A Story Your New Year’s Hangover Could Use: $5.3 Million in Debt Wiped Out
Valeriya/Getty Welcome to Recharge, a weekly newsletter full of stories that will energize your inner hellraiser. See more editions and sign up here. It was a startling announcement: A California church had raised enough money to pay off the medical debts of 5,555 struggling Los Angeles–area residents in time for Christmas, wiping out more than…
On the Anniversary of Oscar Grant’s Death, We Can Now Finally Say Goodbye to a Decade of Police Violence
A protester during a rally outside the LA Criminal Courts building in downtown Los Angeles in June 2010 during the trial of former Bay Area Rapid Transit officer Johannes Mehserle for murdering Oscar Grant. Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times/Getty In the early morning hours of January 1, 2009, a 22-year-old black man named Oscar Grant sat…
Will Small Farmers’ Beef With Trump Sway the 2020 Election?
Marco Cibola On an October morning, two men and a woman wearing cowboy hats, bearing American flags, and sitting atop horses rode into a windowless conference room in the depths of a Ramada Inn on the edge of Omaha. When they reached the front of the room and faced the crowd of about 500 ranchers,…
This Should Be a Tweet but One of My New Year’s Resolutions Requires It to Be a Blog Post
Ben “Good At Photoshop” Dreyfuss I have never taken New Year’s resolutions very seriously. I make them like everyone makes them but inevitably abandon them and don’t really feel very bad about it a few weeks in. That will almost certainly happen here, too, but “joy cometh in the morning,” says the bible as quoted…
Heroes of the 2010s: Kshama Sawant, the Socialist Who Beat Amazon
Mother Jones illustration; Jason Redmond/Getty The staff of Mother Jones is rounding up the decade’s heroes and monsters. Find them all here. In 2013, an actual Trotskyist named Kshama Sawant was elected to the Seattle City Council. A Trotskyist is a kind of communist—not in the sense that Republicans call Democrats communists, but in the sense that communists…
How the 2010s Brought Back Strikes, School Walkouts, and Social Movements
Occupy Wall Street protesters wave signs and banners outside the Park Avenue home of JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in October 2011.Andrew Burton/AP With economic inequality at the highest levels in decades, the climate in crisis, and a political system often unable to address popular demands or even elect the people’s choice, the last…