Monster of 2022: Moynihan Train Hall
Mother Jones; John Lamparski/NurPhoto/ZUMA Manhattan’s new Amtrak hub occupies the ground floor of an old Post Office sorting facility across 8th Avenue from Penn Station, and compared to the claustrophobic, sewage-strewn warren next door, Moynihan Train Hall feels like a revelation. Natural light floods through the elegant glass ceiling; at night, you can look up…
Hero of 2022: The Woman Who Defeated Two Anti-Abortion Ballot Measures
Mother Jones; John Hanna/AP When I asked Rachel Sweet, a political operative from flyover country, what motivated her to pursue a career of fighting for reproductive rights, she couldn’t pinpoint a specific moment or life experience. She grew up in a politically engaged family that often talked about liberal values. She interned at Planned Parenthood…
Monster of 2022: J.D. Vance
Mother Jones; Michael Conroy/AP In October 2016, less than a month before Donald Trump would be elected President of the United States, J.D Vance sat down for a conversation at the American Enterprise Institute. This was Vance in his most Atlantic-friendly era, when he was chiefly the author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family…
Hero of 2022: Those LA Police Funding Billboards
Mother Jones; Kenneth Mejia About a month after President Joe Biden declared in his State of the Union address that the answer to crime is to “fund the police, fund them, fund them,” a mint green billboard appeared above a gas station one block from a northern Los Angeles Police Department precinct. Passersby who happened…
Hero of 2022: The New Three-Digit National Mental Health Crisis Hotline, 988
Mother Jones; Jefferee Woo/Tampa Bay Times/ZUMA I imagine (hope?) I’m not the only person who momentarily forgets my sister’s phone number when the doctor’s office requests my emergency contact information. Hell, sometimes I even forget my own number when the grocery store clerk asks me to plug it in to claim rewards and fuel points.…
Hero of 2022: Dwight Garner Whose Evisceration of Jared Kushner’s Book Is Perfection
Mother Jones; Macmillan; Broadside Books There is a kind of genius in writing the savage review. Sometimes they become assessments of an artist that endure long after the works critiqued have faded from popular memory. The former New York Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani (once called “the Queen of Mean”) described The Discomfort Zone, a…