degrees F.

The toll of the sweltering temperatures driven by a heat dome has been stark: French authorities have recorded at least 48 drownings as people try to escape the heat, while hot cars have tragically claimed the lives of three young children. Spain is seeing a similarly tragic reality. Between Sunday and Thursday alone, an estimated 327 people lost their lives to the extreme conditions, according to data from the Spanish health ministry’s monitoring system.

Italy has recorded the highest heat mortality in Europe for three consecutive summers.

Italy, where I live, is under severe strain too. Even though this is the country that holds the title for Europe’s hottest-ever temperature (119.8 degrees F in Sicily in 2021), the current climate is testing those limits once again. On Friday, the Italian Ministry of Health placed 18 major cities on strict Level 3 red alert (bollino rosso), indicating immediate risk to even healthy adults. These cities include Rome, Milan, Florence, Venice, Turin, Bologna, Genoa, and Bari.

That warning seems prescient—of the five people who have died so far, one was a 61-year-old male in the Piacenza area who collapsed while working in his vineyard. Though this initial toll seems small compared to those in Spain and France, Italy has recorded the highest heat mortality in Europe for three consecutive summers, capturing a grim toll of roughly 18,800 deaths in 2022, 13,800 in 2023, and over 19,000 in 2024. (Numbers for 2025 aren’t in yet.)

Moreover, even as other places in Europe are looking toward relief this weekend, meteorologists warn that Italy’s anomalous heat wave will not ease significantly until early July. Yet, tourism figures for this summer indicate a record-breaking 172 million people are slated to come to the Bel Paese in July and August. Oh, and remember—we do not really do air conditioning in this country (more on that in a moment). If you are heading our way, how will you cope?

The Italian health ministry offered sage advice in their recent circular titled “Protect Me From the Heat”: Avoid going out between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. (when the weather is at its hottest), limit alcohol and coffee (sorry), dress in natural fibers such as linen (do this anyway), eat lightly (again, sorry), and drink at least a liter and a half of water.

Always carry a bottle with you, too; in both the countryside and cities in Italy, you are bound to come across a water fountain. If filling water from somewhere public grosses you out, fear not; there is a knack to it. There should be signs saying Acqua Potabile (drinking water) above the fountain. If it says Acqua Non Potabile, it’s a no-go. If you’re headed to Rome, there are specific drinking-water fountains called nasoni, named because they resemble long noses. There are about 2,500 dotted around the Eternal City.

On a much broader spectrum, there is an app called Acquea that pinpoints over 150,000 points with drinkable water throughout Italy. Run by Rome’s water company, Acea, the app also gives out the sodium and calcium levels of the liquid from the fountains and has a built-in tracker to monitor hydration (small amounts of sodium are essential to rehydrating effectively).

Lunch during hotter times tends to be a no-cook affair. Instead of devouring a plate of hot pasta or a whole pizza come midday, opt for timeless Italian summertime classics such as prosciutto-wrapped melon, a refreshing caprese salad, or an insalata di riso (rice salad) tossed with light ingredients such as vegetables and eggs. Back in 2023, the Italian Ministry of Health even advised swapping out pranzi freddi (cold lunches) for gelato instead. “Consuming an ice cream or a milkshake can be an alternative to a midday meal,” the guide suggested.

Speaking of sweet treats to cool down, Sicilian granita is a semi-frozen dessert similar to a slush, but with fresh ingredients and a more crystalline texture. Originating on the Italian island, but now found everywhere in Italy, popular flavors of granita include lemon and strawberry. In Rome, grattachecca (shaved ice) is king come the summer months. Vendors manually shave ice off of a block and into a cup. The ice is then drenched with flavored syrups, making for a perfect Roman summer street food.

Coffee doesn’t have to be a complete no-go either. There are plenty of cold coffee options, such as caffè shakerato, a drink made by vigorously shaking coffee with ice and a sweetener in a cocktail shaker, or caffè leccese, a sweet, almond-based coffee from Puglia made by placing almond syrup and ice cubes in a glass and topping them off with espresso.

There are plenty of crisp indoor sights, such as art galleries and museums, catacombs, and stone churches filled with art.

While mastering the local food and drink menus is a delicious way to stay cool, surviving an Italian summer also requires a bit of structural strategy. Wherever you are staying or plan to eat, make sure you call before you book to inquire about whether they have air conditioning. The reason it is not a given in Italy is a somewhat unique belief called colpo d’aria (hit of air). According to Italian lore, a sudden exposure to a cold draft while you’re hot is believed to cause neck aches, stomach cramps, earaches, and headaches. Fortunately, recent market data shows unit sales have increased by 16 percent since last year, providing a glimmer of hope that this attitude is changing given the heat waves.

If you find yourself AC-less, the shutters found on the facades of all Italian residential properties can provide much-needed respite. Do as Italians do and keep them closed during the morning to stop the sunlight from getting in and warming up your hotel room.

The boiling weather doesn’t necessarily mean you have to skimp on major landmarks, either—it just means you may have to switch it up. If you fully intend to brave the heat between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., make sure you get tickets in advance to avoid queuing for hours in the blistering sun.

More importantly, make sure your midday landmarks are indoors; standing in the center of the Colosseum at noon during a heat wave is a surefire way to ruin your day. But Italy has plenty of crisp indoor sights to see, such as art galleries and museums, catacombs, and stone churches filled with art.

Taking a stroll (passeggiata) and sightseeing at night is also just as nice as doing it in the day. You’ll probably meet more locals along the way too, as they seldom step out when it is boiling. During summer, main attractions stay open until 7 p.m., and even offer exclusive night openings; after-hours entry at the Vatican or visiting the Colosseum by moonlight allow you to see world-class history under the stars.

And remember, Italy is more than its cities. With tourists never being too far from a beach or hills, and train travel being cheap (and air-conditioned!), holidaymakers can always substitute a day wandering around cobblestoned streets for white sands or grassy paths to keep out of the humidity. By learning to adjust your clock, leaning into the art of the pranzi freddi, and treating the midday heat as an excuse for an extra gelato, you won’t just survive the intense Mediterranean summer, you will get to experience Italy in a safer way, exactly the way the locals have become accustomed to.

Elizabeth Freeman was an enslaved person living in Massachusetts when the Declaration of Independence was signed 250 years ago. The document’s famous words “all men are created equal” did not apply to her, but she thought they should. 

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“She is somebody who heard the words of the declaration, knew that they were real in her life, and argued for that to be true,” says Errin Haines, editor-at-large at The 19th. Eventually, Freeman fought to abolish slavery in Massachusetts.

This week on Reveal, as America marks 250 years since its founding, we share stories of people who were denied equality and the battles they fought to attain it. In addition to Freeman’s story, we hear about one of the first Native American communities to encounter white settlers more than 400 years ago and learn why the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment for women continues to this day.

Long before today’s tech giants forced their way into co-chairing the Met Gala, Google co-founder Sergey Brin positioned himself in the front row of Diane Von Furstenberg’s 2013 spring show, sporting an early prototype of what would be known as Google Glass. Von Furstenberg herself donned a pair of the wearable smartglasses as she directed models, some also wearing Google Glass, down the runway. It seemed like a promising partnership between a powerful tech company and the woman who popularized the iconic wrap dress.

Yet despite the celebrity-packed promotions, generous Vogue spreads, and proclamations of one of the “Best Inventions of the Year,” Google Glass infamously flopped. It turns out there wasn’t much clamoring for clunky lenses that did little more than take photos and send alerts of incoming text messages. Which is to say nothing about the intense privacy concerns the technology appeared to present.

In pushing AI technology, the Meta-Jenner partnership reads like a poor misreading of our cultural moment, as well as a willful disregard of just how badly Google Glass pissed off people a decade prior.

It was around this time that the public was introduced to King Kylie, the internet persona fans bestowed upon the youngest of the Kardashian-Jenner machine as a testament to her cultural clout. In fact, Kylie Jenner was seemingly everywhere in the mid-2010’s, with a social media dominance that in 2018 commanded $1 million per sponsored Instagram post and an immensely popular cosmetics line.

So it makes sense, in a way, that Meta, which owns Instagram, is now turning to a veteran of the platform to sell its new line of AI glasses. “Cutest night with @metaglasses! My meta glasses are out now,” Jenner posted in a carousel from a party in New York, where she celebrated this week with Mark Zuckerberg. One can only imagine the regret felt by Snapchat, which Jenner also gamely used to fuel her rise and is now in the AI glasses business, upon seeing Jenner palling around with Zuck.

At the Meta Connect developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg, head of the Facebook group Meta, shows the prototype of computer glasses that can display digital objects in transparent lenses. Andrej Sokolow/dpa/Zuma

But outside Meta’s monied party on Tuesday, the reception has been scornful. “Meta glasses are cybertrucks for the face,” read a comment that has since gone viral. In fact, much of the negative feedback felt ripped straight from the criticism once aimed at Google Glass: “Mass surveillance predator glasses yesssss,” one user wrote on Jenner’s Instagram. “Legit people are putting others in danger with this technology.”

To be sure, Meta Glasses appear to avoid some of Google Glass’s pitfalls. For one, Meta’s glasses, designed in partnership with Ray-Ban parent company EssilorLuxottica, are more aesthetically pleasing than their Google forebearer. They’re also significantly cheaper, starting at $299. (Jenner’s limited Starfire edition is slightly more at $399.)

But in pushing AI technology, the Meta-Jenner partnership reads like a poor misreading of our cultural moment, as well as a willful disregard of just how badly Google Glass pissed off people a decade prior. After all, is there a bigger unifying force than our current animosity for AI? Just look at all the college graduates, perennially the demographic of cool in any given era, roasting AI en masse. When they’re forced to use it, Gen Z absolutely loathes it.

But the hostility runs far deeper than young people. People on both sides of the aisle are actively rejecting the data centers popping up in their backyards; we have near-universal agreement that the aesthetics of AI suck; and there’s outright antipathy for the billionaire overlords, Zuckerberg included, hoping to shove AI into every inch of the public sphere. It feels appropriate, then, that a company that has been stuck in cultural freefall is trying to make AI glasses happen, when the same, decades-old question—who even wants them?—still looms large.

As for Jenner, the influencer remains relevant, and a willingness to cozy up to the worst people in any given room appears to run in the family. But it’s Jenner’s ability to sell things—which is ostensibly the root goal of the Meta-Jenner partnership—that is far shakier in 2026: Kylie Cosmetics is nowhere near as popular as it once was, and Jenner’s clothing line, KHY, has yet to make an impact since launching in 2023. As for Jenner’s boyfriend, Timothée Chalamet, the actor was also at Tuesday’s event, though apparently not wanting to be seen and, even perhaps even more notably, not wearing a pair of Meta Glasses.

Immigrants, faith leaders, and advocates in Springfield, Ohio, had cautiously hoped that when the Supreme Court decided whether to allow the expiration of Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status (TPS), they would celebrate outside City Hall. Instead, as the clouds over downtown Springfield cleared Thursday evening, they hastily gathered to grieve together. Hours earlier, the Supreme Court cleared the path for the Trump administration to deport 340,000 Haitians and Syrians back to the violence- and disaster-stricken nations they had fled. In a small city where up to a quarter of its residents are Haitians with TPS, the decision feels personal—and fatal: For Haitians who will be forced to return to an unsafe country, some after years of living in Springfield, and for a community that has grown to love and rely on their immigrant neighbors.

A sign planted in mulch outside City Hall in Springfield, Ohio.Sarah Szilagy

Before the gospel and protest songs, prayers, and calls to action, immigration advocates took to the podium to share urgent messages for the Haitian members of their community, first in English, then in Haitian Creole. “If you wish to stay in the United States, and you are afraid to return to your home country, you should speak with an immigration attorney,” one said. “Our immigrant community…they need to decide what will happen with their children if they are detained.” Only a handful of Haitians were around to hear them.

Under an overhang emblazoned with channel letters spelling the phrase “forward together,” hundreds of Springfield advocates stood solemnly in sticky summer heat as an immigration attorney explained the court’s ruling and consequences. “We’ve been talking about this moment for four or five years, and it’s here,” said Kathleen Kersh, an immigration attorney with the nonprofit firm Advocates for Basic Legal Equality (ABLE). “None of us are free until all of us are free, and the way you stand up in the next year is going to define who you are.” This was where, nearly two years prior, the white supremacist group the Blood Tribe claimed Springfield as its “property.” But Thursday evening, the mostly white crowd gripped signs reading “Immigrants make America great,” “Hillbillies for Haitians,” “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Chalk-wielding children doodled on the concrete while a Haitian pastor prayed and a local choir sang songs created in Minneapolis during the wide-scale and often violent immigration enforcement operations there last winter.

Haitian Pastor Jimmy Pierre, who has a green card, prays in Haitian Creole while Springfield faith leaders stand behind him.Sarah Szilagy A local choir led the crowd in singing protest and gospel songs.Sarah Szilagy

Advocates told me that soon after the court’s decision came down, ABLE’s phone started ringing. On the other end of the line were Haitian immigrants, some so terrified they could only weep. The vast majority of Haitian TPS holders live in Florida. But Springfield, Ohio, was thrust under the national microscope during the 2024 campaign, when then-candidate Donald Trump falsely claimed Haitians were “eating the pets” of their American-born neighbors. Singling out Springfield, Trump promised to deport the Haitian residents there upon his reelection. The only thing standing in his way, he argued, was TPS, a humanitarian designation Congress established in 1990 for people fleeing war, natural disasters, epidemics, or unrest. Despite the “temporary” nature of TPS, many countries’ designations have been renewed for years because conditions remained unlikely to improve.

Such is the case in Haiti, which never recovered from a devastating earthquake in 2010 and whose government effectively collapsed after the 2021 assassination of its president, Jovenel Moïse. Speaking to reporters after the rally, Rev. Carl Ruby, a Springfield pastor and one of the leaders of G92, a local faith-based immigrant rights group, recalled the horrors Haitians endured before escaping to the US. He could not forget the story of the young boy he had met who watched a pack of feral hogs eat human remains that were left out in the open. “That’s what we’re sending them back to,” Ruby said. “We ought to be ashamed of that as Americans.”

“That’s what we’re sending them back to. We ought to be ashamed of that as Americans.”

Thursday morning, while waiting to learn whether the court would hand down its decision, Ruby sat with Vilès Dorsainvil under a wooden cross at Ruby’s Central Christian Church, which has become a refuge for the Haitian community and the home base for Springfield’s immigration advocates. Between the evidence of Trump’s racist claims against Haitians—calling Haiti, for example, a “shithole country” whose citizens had AIDS—and newly-discovered evidence that then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem decided to terminate TPS despite DHS officials initially recommending otherwise, they hoped the justices would at least take a more measured approach—perhaps the court wouldn’t wholly save TPS but would nevertheless recognize the racism underlying Trump’s anti-Haitian rhetoric as unconstitutionally prejudiced. Instead, in a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the justices further cemented Trump’s executive power and the inability of federal judges to limit or even question it.

Dorsainvil came to the US in 2020 and, since 2021, has lived in Springfield, where he founded the Haitian Support Center, as thousands of Haitians settled there. A TPS holder himself, Dorsainvil knows what devastation awaits Haitians in the US and back on the island. As I previously reported:

Dorsainvil’s cases are a litany of awful experiences: women and men vulnerable to human trafficking because they lost their work authorizations; families coming home to eviction notices with less than $20 in their bank accounts; people who have “nothing” and nowhere to go. There is a parallel desperation between Haitian immigrants and the families they support back home that Dorsainvil can’t ignore; if a Haitian in the US gets detained or deported, it’s a matter of “life and death” for them and every person in Haiti who relies on them.

“My hope is that the United States, including our current government, will once again place its trust in justice, compassion, and human dignity,” Dorsainvil said Thursday. “This is not the time for people to be judged by the color of their skin, the language they speak, or the country from which they come.”

Vilès Dorsainvil, a TPS holder and executive director of the Haitian Support Center, thanked community members and the legal teams that fought for Haitians’ TPS at the Supreme Court.Sarah Szilagy

Dorsainvil was among the few Haitian TPS holders who attended Thursday evening’s vigil. Organizers, legal advocates, and immigrants didn’t know what to expect: Would ICE begin mass detainments that very day? Would they appear at all? Ruby said when he and Dorsainvil met with ICE officials months ago, they warned the advocates they would take a “carrot-and-stick” approach, which meant they intended “to make life so unbearable that they leave on their own.” But where would they go? Presumably not Haiti, because the country is under the State Department’s highest travel warning, and US commercial airlines cannot fly there.

Ruby told reporters that should ICE come to town, local churches were “committed” to offering sanctuary to Haitians. Advocates, meanwhile, told me they hoped that it wouldn’t come to that point; ICE may have learned its lesson in Minneapolis, and Springfield has had years to coordinate a sprawling volunteer defense and support network. One potential option for protection advocates pointed to was the US Senate, which could advance an existing bill that would extend TPS for Haitians for three more years.

As the sun sank behind downtown Springfield’s mid-rise apartments and office buildings, the crowd dispersed almost as swiftly as it arrived. Stragglers lingered in the courtyard, embracing their neighbors, while the few police officers stationed outside City Hall unhurriedly patrolled the grounds.

Hundreds of Springfield residents gathered Thursday evening, many bearing signs of support for Haitian immigrants.Sarah Szilagy

Community members left with to-do lists: Donate to the Haitian Support Center and the local St. Vincent de Paul chapter, a Catholic nonprofit that immediately launched a diaper and food drive after the decision came down; call Ohio’s US Senators, urging them to extend Haitians’ TPS; keep an eye on their Haitian neighbors. But even with the community’s steadfast support, Biassu Pierre, a Haitian TPS holder and community organizer with ABLE, said in the wake of the ruling, fellow immigrants have questions he cannot answer: What will happen to my children if I am deported? How can I feed my family without lawful work? One woman, Naomi, called him in tears. Her husband was deported to Haiti in December, and he has since “disappeared.” Her three children are among the 1,300 children of Haitian immigrants who were born in Springfield, and who, as American citizens, now face the increasing likelihood of family separation.

“Haitians are not just immigration cases or statistics. We are your neighbor, your co-worker, member of your church,” Pierre told the crowd. “We love Springfield. We would like to stay, to live with you.”

“We want you here!” a man in the crowd shouted back.

Caitlin Clark is in danger, but thankfully she has the good citizens of right-wing media to protect her.

On Wednesday night, Clark’s Indiana Fever took on the Phoenix Mercury when, in the second quarter, Clark lost her footing while driving to the basket. During a brief scramble for the ball, Mercury forward Alyssa Thomas lodged a fist into Clark’s throat. Thomas, known widely to people in the know as one of the more physical players in the league, was eventually given a flagrant 2 foul, the league’s most serious penalty, after league review and suspended for one game.

That’s not enough for right-wing media, which has gone overboard in her defense. Noted conservative commentator Benny Johnson, for instance, wanted justice, tweeting the next day to his four million followers, “This is our George Floyd.”

This is our George Floyd pic.twitter.com/TLEy6a7aPR

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) June 25, 2026

As of this writing, the pile-on continues:

This is absolutely vile.

I’m no WNBA fan but Caitlin Clark is CLEARLY being assaulted constantly just because she’s White.

I’m sick of pretending otherwise.

They are beating her because they are anti-White and they hate she’s better than them. pic.twitter.com/YNktm2bxGB

— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) June 25, 2026

Boomer Esiason, a former pro football player turned radio personality, even floated the idea of Clark taking her talents over to Europe. “If I were Caitlin Clark, I would seriously consider going to play overseas somewhere and get the royal treatment,” Esiason said. “She’s a straight, white basketball player. And she is not being treated with any sort of respect.”

"If I were Caitlin Clark, I would seriously consider going to play overseas somewhere and get the royal treatment…she's a straight white basketball player. And she is not being treated with any sort of respect" – Boomer Esiason pic.twitter.com/zeFRdOMLVn

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) June 25, 2026

And look, maybe Boomer has a point. Maybe players are being unnecessarily mean to Caitlin Clark. After all, young, popular athletes in other leagues are never targeted like this by their peers, and it’s only been Black women who have publicly challenged Clark’s dominance. Maybe she should go to some peaceful majority-white oasis where she can be free of dumb squabbles about race and gender. She could probably become the multi-million dollar face of a league, even get her own signature shoe. Caitlin Clark could become an icon.

Oh, wait.

In February 2025, Maksym Chernyak had a medical emergency. There were multiple signs that Chernyak—a 44-year-old from Ukraine detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Florida—was suffering a severe stroke. But ICE’s medical personnel missed those clues. By the time 911 was called, it was too late. Chernyak’s systolic blood pressure was more than 280 when he got to the hospital. He died soon after.  

Chernyak is one of 52 people who died in ICE custody during the 500 days after President Donald Trump returned to office. A new report from two watchdog groups argues that ICE’s mistakes “almost certainly” cost Chernyak his life. It also reveals that he was far from alone in receiving abysmal medical treatment while in immigration detention. 

The analysis—released on Thursday by Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights—found that the mortality rate for people in ICE custody has skyrocketed during Trump’s second-term mass-deportation campaign. It’s nearly three times what it was during Joe Biden’s presidency and about two times higher than during Trump’s first term—a period that covered the first 10 months of the Covid-19 pandemic. In other words, far more people are now in ICE detention than in prior administrations, and a far greater percentage of those detainees are dying.

The report combines statistical analysis with detailed reviews of specific deaths in ICE custody. It states that PHR—whose medical experts investigate allegations of abuse across the world—identified a “high suspicion of inadequate or delayed health care” in several deaths that raised “serious concerns that the deaths may have been preventable.”

Along with calling for improved medical care within ICE detention, the report recommends that ICE reduce the number of people in detention and prevent overcrowding. Reagan Williams, a researcher in the Crisis, Conflict, and Arms division at HRW, told me that could partly be done by ending mandatory immigration detention, which has been greatly expanded under Trump.

The current policy, which is the subject of an ongoing legal battle, subjects people who entered the country without inspection to mandatory detention regardless of criminal history or how long they have lived in the United States. In the past—including during Trump’s first term—the people covered by the policy would have been eligible for bond hearings and could be released as their immigration cases proceeded.

NBC News reported on Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general is launching a review of the increase in deaths in ICE detention centers. ICE did not respond to my request for comment.

Williams said that HRW and PHR are also asking Congress to mandate detailed independent reviews of deaths in ICE custody. Additionally, HRW and PHR are calling for a new independent entity that would have authority and jurisdiction over the quality of medical services that are provided to people in detention.

Some of the most disturbing sections of the report focus on the medical treatment received by men like Chernyak in the lead-up to their deaths. In Chernyak’s case, HRW and PHR were able to gain a much more detailed understanding of what happened after obtaining medical records from his family. In other cases, they had to rely on inadequate information released by ICE that can obscure the scale of the agency’s mistakes. 

Oksana Tarasiuk shows a picture of herself and her late husband, Maksym Chernyak, inside the couple’s apartment in Florida.Rebecca Blackwell/AP/AP

Dr. Katherine Peeler, a PHR medical adviser and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard, told me that Chernyak’s case was “shocking” on many levels. One of the most concerning things noted by ICE’s medical staff while Chernyak was at the detention center was that he was unresponsive and had “dilated equal but nonreactive pupils.” He also experienced “seizure-like” activity. Peeler said medical staff should have recognized that Chernyak may have been experiencing potentially life-threatening brain swelling. 

Nevertheless, it was recommended that Chernyak be sent to an emergency room via “non-emergency, medical transport.” Thirty minutes later—while Chernyak was still waiting at the detention center—he began having “additional seizures, vomited, and his pupils became unequal and remained non-reactive,” according to the report from HRW and PHR. Medical staff at the detention center then finally called 911. At the hospital, Peeler said, medical professionals immediately recognized that he was suffering from what proved to be a fatal stroke.

While conditions in ICE detention have deteriorated since Trump returned to office, HRW and PHR’s investigation makes clear that many of the problems are longstanding. That can be seen from the death of Serawit Gezahegn Dejene, a 45-year-old man from Ethiopia, on January 29, 2025. Dejene—who was first detained during the Biden administration in August 2024—began suffering from back pain around November 2024, according to information released by ICE. 

During one six-week period, he was evaluated four different times by medical staff at an Arizona detention center. On the last of those visits, after a nurse noted that he had an “abnormal slow gait,” he was provided with pain medication and instructions for spine exercises. The nurse recommended a follow-up in two weeks, but Dejene needed medical attention again just four days later.

This time, medical staff noted that Dejene had lost 20 percent of his body weight and sent him to a local emergency room, which then returned him to the detention center with a diagnosis of “probable lymphoma.” Dejene’s condition quickly deteriorated and he was sent back to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. 

Dejene died soon after. Peeler said the autopsy revealed that Dejene had a number of conditions that stemmed from AIDS that somehow went unnoticed by medical providers. According to the autopsy, those included “central nervous system toxoplasmosis, tuberculosis, Diphyllobothrium tapeworm, pneumocystis pneumonia, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Candida albicans, and Cytomegalovirus.” (ICE’s detainee death report for Dejene states that he denied having “any medical history.”)

“He was immunocompromised, which led him to have all these infections,” Peeler explained. “Which is how people used to die from AIDS. But people don’t typically die from AIDS in this country anymore because we have such effective antiretrovirals.” Peeler emphasized that ICE medical staff had multiple opportunities to potentially save Dejene’s life. “He must have looked sick,” she said. “There’s no way that he looked okay.” 

“This one I found really, really egregious,” Peeler added. “It was over so many weeks. There were so many opportunities that he presented where they should have drawn labs.” 

Williams, the HRW researcher, said she was struck in her research by just how little information is provided to people whose loved ones have died in ICE custody. She mentioned talking to a mother who “was desperate to know more about what had happened to her son.”

Williams stressed the human lives behind the numbers in the report. “When we talk about a rising death rate,” she explained, “we’re talking about a mother losing her son who cooked for her, who cared for her, who she loves deeply, and who she is now suffering without.”

Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton pleaded guilty on Friday to keeping security information from his work in his personal records—an act less egregious than what Donald Trump and Joe Biden previously got away with unscathed.

A Florida judge dismissed Trump’s case in 2024 for allegedly retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, saying that special counsel Jack Smith, who filed the charges against Trump, was illegally appointed by the Justice Department—rather than the President and confirmed by the Senate. 

And Biden was not charged for purportedly keeping documents in a former D.C. office and his personal residence in Delaware. One reason given was that Biden would likely present himself before a jury “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” which would make it difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him for “a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

But, as of Friday, Bolton has pled guilty to one count of unauthorized retention of national defense information out of a total of 18 official charges. Prosecutors said that Bolton faces a prison sentence of up to five years and agreed to pay $2.25 million in fines. His sentencing date is set for October 28.

Since leaving his position in the first Trump administration in 2019, Bolton has become a vocal critic of the president. When he was first indicted last October, Bolton said the case was an attempt by Trump to use the Justice Department to punish his political enemies. The president has gone after officials like former FBI director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and former Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. 

The Justice Department under Joe Biden continued to gather evidence in the case and the 18-count indictment focused on Bolton’s private messages containing national security information—not the contents of the memoir. The indictment alleged that Bolton used his personal email and a messaging app to share more than 1000 pages of notes with two family members. 

The indictment said that Bolton’s emails were later hacked by someone with ties to the government of Iran. “A representative for Bolton notified the U.S. government of the hack in or about July 2021,” the filing reads in part, “but did not tell the U.S. government that the account contained national defense information, including classified information.”

Every day, for more than three weeks running, tens of thousands of Albanians have taken to the streets, a peaceful mass movement seeking nothing less than a complete overthrow of the government.

The “Flamingo Revolution,” as local activists have dubbed it, was set off by the luxury resort projects that Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner, plan to build on nature reserves in Albania. At the beginning of May, a barbed-wire fence was erected in the Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape in Zvërnec, restricting access to one of the most treasured natural coastlines and one of the Mediterranean’s last untouched coastal ecosystems.

Activists, residents, and members of the Levizja Bashkë political party gathered to protest the fences, and after security guards violently dragged a demonstrator through the property, more protests erupted and the story went global.

A protester speaks his mind during the early days of the so-called Flamingo Revolution. Protesters gather nightly in the Boulevard of Martyrs, even in the rain.

The Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape in Zvërnec, Albania, one of the Mediterranean’s last untouched coastal ecosystems and home to hundreds of protected species, is where Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump aim to build a new luxury resort.

The Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape is home to flamingos, pelicans, migratory birds, and hundreds of protected species. It includes lagoons, wetlands, and habitats of exceptional ecological value. And it is one of many protected nature zones now at dire risk of destruction.

In February 2024, led by Prime Minister Edi Rama of the center-left Socialist Party, Albania’s parliament passed Law 21/2024, which allows the National Territory Council to grant permits for luxury tourist resorts anywhere in the country, even inprotected landscapes. Three days later, Kushner went public with plans to create two luxury developments in the region, including a resort on Sazan, a protected nature zone and one of Albania’s only major islands.

Javanka’s vision includes up to 10,000 “units of villas,” priced far beyond what most Albanians can afford, to be built in an area where many locals lack access to 24-7 running water. Albania, which has set a goal of 2030 for admission to the European Union, is obligated to repeal Law 21/2024, which clashes with EU conservation standards, but so far has failed to do so.

The ongoing protest movement set off by the Kushner projects, has turned into something much larger, with youth chanting “Çohuni nga kafja! (Get up from the cafes!)” each night as they flood the streets of Tirana, Albania’s capital.

Protesters atop the Skanderbeg statue in Tirana’s main square. Skanderbeg was a national hero who fought for Albania’s independence from the Ottoman Empire. A view from the crowd at the foot of the Skanderbeg statue.

Their immediate goal is Rama’s resignation and the dissolution of his government; in its place, the protesters are demanding a year-long, interim technocratic leadership to prepare Albania for new elections, along with a two-term limit for prime ministers, nullification of Law 21/2024, and legislative reforms related to foreign investment and elections.

You can tell a lot about a movement from protesters’ chants. One that has united Albanians left and right is “Rama Burg, Berisha Burg” (Rama jail, Berisha jail), a call for the imprisonment of the country’s two most predominant political bosses, Socialist Rama and Democrat Sali Berisha, whose parties have been mired in corruption scandals ever since Albania transitioned from state socialism to democracy in 1991.

Berisha has been charged with corruption directly, while Rama’s Deputy Prime Minister Belinda Balluku, her predecessor, Arben Ahmetaj, and Tirana’s mayor, Erion Veliaj, have all been indicted by Albania’s Special Anti-Corruption Prosecution agency. Among the other chants: “Revolution!” “The end has come for you!” “We are the opposition!” “Cancel the Project!” “Rama, resign!” And “A new Albania!” 

During a nightly march, protesters encourage bus riders to join in. An elderly resident shows support for the protesters.

Savvy Gen Zers, content creators, and influencers have flooded Instagram with protest videos, memes, informational content, and revolutionary posters and artwork that are helping to fuel the movement—and prompting Rama to blame the protests on social media algorithms he says are being hijacked and fueled by foreign agents.

In interviews, the PM has downplayed the opposition. Rama says the Kushner-Trump project will proceed even if 500,000 Albanians take to the streets—and that the Socialist Party’s sweep in 2025 is evidence of his popular support. He also has referenced the investment of roughly $4.6 billion in the Vlorë region, with an estimated $1.6 billion just for Sazan island—a no-brainer, he says, for a nation whose GDP is only about $33 billion.

But the unprecedented youth protest movement signals something else—widespread discontent. It has spawned the largest public demonstrations since the collapse of the communist regime in 1991. Since then, approximately 40 percent of the population has left Albania, and more than 50,000, mostly young adults, still migrate abroad annually—an exodus driven by official corruption, Albania’s high cost of living, and the lack of economic opportunity.

A sizable diaspora has spawned sister protests in several European and American cities; on June 20, hundreds of Albanian expats flew in and descended on Tirana in support of the protesters, leading to the movement’s largest rally yet, with more than 100,000 in attendance. Outside the city, in beach towns such as Kakome and Rrjoll, protesters followed the example set by their peers in Zvërnec, tearing down the fences and barriers blocking coastal access to protest the privatization of natural areas by powerful business interests.

The movement has attracted many young families with children, thanks to its nonviolent nature. Protesters impersonate Sali Berisha and Edi Rama, heads of the two main political parties, complete with chains and prison colors.

The movement is grassroots and decentralized, with no clear leaders, only protest “coordinators.” It is a revolt against the status quo and the political establishment that has ruled Albania for the past 36 years. It is a protest against corruption, and oligarchy.

It has united people across the political spectrum—youth, environmental activists, pensioners, young families, and influencers coming together to build momentum and pressure Rama to resign. Nightly rallies at the Boulevard of Martyrs are family-friendly, with a dedicated children’s drawing area run by local artists and volunteers, and a “people’s podium” where citizens can voice their discontent. Each night, after the rallies, protesters march through the streets of Tirana, with residents waving them on from balconies, taxi drivers honking their horns, and tourists looking on from cafes—and sometimes even joining in.

In a country as small as Albania, with just 2.3 million residents, 100,000  protesters is the equivalent of 12.7 million in the United States. And it doesn’t appear as though the movement will lose steam anytime soon.

Cafe patrons watch as thousands of protesters march through Tirana. Protesters on the march after a nightly rally. For three weeks now, thousands of people have come out on Tirana’s streets every night. Protesters call it the Flamingo Revolution. Hundreds of Albanian expats returned home to join the protests on June 20. Many plan to do the same over the July 4 weekend. A young woman displays a Monopoly box with “Albania” written on it during one nightly march.

The “people’s podium” is a key part of the nightly rallies, open to anyone who wants to speak.

A protester waves an Albanian flag atop the Pyramid of Tirana, which was originally built as a museum to Communist leader Enver Hoxha. Now it’s a cultural hub and tourist attraction. On Day Three of the protests, police unleash water cannons and teargas after protesters stormed through barricades set up to thwart them. There have been no such confrontations since. Environmental activists march with hand-painted flamingos in protest of the Kushner-Trump resort plan. The protests are widely seen as family friendly, which has added to the appeal.

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

The crisis on the Colorado River is simple: The seven Western states that border the essential waterway use more water than it contains. Chronic overuse has drained its two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and a two-decade drought cycle has pushed them to the point of collapse. 

The dream solution to this crisis is an agreement among all involved to use less water. Such a deal would decide who must reduce consumption, which means asking which cities would ban irrigating lawns and washing cars and which farmers would rip up their fields.

“The basin should not be forced to choose between stabilizing the present and negotiating the future.”

This has proven impossible. The states have been trying to work this out since the last dry spell, in 2022, but talks have ended in frustration and name-calling. The main sticking point is between the Upper Basin states, led by Colorado and Utah (along with Wyoming and New Mexico), and the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada. Each side believes the other has a legal and a moral responsibility to cut usage during dry years. The stalemate means the Trump administration must design a schedule of restrictions ahead of a crucial deadline in September. So far, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has balked at resolving the quarrel.

Instead, the administration is turning to a far less controversial plan: Throw money at the problem. The Interior Department and Congress are pondering a slew of projects that could increase supply—a reversal of President Trump’s zeal for cutting federal grants. The seven state governors have sent Washington a “wish list” of over $50 billion, and several startups have their hands out as well.

Federal investment makes sense given the scale of the problem and the intractable impasse, said Jennifer Pitt, the Colorado River program director at the National Audubon Society and an expert on the governance of the river.

“It is something easier for people to agree on,” she said. “This is a slow moving crisis, but it is a crisis, and we do see the federal funding come in to address crises in other parts of the country. Just because this is a slow moving one doesn’t make it any less worthy.”

During a Senate committee hearing last week, the Interior Department’s top water official, Andrea Travnicek, said the agency has yet to vet the wish list. She didn’t offer a specific funding request, and urged lawmakers to be “thoughtful” about how they spend taxpayer money. But senators in both parties seemed to encourage new investments. “The basin should not be forced to choose between stabilizing the present and negotiating the future,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico.

The possibility of new funding marks a return to the policy of Joe Biden’s administration. During the last extreme drought in 2022, the Interior Department paid farmers billions to leave their fields fallow, but that money, from the Inflation Reduction Act, has almost run dry. 

The difference now is that the roster of proposals is far more ambitious, and some far less certain to bolster the basin’s water supply. They range from desalination plants and desert groundwater pipelines to forest ecosystem restoration.

Here are a few of the major solutions state officials and companies are proposing.

Desalination
As the Colorado River crisis has deepened, some cities in the Southwest have eyed desalination, which extracts salt from sea water. A company called Poseidon Water opened such a plant in San Diego in 2015 and tried for decades to open another in Los Angeles. The wish list to the Interior Department requests as much as $6 billion to build one across the border in the Mexican state of Baja California to supplement Arizona’s vanishing Colorado River supplies.

The Interior Department also signed an agreement in early June with San Diego’s water agency that explains how that plant would help. Rather than sending treated seawater inland, states would pay the city to take less from the Colorado River. Arizona stands to lose the most water during drought years, and it would be the most likely to participate in that exchange.

But desalination is expensive, requires enormous amounts of electricity, and state-of-the-art industrial technology. The Poseidon facility cost $1 billion, but San Diego has diversified its water portfolio so much that it no longer needs all the water it must purchase from the plant. Trading water could help it offset some of that cost.

Taming tech and power
Nevada uses less water than any state on the river and has cut usage in Las Vegas by replacing grass with artificial turf. It is now seeking money to slake some of its last thirsty industries: power plants and data centers. These facilities need a fraction of what agriculture requires, but they dominate usage in the Silver State.  

The state’s wish list includes $300 million to retrofit its largest natural gas plant and reduce water consumption by an amount equivalent to more than 3,000 average homes. It also seeks $650 million to install zero-water cooling systems in airports, schools, and industrial facilities. These closed-loop systems, which recirculate the same cooled water or, in the case of data centers, blast hot servers with cold air, have become more popular in Western states amid concerns about the tech boom’s growing thirst.

Squeezing rain from the clouds
Whereas Lower Basin states like Arizona and California can draw from the Colorado River’s big reservoirs on demand, northern states at its headwaters only receive the rain and snow that feed it. 

These Upper Basin states have been trying for decades to engineer more precipitation, with support from Washington, DC. It sounds futuristic, but cloud seeding—spraying salt or silver iodide into clouds, forcing them to release water they might otherwise retain—has proven fairly effective on a small scale. Utah spends a few million dollars each year doing this, and officials say it could boost annual snowpack by as much as 10 percent. 

In addition, a few startups are pitching cheaper and more scalable versions of this technology. Rain Enhancement, a Florida-based outfit, says it has brought about 15,000 homes’ worth of rain to a river tributary in Utah this year; another, Rainmaker, says it can produce 1,000 times that much by 2031. That’s enough to close the supply gap on the river. That promise is fanciful, but these companies could secure federal funding from an administration that loves the tech industry.

Mining a hoard of desert groundwater
The West teems with companies that have promised miracles, from building a 300-mile pipeline to tapping a hoard of groundwater in Nevada. But perhaps no project has had a longer and more turbulent history than Cadiz, a proposal, almost 30 years old, to export groundwater from an aquifer in the Mojave Desert.

This has drawn vicious opposition from environmentalists and the late California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who called it a “grave threat” to the desert. Cadiz experienced several setbacks during the Biden administration: It lost a federal permit, California ended its pipeline lease, Arizona declined to support it, and its stock price fell to almost zero. But Susan Kennedy, its CEO, says Cadiz is flowing again with a funding agreement from the Interior Department to study exchanges between Cadiz and the Colorado River.

The company still needs to finish two pipelines, one to the Central Valley and another to the aqueduct that carries Colorado River water to California. It also must build a plant to remove contaminants in the water, but Kennedy believes she can have the tap running by 2028.

“This isn’t a competition; it’s an all-of-the-above situation,” she said of the situation on the river. That may be so, but the seven states did not include Cadiz on the wish list sent the Interior Department.

The Supreme Court made one thing plain this week: It is an anti-immigrant court. There were hints before—big ones, to be honest. But in three rulings this week, the Republican-appointed justices voted to green light Trump administration policies against immigrants that both defy federal law and carry a massive humanitarian toll. This week’s decisions display, at best, a callous disregard for the wellbeing and safety of millions of people. At worst, they signal that an anti-immigrant mindset has taken hold of the court’s conservative wing.

On Thursday, the court issued two decisions with shocking human consequences. First, in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the court allowed the administration to deny immigrants the right to apply for asylum simply by preventing them from technically crossing the border. The relevant law states that immigrants “arriving in” the US may apply for asylum. In a gotcha-type trick typical of a middle school bully, the administration claims that if it can prevent people from physically stepping across the border, they can ignore all the mandatory processes Congress set-up to process asylum seekers who come to the nation’s doorstep. The 6-3 majority agreed, using a juvenile grammatical argument to render the law contradictory and unenforceable. Because Congress used the preposition “in,” the administration is now free to defy the law and deny thousands of immigrants fleeing persecution their right to apply for asylum. The conclusion is as stupid as it is cruel.

Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in the case, joined by the other five GOP appointees, ignores the policy’s devastating toll. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent does not. She describes the violence visited upon immigrants as they endlessly wait in makeshift camps along the border to be able to apply for asylum, and the tragedy of mothers, fathers, and children drowning in the Rio Grande after being turned away from a port of entry. 

“The consequences of today’s decision are predictable. More people will die.”

“The current asylum system developed in response to the international moral reckoning that followed the Holocaust and World War II,” Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. In 1939, the United States turned away the M.S. St. Louis carrying Jewish refugees. Forced to return to Europe, many of its passengers died in concentration camps. “Congress passed the Refugee Act in 1980 because it did not want this country to repeat the mistakes of its past,” she continued. “Yet if the refugees on the M.S. St. Louis were to walk up to a port of entry on our southern border today, the majority’s interpretation would allow immigration officers to refuse even to consider their asylum applications by physically blocking them from stepping foot onto U.S. soil.”

“The consequences of today’s decision are predictable,” she concluded. “More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not.” Like in 1939, the blame for that bloodshed will be on the United States. In place of the statutory scheme Congress erected to remedy past mistakes, the majority lets the Trump administration repeat them. 

Whereas the asylum case allowed the Trump administration to turn away people seeking humanitarian relief, the next opinion gave it effectively unreviewable power to strip millions of immigrants of humanitarian relief they are already receiving in the US. Under federal law, the executive branch can grant people from crisis-torn countries what’s known as Temporary Protected Status, allowing them to legally stay in the US while their home countries remain unsafe. These TPS designations are periodically reviewed and can be extended or terminated depending on if conditions have improved.

In Alito’s opinion in Mullin v. Doe, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to prematurely terminate TPS for 350,000 immigrants from Haiti and Syria. The decision frees the administration to strip legal status from 1.3 million immigrants from 17 countries. 

In revoking TPS for Haitians, the administration made a mockery of the legally-required process. Yet the Roberts Court blessed that lawlessness on Thursday by finding that the decision to revoke TPS is generally unreviewable by courts. As a result, the rules Congress put into law to govern TPS designations are now mere suggestions. Just as in the case about blocking immigrants from ports of entry, the six justices in the majority gave the president the authority to run roughshod over the law. In both cases, mostly nonwhite immigrants will suffer the dire consequences.

While the decision left the door open for people stripped of TPS to make a constitutional claim, as Alito’s opinion shows, it’s unclear whether this court would ever agree there was a valid one. In this case, the plaintiffs argued the revocation was driven by racial animus in violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection mandate. The majority brushed aside the cascade of racial dog whistles and stereotypes Trump targeted at Haitians in the US. “None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications,” Alito wrote.

In her dissent, Kagan accuses the majority of refusing to quote the presidential language that they claim is so innocent. So Kagan, joined by the other Democratic appointees, memorializes it in her dissent:

Haitians are “eating the dogs . . . . They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live [in Springfield, Ohio].” And: Haitians are also eating “other things too that they’re not supposed to be.” And: Haitians in the United States “probably have AIDS.” And: Haiti is a “shithole country,” which is “filthy, dirty, [and] disgusting.” And: Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.” And: Haitians, along with some others, are “poisoning the blood” of our country. And: “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries” like “Haiti [and] Somalia”? “Why cannot we have some people from Norway [and] Sweden?” 

Under Supreme Court precedent, a plausible race-neutral justification is not enough to overcome evidence of a racist motive. And yet, just as it waved the law aside, the court waves away the pesky 14th Amendment (at least as it pertains to racial minorities). After oral arguments in the TPS case, the attorney for the Syrian plaintiffs, Ahilan Arulanantham, had said that the question before the court is whether the government can “ignore the law when it tries to take away someone’s immigration status.” 

When it comes to TPS, the answer is yes. When it comes to asylum seekers, the answer is yes. And even for immigrants granted permanent residency, the Supreme Court placed executive caprice over the law.

In a third case this week, the Roberts Court also answered yes to demoting the status of green card holders, permanent residents who have lived in the United States for years, even decades. On Tuesday, in Blanche v. Lau, the same 6-3 majority gave border officials the discretion to take away a green card at a port of entry if they suspect that the legal permanent resident reentering the country may have committed a crime involving moral turpitude, a vague grouping of crimes in immigration law. As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote Tuesday, “agents at the border have just been given exceptional discretion to bypass protections generally afforded to green card holders.”

In her dissent, Jackson explained that the decision undermined the “benefits and security that come with having a green card,” empowering border officials to reclassify a permanent resident’s status on a hunch, then justify it later with “post hoc evidence.” Just as in the other two decisions from this week, in Lau the Supreme Court destabilizes the entire immigration system, relied upon not just by immigrants and their families—but also employers like hospitals and universities—by replacing the certainty of the law with the whims of the president and his agents.

With just a few days left before the justices begin their summer recess, we are still awaiting the court’s ruling on the meaning of birthright citizenship. The Trump administration is seeking to deny citizenship to thousands of people born in the US to parents of temporary visitors and undocumented immigrants. The justices are expected to reject this attempt and uphold the principle, written plainly in the Constitution, that virtually all people born in the US are citizens.

The justices may think that, by upholding birthright citizenship, they can wash their hands of the anti-immigrant stench from these three rulings. They may presume that their refusal to acknowledge Trump’s blatant racism will be cleansed when they sign an opinion bashing slavery and praising the principle of equality. They may hope that in recognizing the practical consequences of ending birthright citizenship, the cruel results of this week’s rulings will be overshadowed.

But no matter what happens in the birthright citizenship case, this court is a partner in the administration’s cruel, racist, anti-immigrant crusade. In just one week, the majority showed its true colors.

Tom Kean Jr. was once lost, but now he is found. At home in Westfield, New Jersey, waiting for you in a suit and tie, with his wife silently smiling in the background.

Sound strange? Well, that’s how the New Jersey Republican greeted a New York Times reporter on Wednesday night, the first sighting since effectively vanishing in March due to an undisclosed health condition and missing more than 100 votes in the House. Kean’s absence sparked intense speculation, particularly in the lead-up to his primary election earlier this month. (He ran unchallenged, made zero campaign appearances, and won.)

So what was it like to see Kean in the flesh? Honestly, it seemed unsettling!

He could be seen from the street on Wednesday evening, standing in a brightly lit front room of his Westfield home just before 8:45 p.m.

“It’s good to see you,” he said after a reporter for The New York Times rang his doorbell. He was wearing a dark suit and a red tie. “I’ll talk to you next week,” he said. “Thank you.”

Mr. Kean’s wife, Rhonda, stood in the background, smiling pleasantly. He declined additional comment and closed the door.

Last week, Kean’s office announced that the congressman would return to Congress on June 30 and finally explain the mystery surrounding his monthslong absence. But will Kean explain walking around one’s house in formalwear? At bedtime? What about the ghost stock trades? That’s what I want to know.

Rep. Dan Goldman didn’t just lose his primary Tuesday. He got trounced. With roughly 90 percent of votes counted, the incumbent New York congressman is trailing former city comptroller Brad Lander by more than 30 points. Goldman lost the Democratic primary despite his campaign spending more than $7 million—$2 million of which came directly from Goldman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune.

Lander’s victory is extraordinary. As a general rule, congressional incumbents don’t lose their primaries by dozens of points, absent personal or professional scandals. Goldman, who was first elected in 2022, has none. The exception to that rule is members of Congress who find themselves severely out of step during times of ideological realignment within their party. That is what happened in New York’s 10th Congressional District, which covers lower Manhattan, the wealthy neighborhoods of Brownstone Brooklyn, and sections of south Brooklyn. 

A related dynamic played out in New York’s 7th and 13th districts, where Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier—two left-wing candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America—defeated Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso and longtime Rep. Adriano Espaillat. Valdez leads Reynoso by more than 20 points, while Avila Chevalier—who ran in a less DSA-heavy district and was seen as a weaker candidate than Lander or Valdez—narrowly prevailed over Espaillat.

Israel and Gaza played a major role in the bitter contest between Goldman and Lander. Both men are self-described liberal Zionists who vocally condemned Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack. But beyond that, their approaches to Israel diverge drastically.

In November 2023, Goldman was one of just 22 Democrats who voted to censure his colleague Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) after she shared a video that included the line “from the river to the sea” to show her support for Palestinian rights. Last year, Goldman broke with most of his party by voting to sanction the International Criminal Court after it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and a Hamas military commander. 

During a debate earlier this month, Goldman said he was “proud” to march in this year’s Israel Day parade in New York. Lander chose not to, saying he would not be attending “while Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, violating international law, [and] violating Palestinian human rights.” His differences with Goldman when it came to Israel, he said, were “profound.” 

Lander and Goldman are both Jewish candidates who were running to represent one of the most Jewish congressional districts in the country. But Lander’s views on Israel appear to be much more in line with those of fellow progressive Jews in neighborhoods like Park Slope. (As my colleague Sophie Hurwitz has written, Lander’s children are named after a Jewish leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and a Jewish labor organizer.)

Lander’s victory wasn’t just about Israel. The former city comptroller is about as known a quantity in Brownstone Brooklyn as a politician can be. Before being elected comptroller in 2021, he represented Park Slope and nearby neighborhoods on the New York City Council for more than a decade. While in that role, he successfully pushed a major rezoning in Gowanus that has led to a boom in housing construction in the neighborhood. 

Lander’s background and wonkish affect are also a natural fit in a progressive district that includes the Park Slope Food Coop. After growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, he attended the University of Chicago and became a Marshall Scholar. He later moved to Brooklyn, where he bought his home for a now-unimaginable price of $655,000. He is a quintessential Park Slope dad whose enthusiastic Pride-flag-waving has garnered affection on social media.

When Lander ran for mayor last year, he was considered one of Andrew Cuomo’s top rivals before Mamdani surged in the polls. But he accepted likely defeat rather than try to take Mamdani down. Toward the end of the primary, the two candidates cross-endorsed each other to take advantage of New York’s ranked choice voting system. After the mayoral election, Mamdani endorsed Lander in his bid to unseat Goldman.

Mayoral candidate Brad Lander was cuffed and detained by ICE agents after asking to see a warrant for people who were detained after an immigration hearing. Video from the city comptroller’s press secretary @chloecbristow. She says he’s still being held in 26 Federal Plaza. pic.twitter.com/cW9jIsp35b

— Jeff Coltin (@JCColtin) June 17, 2025

In Donald Trump’s second term, Lander has emerged as a prominent champion of immigrants’ rights. Last June, while running for mayor, he was arrested at a Manhattan immigration courthouse while trying to escort a man out of the building. Shortly before being detained, he told a reporter, “I don’t think there’s any place that’s more important to be right now than bearing witness and trying to stand up for the rule of law.” 

In September, he was arrested again at the same federal building, along with other Democratic officials, after demanding to inspect immigration detention facilities. Earlier this month, he was found not guilty of charges stemming from that arrest.

Goldman, a former federal prosecutor who served as lead Democratic counsel during Trump’s first impeachment, was always an odd fit for the district. When he first ran in 2022, he spent nearly $5 million of an inheritance worth up to $250 million. Doing so allowed him to effectively buy his way through a crowded, low-turnout primary. He prevailed with just 26 percent of the vote—2 points above his closest challenger. 

In 2022, Goldman, a rich Manhattanite, did best in wealthy sections of the island, like Tribeca and the West Village. He did much worse in more left-leaning and gentrified parts of Brooklyn. The dynamic repeated itself in the 2024 primary. Despite not facing a serious challenger—his main opponent spent less than $40,000—Goldman ended up with only 65 percent of the vote. In some areas, he actually lost—an obvious sign that he was vulnerable to being primaried.

Still, the scale of Lander’s victory is shocking. In some election districts (the New York equivalent of precincts), Lander appears on track to win more than 90 percent of the vote. Overall, Lander is winning Brooklyn by 45 points. And in Manhattan—Goldman’s home turf—Lander is up by about 10 points.

From an electoral perspective, the scale of his victory is reminiscent of recent primaries in which moderate Republicans have been ousted by right-wing challengers. In 2022, Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) ended up with 66 percent of the vote against Liz Cheney—the same percentage Lander has now. 

Hageman and Lander, of course, belong to opposing parties and hold wildly different views. But they represent similar intraparty upheavals. In Wyoming, the lesson in Hageman’s race was that the GOP had no room for criticizing Trump, let alone voting to impeach him. In New York, Lander’s victory shows that being the public face of a Trump impeachment is no longer enough for Democrats. The party’s voters are increasingly unwilling to tolerate representatives who enable an Israeli state responsible for genocide.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to a humanitarian program that protects immigrants who can’t safely return to crisis-stricken countries. The decision effectively allows the Trump administration to move forward with terminating Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for more than 350,000 nationals of Syria and Haiti who are living and working in the United States.

It also paves the way for the administration to potentially end the protection for several other countries experiencing wars, environmental disasters, and extraordinary circumstances. That push, which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has called the “largest de-documentation event in US history,” could strip away legal status from more than 1.3 million TPS holders from 17 designated countries.

In a 6-3 decision, the Court’s conservative supermajority sided with the federal government’s arguments that the executive branch’s determinations about TPS aren’t subject to judicial review. The Trump administration claimed that Congress, in enacting the 1990 statute that created the program, gave the Department of Homeland Security secretary full discretion to designate a country for protection, as well as to extend or terminate that designation.

The justices held that the federal law bars the courts from reviewing “non-constitutional” claims related to the humanitarian program. They took a broad view of the judicial bar provision in the TPS statute, which states that “[t]here is no judicial review of any determination of the [Secretary of Homeland Security] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state.” They said “determination” encompasses not only the secretary’s final decision, but also the process to get there.

The majority also found that the Haitian TPS holders challenging the termination of the protection were likely to fail when they argued that the Trump administration violated the Equal Protection Clause by discriminating against them based on race. “None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary was overtly racial,” Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, said of the Trump administration’s disparaging public comments about Haitian migrants, “and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications.”

The consequential ruling comes in a case that consolidated two lawsuits—Trump v. Miot and Mullin v. Doe—challenging the termination of TPS for more than 300,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians. The Court agreed to hear the case in March after the Trump administration applied for a stay of lower court decisions postponing the terminations. Unlike in other similar TPS cases, the justices preserved the status quo, keeping protections against deportation for these groups in place while reviewing the government’s arguments.

Under the statute, the DHS secretary can designate a country for TPS for up to 18 months, after which time they’re required to conduct a review and assess whether country conditions continue to merit this designation before determining if it should be terminated, extended, or re-designated. Haiti was first designated for TPS in 2010 after a devastating hurricane, and its designation has been repeatedly extended. 

On June 16, lawyers representing Haitian immigrants asked the Supreme Court justices to dismiss the case and allow the lower courts to resolve it in light of new evidence supporting their arguments that then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s termination of TPS for Haiti was a “preordained outcome” and that she had moved to end the protection even without receiving a recommendation from the State Department. 

During her tenure, Noem tried to end the program for as many as 13 nations, including Venezuela, Yemen, and Afghanistan. District courts found that Noem violated requirements of the statute when terminating or, as in the case of Venezuela, vacating an existing extension of TPS designation, including by failing to properly consult with other relevant federal agencies on country conditions.

Then-Secretary Noem took “a hatchet to the TPS system,” US District Court Judge Katherine Polk Failla of New York wrote in her decision finding that the termination of TPS for Syria was arbitrary and capricious. “Once the Secretary was confirmed, she endeavored to terminate TPS status whenever presented with an opportunity to do so, resulting in termination decisions that are grounded not in law and not in fact, but that are in political considerations simply not relevant under the TPS statute.”

In the case concerning Haiti, District of Columbia federal Judge Ana C. Reyes concluded earlier this year that the evidence suggested that Noem’s decision to end the protection for that population was motivated, at least partially, by racial animus, given President Donald Trump’s disparaging comments about Haitian migrants. She also noted that while Congress gave the secretary ample discretion to make determinations about TPS, the goal in passing the statute was to standardize discretionary temporary protections and insulate them from political whims.

Last year, the Supreme Court twice tossed district court rulings blocking Noem’s actions against TPS for Venezuela, allowing the Trump administration to revoke protected status from hundreds of thousands of people pending appeal. In a dissent last October, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson chastised the Court for granting the government’s application for a stay in the Venezuela case.

“I cannot abide our repeated, gratuitous, and harmful interference with cases pending in lower courts while lives hang in the balance.”

“I view today’s decision as yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” Justice Jackson wrote. “This Court should have stayed its hand. Having opted instead to join the fray, the Court plainly misjudges the irreparable harm and balance-of-the-equities factors by privileging the bald assertion of unconstrained executive power over countless families’ pleas for the stability our Government has promised them.” She added: “I cannot abide our repeated, gratuitous, and harmful interference with cases pending in lower courts while lives hang in the balance.”

During the oral arguments for Trump v. Miot and Mullin v. Doe in April, the liberal justices expressed skepticism at the government’s theory that the secretary’s decision-making process regarding TPS isn’t reviewable by the courts. “What was the point of Congress putting this statute into being and having requirements for the Secretary if there was no ability for anyone to challenge the Secretary’s compliance?” Justice Jackson challenged Solicitor General D. John Sauer. Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that Congress could have been explicit about terminations of TPS being unreviewable, but it didn’t.

The lower courts found that Secretary Noem had failed to adequately consult with the State Department about country conditions, in violation of procedural requirements. Justice Jackson offered a hypothetical, asking if the secretary could use a Ouija board when deciding to terminate the protection, or randomly pick countries for designation from slips of paper in a hat.

They also addressed the plaintiff’s claims that the government’s push to terminate TPS for Haiti had been motivated by racial animus against non-white migrants. Justice Sotomayor said it was hard to see how Trump calling Haiti and other countries “shithole” places and accusing migrants with TPS of “poisoning the blood” of the United States as indicative that a “discriminatory purpose may have played a part in this decision.”

The conservative justices, on the other hand, appeared receptive to the government’s arguments that TPS “determinations” are beyond the federal court’s review power. The plaintiffs counter-argued that the DHS secretary’s final decision about terminating TPS may be immune to judicial review, but the procedural steps to make such a determination aren’t.

“After today,” Justice Elena Kagan dissented in Thursday’s ruling, “a Secretary can announce to the world that she didn’t consult with anyone—more, that she didn’t evaluate country conditions at all—before making, extending, or terminating a TPS designation.”

Todd Schulte, president of the advocacy organization FWD.us, called the Court’s decision “an astonishing human tragedy.” The ruling, he said in a statement, was “an awful harbinger for what we expect this administration to try to do for other TPS designations. Hundreds of thousands of people who have lived here for decades now see heartbreaking chaos ahead.”

“We’re talking about the power to mass expel people who have done nothing wrong to countries that remain unsafe,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, the attorney arguing for the Syrian plaintiffs. “And our view is it is unlikely that a refugee protection statute would have given that power to the Secretary.” The question before the Court, Arulanantham said in a statement following the April oral arguments, was whether the government could “ignore the law when it tries to take away someone’s immigration status.” Judging by the justices’ ruling on this case, the answer appears to be yes.

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.”

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.