Things have been a bit quiet around these parts lately, huh? After a few months bringing you some of our best feature investigations read aloud, in partnership with Audm, we’re going through some behind-the-scenes newsroom changes that will impact how we best serve you, our listener. We’re going to be taking some more time, off-air, to re-tool and recalibrate. Goodbyes are hard! But it’s not really a goodbye. It a “goodbye for now”. And Mother Jones journalism isn’t going anywhere. You can continue to listen to our incisive stories on Audm through their app and on our website. And, of course ..read more

We bet you’ve heard one phrase more and more this year than ever before: Critical Race Theory. It’s an obsession on Fox News, and it’s the topic, along with anti-mask protests, raging at school board hearings across the country—a new frontier in a roiling culture war. But what is Critical Race Theory? And how did it come to be used to whip up a new hysteria on the right? States are now racing to ban the teaching of CRT, many successfully, even while many of its fiercest critics can barely explain what it is. For this week’s episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, some much-needed history. Journal ..read more

With everything going on these days—we’ll spare you the list of existential crises we’re currently living through—now seems like the perfect time to hear from two leaders who have a revolutionary vision of what this country could be. Last week, in a special livestream event, Mother Jones reporter and columnist Nathalie Baptiste spoke to two fascinating politicians that may be on the cusp of a national movement. Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba is the youngest-ever mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. India Walton won a historic upset primary against a four-term incumbent and is the Democratic nominee for ..read more

A week ago, thousands of people turned out for Women's March rallies across the country, galvanized by Texas' recent six-week abortion ban and the very real fear that Roe v. Wade could soon be overturned, as challenges to the Texas law and another law in Mississippi wend their way to the Supreme Court and its 6-3 conservative majority.  But while the battle over the Texas law rages, and people rightfully worry about a world in which abortion access is no longer protected, women in Mississippi are already living it. In 2019, reporter Becca Andrews went to Mississippi to explore where  ..read more

Mother Jones reporter Stephanie Mencimer has been following Ammon Bundy for years. He's the guy you'll remember who became a kind of folk hero on the far-right after he joined his father, rancher Cliven Bundy, in leading an armed standoff against the Bureau of Land Management in Nevada in 2014. Two years later, Ammon led the armed takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, which left one occupier dead. Bundy went to trial twice on criminal charges related to the standoffs but federal prosecutors failed to win a conviction. Now he’s a big-time celebrity activist and running for governor ..read more

As the Delta variant upended hope of returning to normal this summer, Mother Jones reporter Edwin Rios published a deeply reported story on Flint, Michigan, recounting how residents of this predominantly Black city have battled COVID-19 in spite of government distrust, neglect, and environmental catastrophe. But the pandemic isn’t Flint’s first crisis: In 2014, public officials implemented cost-cutting measures that led to dangerous concentrations of lead in the city’s water supply. Up to 12,000 children were exposed to contaminated water. Then-President Barack Obama declared a state of emerge ..read more

Towards the end of 2020, Mother Jones’s editorial director Ian Gordon wrote a deeply reported story about how then-President Donald Trump took a broken asylum system and turned it into a machine of unchecked cruelty. America’s system for processing refugees and asylum seekers was effectively dead, he discovered, and the myth of national decency died with it. That the United States had long-standing commitments to asylum seekers under federal law and international agreements was of little consequence to Trump and his coterie of immigration hardliners. Even less compelling to them was the r ..read more

Every time you read the news lately, there she is: in conversations about bipartisanship, the infrastructure deal, the filibuster, even the fate of Joe Biden's presidency itself. But who is Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona? And what does she want to accomplish with her outsized influence on the passage of basically any law through the Senate, with its razor thin margins? For this week’s installation of our Summer investigation series, Mother Jones senior reporter Tim Murphy takes a look at Sinema’s political evolution. As a progressive in one of the nation’s most conservative state legislatures, Sine ..read more

Jake Tapper has drawn a line: no “Big Lie” proponents on-air. The CNN anchor and chief Washington correspondent won’t book Republican politicians touting the conspiracy theory that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. But when he’s not in front of the camera, Tapper enjoys blurring the lines between fact and fiction by crafting novels about real-life figures like John F. Kennedy and Frank Sinatra. His latest book, The Devil May Dance, is a sequel to his bestseller, The Hellfire Club, which has been adapted into a TV series by HBO Max. During a ..read more

Sergey Grishin is a well-connected, billionaire mogul. Last August, he made headlines when he sold his lavish estate to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Grishin’s multiple US-based businesses include a social media company in California with more than 300 million Instagram followers, called 421 Media. But what those followers probably don’t know is that they’ve been helping to enrich a man who has been accused in court documents of harassing and abusing women. In fact, women in multiple countries have been living in fear of Grishin, and have documented years of evidence. Now, they’re going publ ..read more