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 conti...
Dec 03, 2021•2 min
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 explai...
Oct 29, 2021•14 min
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 ...
Oct 21, 2021•55 min
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...
Oct 09, 2021•23 min
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 pro...
Sep 16, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 181
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...
Sep 01, 2021•40 min
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 consequ...
Aug 18, 2021•52 min•Ep. 179
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 pol...
Aug 04, 2021•51 min•Ep. 178
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 ...
Jul 28, 2021•42 min•Ep. 177
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...
Jul 21, 2021•57 min•Ep. 176
Everywhere you turned in the aftermath of the 2020 election, someone was arguing a hard line on cultural issues as an explanation for the outcome. The point was made by different commentators of at least outwardly different political persuasions, with different code words and different bogeys—feminists, socialists, wokeness. However they might have varied, these arguments all circled the same thesis: The members of the working class—by which is always meant the white working class and very often...
Jul 07, 2021•31 min•Ep. 175
For five decades, Garry Trudeau has been writing what is one of the most important—and entertaining—comic strips in American history: Doonesbury . He started the strip in October, 1970 as a student at Yale. With its sharp-witted look at American politics and American life, it quickly became a phenomenon, eventually appearing in over 1,000 newspapers. He’s lampooned every president of the last half-century and has introduced us to scores of original and engaging characters. After the first Gulf W...
Jul 02, 2021•28 min•Ep. 174
Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who has spent the last two decades pounding out bestselling accounts of American presidents such as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and George H.W. Bush. In June 2019, Joe Biden invited Meacham to Newark, Delaware, for a conversation about the biographer’s recent volume, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels , a 416-page meditation on how enlightened political leaders, propelled by a civic-minded citizenry, have rescued America...
Jun 23, 2021•26 min•Ep. 173
After three years of weekly episodes—that’s 181 shows, if you’re counting—the Mother Jones Podcast team has decided to switch things up for the next couple of months, as we, like you, emerge from a year that has thrown up enormous challenges, journalistically, politically, and personally. It’s time for Summer! We’ve always strived to bring you the very best of our newsroom, and that includes the deeply reported stories and characters that our journalists to life. So, starting soon, we’re giving ...
Jun 09, 2021•6 min•Ep. 172
The deadly insurrection at the US Capitol wasn’t the start of something, nor was it the end. What happened on January 6 had been planned for weeks, and the ideology behind it, brewing for years. That day’s chaos was the moment in which a dangerous mix of far-right factions came together in a way that won’t be disentangled anytime soon. Even now, nearly five months later, there’s still so much to process and still so many questions to answer (especially as Republicans work to forget the deadly at...
Jun 02, 2021•28 min•Ep. 171
As we approach the five-month anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, the Republican Party has made one thing clear: They want to forget all about it—holding Trump and his big lie closer than ever. In the House, the party just kicked out a top leader, Rep. Liz Cheney, for calling out Trump’s lies and authoritarianism. Over in the Senate, Republicans are likely to stymie efforts to formalize a January 6 commission to investigate the attack. The GOP might be desperate to move on, but the Depart...
May 26, 2021•32 min•Ep. 170
The right-wing dark money group Heritage Action for America claims to be the mastermind behind the recent fire hose of state-level voter suppression laws, a new Mother Jones scoop reveals. Mother Jones voting rights reporter Ari Berman joins Jamilah King to walk through the explosive video he obtained of Jessica Anderson, the head of Heritage Action and a former Trump administration official, bragging about having drafted and funded voter suppression legislation in eight battleground states: Ari...
May 19, 2021•20 min•Ep. 169
A Mother Jones investigation has found that hundreds of visa workers are stuck in India with no way to get back to their families in the United States. India is the in the midst of a shocking COVID-19 crisis. Health officials are reporting approximately 400,000 new cases a day. Hospitals are experiencing shortages of beds, oxygen, and medical supplies. Deaths are projected to reach 1 million by August. Sinduja Rangarajan, Mother Jones ’ Data and Interactives Editor, has reported that hundreds of...
May 12, 2021•25 min•Ep. 168
Natalie Baszile knew she was onto something when she got the call from Oprah’s people. A novelist and food justice activist, Baszile had been working for years on a semi-autobiographical novel about a Los Angeles-based Black woman who is unexpectedly faced with reviving an inherited family farm in Louisiana. The book became “Queen Sugar,” was published in 2014 and, with Oprah’s backing, it debuted as a television series on OWN in 2016. It was executive produced by Oprah Winfrey herself and direc...
May 05, 2021•26 min•Ep. 167
Agriculture was once a major source of wealth among the Black middle class in America. But over the course of a century, Black-owned farmland, and the corresponding wealth, has diminished almost to the point of near extinction; only 1.7 percent of farms were owned by Black farmers in 2017. The story of how that happened–from sharecropping, to anti-Black terrorism, to exclusionary USDA loans–is the focus of this episode on the Mother Jones Podcast . Tom Philpott, Mother Jones ’ food and agricultu...
Apr 28, 2021•26 min•Ep. 166
Judas and the Black Messiah , a ground-breaking film about the life of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, has been hailed as one of the best films of the year. The film is up for five Oscars, including Best Picture. It’s a historic haul for a movie made by an all-Black team of producers. It’s also a notable and somewhat unexpected achievement for Keith and Kenny Lucas, who, along with director Shaka King and co-writer Will Berson, wrote the semi-biopic’s screenplay. The Hollywood honor for the 3...
Apr 24, 2021•16 min•Ep. 165
Late Tuesday afternoon, the jury in the trial of Derek Chauvin delivered its verdict: guilty on all three counts in the killing of George Floyd. The 12 jurors—six of whom are white, four Black, and two multiracial—heard three weeks of testimony and deliberated for about 10 hours. Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer, was charged with second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. The verdict comes just less than a year since Chauvin forcibly knee...
Apr 21, 2021•14 min•Ep. 164
Money. You’re probably thinking a lot about it these days. From a global pandemic that’s tanked the global economy, to President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure bill, to workers once again trying (and failing) to unionize at Amazon, who gets what and how is the recurring theme of so many important social and political debates right now. Michael Mechanic is a long-time Senior Editor at Mother Jones . His compelling new book is called Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their We...
Apr 14, 2021•27 min•Ep. 163
Lady Bird Johnson always fit the mold of a certain old-fashioned, stereotypical presidential wife: self-effacing, devoted to her generally unfaithful domineering husband, not particularly chic, and, being a traditional first lady one who needed a public cause, and found hers it in planting lots of flowers near highways. They called it at the time, with just a hint of disparagement, "beautification." Nowhere in the hundreds of thousands of pages written by presidential historians on the 36th pres...
Apr 07, 2021•35 min•Ep. 162
Earlier this week, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky went off-script during a news conference to issue an emotional warning : a fourth coronavirus surge could be on its way. She described a “recurring feeling I have of impending doom,” saying that while there was “so much to look forward to,” the country was entering a dangerous new phase. “I’m scared,” she said. Meanwhile, the country has seen week-on-week vaccination records tumble, and officials predict that half of Americans will be fully p...
Mar 31, 2021•22 min•Ep. 161
For many people who contract the coronavirus, shame is an underreported side-effect. Its symptoms are intense bewilderment about the cause of infection, reluctance to engage with healthcare systems, and discomfort disclosing the diagnosis to friends and family. The internal dynamic is likely reinforced by the public shaming that follows news stories about crowds of spring breakers not following social distancing rules. Or the Instagram account dedicated to calling out parties and gatherings . Or...
Mar 26, 2021•18 min•Ep. 160
Cass Sunstein is a public intellectual and provocateur—and he has been pondering a timely issue: public lying. A longtime Harvard law professor and an expert on behavioral economics, Sunstein has written a slew of books, including volumes on cost-benefit analysis, conspiracy theories, animal rights, authoritarianism in the United States, decision-making, and Star Wars. He was recently named senior counselor at the Department of Homeland Security, where he will oversee the Biden administration’s ...
Mar 25, 2021•19 min•Ep. 159
Boiling water to drink and bathe. Collecting rainwater to flush toilets. Using bottled water distributed by the National Guard to take care of basic hygiene. For four weeks, tens of thousands of people in Jackson, Mississippi, did not have access to clean water. Freezing winter storms wreaked havoc on Jackson’s old and crumbling water infrastructure. In mid-February the city experienced 80 water main breaks, leaving tens of thousands of residents were left without running water. But while the Te...
Mar 24, 2021•23 min•Ep. 158
Anything for Selena is more than a podcast about the iconic 1990s superstar Selena Quintanilla. It’s a nine-part series about belonging itself. Journalist Maria Garcia documents her own journey as she discovers what it means to love and mourn Selena, and what her legacy can teach us about pop culture and Latinx identity today. As a fearsomely talented singer and dancer, Selena dazzled on stage with bold red lips and large hoop earrings, wearing sparkly bustiers and tight, high-waisted pants. She...
Mar 17, 2021•31 min•Ep. 157
Stacey Abrams has a name for the series of bills that just passed the Georgia state legislature: “Jim Crow in a suit and tie.” Abrams joins the Mother Jones Podcast to explain why your right to vote is once again under attack—perhaps more so now than it has been in generations. Donald Trump’s big election fraud lie sparked a deluge of voter suppression efforts across the country. Over the past two months, GOP legislatures have pushed 253 new voting restrictions in 43 states. Under the guise of “...
Mar 10, 2021•25 min•Ep. 156
