The FBI Reported More Than 6,000 Hate Crimes Last Year. Here’s Why It’s Probably A Whole Lot More.
Richard Ellis/Zuma An FBI report released earlier this week claims that hate crimes increased 4.6 percent in 2016 over the previous year, from 5,850 in 2015 to 6,121 last year. Mainstream media outlets widely reported on these statistics (see here and here), with several outlets calling out a specific spike in hate crimes around Election Day and reporting the…
WikiLeaks Set Off an Attack on Our Trump-Russia Project—Right After Messaging Donald Trump Jr. About It
Ron Sachs/DPA/AP; Ben Cawthra/Rex Shutterstock/ZUMA; Mother Jones illustration Additional reporting for this story was contributed by Denise Clifton and AJ Vicens. On Monday, The Atlantic published private messages from September 2016 in which WikiLeaks gave Donald Trump Jr. the password to a forthcoming site documenting his father’s ties to Russia. But there was more to the…
John Oliver Exposes the One Thing Trump Has Been Disturbingly Successful at This Year
To mark the anniversary of Donald Trump’s presidential victory, John Oliver on Sunday took a step back from the daily chaos coming from the White House to examine the three significant ways the Trump presidency has attacked the basic norms of democracy: delegitimizing the media, practicing “whataboutism” (example: his reaction to Charlottesville), and trolling. “While there…
Black Americans Have Our Own National Anthem. Stand Up and Sing It With Us.
James Weldon Johnson.Mother Jones illustration; National Archives and Records Administration; Jose Luis Magana/AP; Jane Kelly/Getty On a cloudy day in May 2015, several hundred Howard University seniors, myself included, filed into the school’s main quadrangle for commencement, a ceremony that kicked off with “The Star Spangled Banner.” I can’t honestly recall whether my fellow black students…
It’s Been an Amazing Year for Political Artists Telling Donald Trump to Shove It
kadirkaplan/Getty For many Americans, Trump’s first year in the White House has been, in a word, ugly. But the Trump administration has resulted in some of the most provocative political art in American history. “Painting is not made to decorate apartments,” Pablo Picasso famously said in 1945. “It’s an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.” Over…
These Explosive Photos of Led Zeppelin, Stevie Nicks, and Alice Cooper Will Make You Believe in Rock’n’Roll Again
Rock photography is dead. Blame publicists. Blame managers. Blame overzealous, predatory photographers. Blame all the people who made access to musicians near impossible. As the newest book by legendary rock photographer Neal Preston proves, when it comes to the best in music photography, access is everything. Exhausted and Exhilarated, (Reel Art Press, 2017) is filled…